Free Republic

President Trump granted clemency on Tuesday to 20 people, including three former Republican members of Congress and two people who were convicted of crimes as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also pardoned four military contractors convicted of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007, and extended clemency to several people convicted of drug offenses. The pre-Christmas pardons and commutations came as the president has been exploring how to reward friends and allies in the waning days before leaving office next month, with more acts of clemency expected to come.

New text messages released Thursday show FBI officials spied on a Fox News executive over the course of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation that targeted President Donald Trump as a secret Russian agent who illegally stole the election from Hillary Clinton in 2016. The FBI surveilled and recorded a phone call between former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and an unnamed vice president at Fox News, according to a text message sent to fired former FBI official Peter Strzok just weeks before Trump was inaugurated as president in 2017.Agents were targeting former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos,...

What is most interesting is the timing of Gina Haspel's last tour as London Station Chief -- from 2014 to early 2017. That is the same timeframe (specifically, the late summer of 2016) when the FBI approached foreign policy academic and "utility government operative" Stefan Halper to begin the operation targeting Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in an FBI-designed foreign counterintelligence operation, against Team Trump, to be launched in Cambridge, England. The CIA Station Chief is the top intelligence official in any given country. The FBI must inform the Station Chief of what they planned to do and get Station...

Fired FBI special agent Peter Strzok’s latest claims about the events leading to the bureau’s opening of the Trump-Russia investigation are contradicted by the timelines presented in reports by special counsel Robert Mueller and DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. In a new interview ahead of the release of his book, Strzok claimed that Australian diplomat Alexander Downer was spurred to inform the U.S. government about a May 2016 conversation he had in a London wine bar with George Papadopoulos, in which the Trump campaign associate mentioned that Russia might have dirt on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, after hearing...

Assertions that the focus was ‘the Trump campaign’ are now known to be ludicrous Long-sought documents finally pried from U.S. intelligence agencies prove that the Obama administration used the occasion of providing a standard intelligence briefing for major-party candidates as an opportunity to investigate Donald Trump on suspicion of being a Russian asset. I say investigate Donald Trump advisedly. As I contended in Ball of Collusion, my book on the Trump-Russia investigation, the target of the probe spearheaded by the FBI — but greenlighted by the Obama White House, and abetted by the Justice Department and U.S. intelligence agencies —...

Newly released documents reveal the FBI never had even preliminary evidence of a Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia, and instead used a rarely enforced statutory relic – the Foreign Agents Registration Act – as the legal rationale for opening investigations in 2016-2017 and surveilling Trump campaign aides. On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened a counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia – nicknamed Crossfire Hurricane – not under espionage conspiracy laws but under FARA. The next month the FBI opened four separate FARA cases into people associated with the Trump campaign. Two other FARA cases were...

For months and months Papadopoulos has accused Italian officials in participating in the Trump collusion scam. Papadopoulos is certain the Italians were working with the Obama CIA to set him up in 2016. Today former US Ambassador to Italy and the Republic of San Marino John R. Phillips was included on the list of unmaskers.

A newly declassified transcript calls into question the entire Crossfire Hurricane investigation: Why was it started, and why did it continue? Attorney General William Barr said last week that “the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness” in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Rather, “there is something far more troubling here.” “Without any basis,” Barr added in his sit-down interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, “they started this investigation of [Trump’s] campaign, and even more concerning actually is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president to sabotage his presidency —...

In late October 2016, less than two weeks before the presidential election, a former adviser to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, George Papadopoulos, denied to an FBI confidential source that the campaign was involved in the circumstances surrounding the hack of the Democratic National Committee's email system, calling the idea "illegal." CBS News has now reviewed the transcript of the conversation between Papadopoulos and the confidential source working for the FBI, and has published key excerpts below. The recorded conversation between Papadopoulos and the confidential source working for the FBI was documented in the December report issued by Justice Department Inspector...

The New York Times admitted on Thursday that the Obama administration deployed multiple spies against the Trump campaign in 2016, confirming recent comments by Attorney General William Barr that 'spying did occur' during the campaign. Following months of angry claims by journalists and Democratic operatives that the Obama administration never spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, The New York Times admitted Thursday that multiple overseas intelligence assets were deployed against associates of the Republican nominee. It is not the first time the Times has revealed widespread spying operations against the campaign. In addition to noting that long-time informant Stefan...

