Free Republic

A top aide to embattled New York Police Department Commissioner Edward Caban is associated with shadowy groups that do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party, The Post has learned. Lin Gui’an, 49, the assistant director of the Police Commissioner Liaison Unit, was previously vice chairman of a nonprofit linked to a web of CCP-controlled community groups and school associations, known as United Front, for 12 years, according to records viewed by The Post. He has also been pictured attending events alongside prominent members of United Front groups or sponsored by them. The role of United Front is to spread...

Former supermodel Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is the latest person to be dragged into the campaign finance scandal swirling around her husband, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Earlier this month, Bruni-Sarkozy, 56, was charged with fraud and witness tampering related to up to $54 million that former Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy allegedly gave to Sarkozy in illegal campaign contributions for his winning 2007 presidential campaign, according to French newspaper Le Monde. Sarkozy, 69, was president of France between 2007 and 2012. Khadafy was assassinated in Libya in 2011. The former first lady, who is also a singer/songwriter and once dated Rolling Stones...

There’s buzz swirling within the Biden camp that the president’s swift endorsement of Kamala Harris was his revenge on prominent party leaders — including Barack Obama — who pressured him to bow out of the race against his will, sources told The Post.

Native American campaigners are raising questions about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first-ever curator of Native American art — claiming she does not belong to a federally recognized tribe in the US, The Post has learned. Patricia Marroquin Norby was hired with great fanfare in 2020, after what the museum said was “a long and competitive search,” as its “inaugural Associate Curator of Native American Art” in its American Wing. For years, Marroquin Norby, 53, described herself — including in legal filings — as “Apache,” “Eastern Apache” and “Nde” as well as “Purepacha/Tarascan,” an indigenous group from the northwestern part...

Robert Kennedy Jr. was on such good terms with Jeffrey Epstein that he had free use of the billionaire pedophile’s Manhattan office in 1993 — and partied with him ... Bobby never could keep dates or wives straight... They were irrelevant to him. ... Oxenberg’s account which may raise most questions over RFK’s attempt to minimize his Epstein connection — because it describes how Maxwell was part of Kennedy’s family circle long before his affair with Mary Richardson began. Oxenberg is a member of the deposed Serbian royal family — Britain’s Prince Andrew is a second cousin — while her...

Russia’s foreign minister said that Israel’s retaliation against Hamas terrorists in Gaza is against international law, and will lead to a crisis that will last decades. Sergei Lavrov made his comments — the Kremlin’s most critical of Israel so far — in an interview with Belarus’s state news agency Belta reported Saturday. “While we condemn terrorism, we categorically disagree that you can respond to terrorism by violating the norms of international humanitarian law, including indiscriminately using force against targets where civilians are known to be present, including hostages that have been taken,” Lavrov told the news agency. “If Gaza is...

A Nashville lawyer found a novel way to beat student loans: a lawsuit. In subsequent tweets, Manookian shared the basic steps others could follow to get their student debt wiped through the legal system. “This isn’t about loan forgiveness,” Manookian told The Post. “It’s about holding these companies to the very same contract that they insist debtors comply with.” Manookian, who attended Vanderbilt University Law School, told The Post he took out two loans from JP Morgan and Bank One for $60,000 to pay for his education, chipping away at his students loan debt for “upwards of a decade.” A...

When former fashion exec Alina Habba celebrated her 39th birthday last month, Donald Trump made sure the statuesque brunette and key member of his legal team celebrated in style — in an opulent dining room with his closest advisors and a big cake adorned with red and yellow flowers. In addition to her work on numerous cases for the former president, Habba is also an ardent Trump admirer and a regular at both his Palm Beach resort and Bedminster, NJ, golf club, according to her social media posts. “Starting this year off with amazing patriots at the rally in Texas...

Russian President Vladimir Putin will likely not survive in office if he loses the war in Ukraine, the embattled nation’s head of military intelligence claimed this week. “It’s unlikely that he survives it,” said Ukrainian Major General Kyrylo Budanov, who heads up the country’s Defense Intelligence directorate, in an interview with the War Zone. If Russia loses the war, Putin would likely be overthrown, he said, without elaborating on what he meant by “survive.” “Currently, there’s active discussions happening in Russia about who’d be there to replace him,” said Budanov, who did not provide any more specifics. Budanov also told...

Ben Affleck tried to sell his sprawling Greek Revival “imitation” plantation — the site of his elaborate wedding to Jennifer Lopez Saturday — three years after revelations surfaced that one of his ancestors was a slave-owning Georgia sheriff. In 2015, the Hollywood actor tried to suppress details about Benjamin Cole, a relative on his mother’s side who owned several slaves in Chatham County, near his 87-acre Hampton Island property. Affleck purchased the property in 2003, according to reports. The revelations about Cole were made on PBS’s “Finding Your Roots” hosted by Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Affleck put...

