Free Republic

Filled with wonders, Marco Polo's tales are the first European account of the Silk Road. But, 700 years after the famed Venetian merchant and explorer's death, can they be trusted? Can a man who claimed to have seen a unicorn in the Indonesian island of Sumatra be trusted? This and other similarly valid questions have cast doubt on the truthfulness of Marco Polo since the 14th Century, when his book The Travels of Marco Polo became a bestseller and was translated into dozens of languages, hand-copied in countless manuscripts and available at any lavish court in Europe. Polo's tales are...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) intends to use the guilty plea of two defendants Thursday over the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary to pursue journalist James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, which reportedly gave the diary to law enforcement in 2020. On Friday, Robert Kurlander, 58, and Aimee Harris, 40, pleaded guilty to stealing the diary of the presidential daughter, which included claims of inappropriate behavior by President Joe Biden, and conspiring to sell it to Project Veritas for $40,000. Ashley Biden had reportedly left her diary at the home of a friend before it was sold to Project Veritas. As...

Hunter Biden's laptop has been dubbed the "Laptop from hell" for a reason. A new watchdog group that has been digging into the data from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop for a year now and they have released a report of at least 459 crimes documented on Hunter's computer. From Daily Wire: A year-long exploration of Hunter Biden's laptop has yielded a 630-page report that its authors say document 459 violations of state and federal laws and regulations by President Joe Biden's son and his business partners. Marco Polo, a nonprofit formed by a one-time aide to former President Trump to...

What’s a Fabricator? A fabricator is an intelligence agent/asset that generates disinformation by lies, deceptions, or by producing forged materials in order to substantiate their claims. A fabricator is often cited as a reliable source behind black propaganda. Multiple fabricators are usually used to justify a Big Lie. The Dashing and Debonair Jack Maxey By way of classification, Jack Maxey is a member of the class of establishment republicans who produced the Italian Job, the Absolute Proof, and a score of other election disinformation actors that were designed to derail any attempt to conduct a real election integrity investigation. Jack...

Hunter Biden filed a lawsuit this week against a former Trump White House aide over his alleged role in the laptop data scandal, which the first son’s attorneys blasted as a “sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign” to advance an “extremist” agenda. The 14-page complaint filed in California federal court Wednesday accuses Garrett Ziegler, a one-time aide to President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, of violating the state’s computer fraud and data laws by accessing “tens of thousands of emails, thousands of photos, and dozens of videos and recordings” that belonged to Hunter, according to the suit viewed by The...

The taxman just delivered a body blow to another member of the Biden family, informing her that she owes thousands of dollars in unpaid back taxes. The revelation, first reported by Fox News, is another indication of the pressure that multiple family members to President Joe Biden are under to profit off his stature and status. A recent tax lien docket by the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue shows that Ashley Biden, daughter to the president, owes $5,000 for unpaid tax bills accrued between 2015 — when Biden was vice president — and 2021, shortly after he took office again. The...

In a not-so-surprising twist in the presiding judge’s life of the ongoing sham Trump trial in New York City, unhinged Judge Arthur Engoron has taken to an unconventional pastime—posting half-naked photos of himself on an alumni newsletter he oversees. Research group Marco Polo first reported this revelation.

A nonprofit research group which combed through Hunter Biden’s laptop has sent a letter to the judge overseeing the First Son’s tax fraud case, urging her to reject the plea deal offered by prosecutors.Marco Polo, which put emails from the laptop online and wrote a 630-page report summarizing its contents, said that judges are not obligated to accept plea deals even if prosecutors and the defendant agree on them, and that “not only will the plea deal in front of you, if accepted, make a mockery of the phrase ‘slap on the wrist,’ but it will also send a sobering...

Hunter Biden's lawyer claimed there will be '3 more', in text messages with a right-wing nonprofit about Donald Trump’s arrest. The heated text exchange, between hotshot Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris and a 'researcher' working with the conservative think tank Marco Polo, has raised questions over what the First Son's legal team know about prosecutors' plans against the former President. The news comes as Morris sued Marco Polo and its founder, former Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler, in a Los Angeles court last week for alleged harassment, invasion of privacy and 'criminal impersonation' over the nonprofit's investigation into Hunter's abandoned...