Back in December, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified that there were 17 significant "errors and omissions" in the Carter Page FISA application process: The inspector general "identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications and many errors in the Woods Procedures" which guide the FBI's FISA process, according to the 476-page report. "These errors and omissions resulted from case agents providing wrong or incomplete information to the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence and failing to flag important issues for discussion,” Horowitz said. Horowitz found big problems in the system: “That so many...

Last week, President Trump triggered the left when he tweeted a Photoshopped picture that portrayed former President Barack Obama perched midair outside Trump Tower, binoculars and listening device in hand.The liberal outlet Vox condemned the president for his “increasingly bad tweets,” before declaring “there’s no evidence the Obama administration spied on Trump.” Vox then regurgitated the false narrative that, while the FBI did surveil former Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page, “that didn’t happen until after Page left the campaign.” For years, conservatives tried to correct the record, noting that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) order gave the...

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was behind the leak of text messages between the FBI ‘s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to the press. A court filing by the Department of Justice late Friday revealed the admission in a five-page statement by Rosenstein on the text messages between the FBI agent and lawyer back in 2016 as they were both working on investigations, Politico reported. (Image: YouTube screenshot) Rosenstein, who stepped down from his position last year, apparently released the messages as a way to protect the FBI employees who criticized then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign....

The Justice Department released its fourth batch of documents from the special counsel’s probe Friday, including notes of FBI interviews with former Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. The documents include the FBI’s interviews conducted in 2017 with Papadopoulos and with Page, as well as interviews with Russian associates of Page. The records were provided to BuzzFeed News and CNN in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for FBI notes, known as 302s, that were used in the Trump-Russia probe. Papadopoulos and Page were two of the four original targets of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI counterintelligence investigation...

Cyprus, Greece, Israel to sign pipeline deal on Jan. 2 By DEMETRIS NELLAS December 22, 2019 ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The leaders of Cyprus, Greece and Israel plan to sign an agreement early in the new year for the building of the eastern Mediterranean natural gas pipeline, the Greek prime minister’s office announced Sunday. The agreement will be signed in Athens on Jan. 2 by Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Cypriot President Nikos Anastasiades and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As now planned, the pipeline will run across the Mediterranean from Israel’s Levantine Basin offshore gas reserves to the Greek...

For more than two years, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told us President Donald Trump has done something wrong. He didn't know exactly what but he just knew Trump was involved in some sort of wrong doing. First, it was Russia! Russia! Russia! Once Special Counsel Robert Mueller proved that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia, he latched onto Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And that's how we're currently at the impeachment fiasco that the Democrats are ramming through the House. What's interesting, however, is Schiff is suddenly changing his tune. During a Sunday morning interview with...

In the middle of Russia fever, the liberal press took a hectoring tone to any outlet that showed a glimmer of doubt. How dare any journalist not believe that President Trump is an agent of Vladimir Putin! Who would question the upstanding virtues of the FBI? Of course, we now know that the conspiracy theories were wrong. There was no Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. And, moreover, the inspector general report proves that the FBI trampled over civil liberties and common sense in pursuit of the case. While idle conversation during a meeting with George Papadopoulos and an Australian...

The CIA primarily leaks PR spin to the Washington Post. The FBI primarily leaks PR spin to the New York Times; and the State Dept. primarily leaks PR spin to CNN. This narrative distribution model is the one constant in an ever changing universe. Cue the audio visual… Obviously the prior Washington Post effort to conflate the Durham investigation with the Horowitz investigation didn’t get the desired result. As a consequence it only took a few days before the Washington Post was back at it (Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett again) to try obfuscation 2.0; this time with Joseph Mifsud....

It’s a little like the proverbial child killing its parents and throwing itself on the mercy of the court because he's now an orphan, but, with the wheels of Barr-Durham-Horowitz justice inexorably turning on them, there are Fusion GPS founders, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, on a media book tour claiming they are the victims of right-wing vengeance for their role in orchestrating a criminal fraud upon the FISA court and a coup against a sitting president of the United States. Holy Michael Avenatti!

The sins of former President Obama are just now beginning to surface. We know that Obama targeted George Papadopoulos first to stop the construction of Israel’s natural gas pipeline to Europe in favor of Iran’s pipeline. Then Obama targeted Papadopoulos a second time to prevent candidate Trump from being President! The pieces are all starting to fall together and Obama and his gang can’t make it stop. The most corrupt President in US history, Barack H. Obama, will soon be known as the biggest crook to enter the Oval Office. One individual who was targeted by Obama will be the...