For the last couple of years at least, Morris has been a Democratic Party loyalist, and spent hundreds of thousands on backing Democratic candidates, including President Biden. He met Hunter Biden at a political fundraiser for his father in December 2019, according to the New York Times.... Morris, who owns a sprawling loft in Tribeca and spent more than $11 million to buy singer Olivia Newton-John’s Malibu compound in 2009, has doled out cash to other Democratic politicians, according to public records. Earlier this year, he gave $100,000 to a political action committee supporting Conor Lamb, a Democratic Pennsylvania congressman...

When Vladimir Putin proposed to his first wife, he was so low key that she was sure he was trying to dump her instead. SNIP For Shrebneva, “it sounded like we were breaking up.” When she told him that she had made up her mind, “he let out a doubtful ‘Yes?'” SNIP The divorce was later confirmed when her name was eventually removed from Putin’s official biography on the Kremlin’s web site.

Convicted sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell will no longer fight to protect the identity of eight johns who allegedly had sex with young women she and her billionaire pedophile pal Jeffrey Epstein procured for them. A lawyer for Maxwell stated in a letter to federal Judge Loretta Preska this week that she would no longer object to the identities of the “John Does” in a 2015 civil lawsuit brought against Maxwell by Prince Andrew accuser Virginia Giuffre. “After careful review of the detailed objections submitted by Non-Party Does 17, 53, 54, 55, 73, 93, and 151, counsel for Ghislaine Maxwell writes to...

A day after a career criminal was arrested in the fatal shooting of philanthropist Jacqueline Avant at the lavish Beverly Hills home she shared with her husband Clarence, a 90-year-old music producer inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, her family issued a statement that read in part, “Now, let justice be served.” But in Los Angeles, where left-wing lawmakers and activists have pushed a litany of progressive reforms that help violent criminals spend less-time behind bars, justice is not only fleeting — it’s twisted, critics say.

North Carolina’s lieutenant governor is facing mounting calls for his resignation after he was caught on video calling transgender people “filth.” The video, which was first posted Wednesday by Right Wing Watch, showed the first-term Republican making the comments during a speech at Asbury Baptist Church in June. “There’s no reason anybody, anywhere in America should be telling children about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth,” Mark Robinson said in the video, which has gone viral. “Yes, I called it filth.” The comments were condemned by the White House this week. “These words are repugnant and offensive,” said Andrew Bates,...

Biden administration officials are divided over the origin of the coronavirus, but an increasing number now believe that it could have leaked from a Wuhan lab, according to a report. The once-derided lab-leak theory is now being seriously considered by senior administration officials even as most experts on coronaviruses maintain that the virus had its origins in nature, jumping from animals to humans, according to a CNN report Friday. On Thursday, the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said it was “premature” to dismiss the theory that the virus escaped from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology and...

Biden administration officials are divided over the origin of the coronavirus, but an increasing number now believe that it could have leaked from a Wuhan lab, according to a report. The once-derided lab-leak theory is now being seriously considered by senior administration officials even as most experts on coronaviruses maintain that the virus had its origins in nature, jumping from animals to humans, according to a CNN report Friday. On Thursday, the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said it was “premature” to dismiss the theory that the virus escaped from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology and...

After stemming historic protests across Cuba by shutting down digital communications this week, the island’s beleaguered Communist government is now beefing up a more traditional way of stifling opposition — citizen spies. The rapid-response brigades, which are made up of civilian snitches — neighbors, co-workers and plainclothes cops loyal to the regime — are out in force after protesters demanding food, medicine and freedom took to the streets beginning July 11, according to dissident bloggers on the island. Cuban journalist Yoani Sanchez reported an increase in the activity of the brigades, and “a heavy police presence” on the streets of...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange secretly fathered two children with one of his lawyers while he was holed up at the Ecuadorean embassy in London and fighting extradition to the US, according to a report. Stella Morris, a South African-born lawyer, began a relationship with Assange, 48, in 2015, she told The Daily Mail, which broke the story of the couple’s secret romance and birth of their two sons on Saturday. Gabriel was born in 2017, said Morris, 37. Their second child, Max, was born last year. Both births were filmed with a GoPro camera and the footage sent to Assange,...

While President Donald Trump attended big-money fundraisers for the Republican Party and his 2020 re-election campaign at mansions in Southampton and Bridgehampton on Friday, many of his East End supporters are eschewing the spotlight — especially after last week’s calls for boycotts of billionaire Stephen Ross’s fitness chains SoulCycle and Equinox because he hosted the president. “We are all in the closet,” said a boutique owner in Southampton who fears reprisals from his customers — most of them moneyed Democrats — if he speaks openly about his allegiance to Trump. “It’s like you have this disease and people want to...