The Marco Polo Group is changing documents they claim to be from Hunter Biden’s laptop. The documents might have originally been from the laptop, but the Marco Polo Group is editing them and now they are useless because they’ve been edited. What sort of playground is this? On Tuesday, TGP reported on an email from Hunter Biden that was sent to his business partner in crime, Devon Archer. These two were on the Board of Ukraine’s oil and gas giant Burisma together. The bulk of the email appeared to be from someone or some source other than Hunter Biden based...

Just when we thought Hunter Biden’s laptop situation couldn’t get any weirder, Hollywood entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris took it up a couple of notches with threats sent to a conservative watchdog group. ===== SNIP ===== In texts obtained by DailyMail.com, Hollywood entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris sent ‘threatening’ messages to a member of right wing group Marco Polo The member posed as an ally and texted Morris for information regarding Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop When Morris learned the trickster was from Marco Polo, he called the member a ‘f***ing moron,’ said ‘I’m going to take all your money’ and ‘I know...

New revelations from Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” may show why top U.S. intelligence officials did not want it gaining credence in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Hunter Biden had texted his brother’s widow that China arrested CIA informants in “retaliation” for the U.S. arresting of “my client the chief of intelligence of the people’s republic of China.” It’s worth stating the obvious: This was written by the son of the current president of the United States. Hunter Biden sent the text messages to Hallie Biden on Dec. 14, 2018, according to text messages found on the abandoned...

Pasta is Italy’s staple food, but it’s not only Italians who indulge in platefuls of the doughy concoction every day. People all over the world adore it. It comes in more than 300 shapes: long, as in spaghetti; flat, as in fettuccine; hollow (bucatini); short, as in penne; the butterfly-shaped farfalle and ear-shaped orecchiette; tubular (rigatoni); and stuffed, in varieties such as tortellini and ravioli. It can be bought dry or freshly made from egg-based dough. World Pasta Day, held each October , celebrates the universal love of this staple of the Mediterranean diet. But who invented pasta? Legend has...

A case of misplaced blame. All those blaming Columbus for sailing west must turn one chapter back in the history books to find that it was actually Islamic jihad disrupting the land routes from Europe to India and China that resulted in Columbus looking for a sea route. Nearly two centuries before Columbus, the 17-years-old Marco Polo left Venice for India and China with his father, Niccolo Polo, and uncle, Matteo Polo, in 1271. Together they traveled 5,600 miles to the east to meet Kublai Khan, the grandson of Ghengis Khan. Kublai Khan was Emperor of China, Korea, North India,...

Special Report 2/23/04Marco Polo in Reverse In the spring of 1288 a curious throng packed the Vatican to celebrate Easter and glimpse a visitor from the far side of the world. Rabban Sauma, a Mongolian Christian, had braved a 7,000-mile trek from Beijing. But when he received the Eucharist from the pope, he broke down and sobbed. The crowd's loud amens shook the church. Sauma was the Mongol Empire's first envoy to Europe, just 50 years after Mongol armies were repulsed at the gates of Vienna. Much of his diaries have survived, giving a unique perspective on the West. "Sauma...

Vatican Reveals Secret Archives A 13th-century letter from Genghis Khan’s grandson demanding homage from the pope is among a collection of documents from the Vatican’s Secret Archives that has been published for the first time. By Nick Squires in Rome 01 Jan 2010 In a letter dated 1246 from Grand Khan Guyuk, pictured, to Pope Innocent IV, Genghis Khan's grandson demands that the Pontiff travel to central Asia in person The Holy See’s archives contain scrolls, parchments and leather-bound volumes with correspondence dating back more than 1,000 years. High-quality reproductions of 105 documents, 19 of which have never been seen...

I, brother Odoric, a Czech from Turlania,...crossed the sea and visited the land of the unbelievers intending to harvest some of their souls. I will not mention all that I have seen...For I would have not believed it myself, if I had not heard it and seen it with my own ears and eyes. Thus begins the 'The Journey into the Empire of the Great Khan', a book of recollections written in the 14th century by Czech priest, Odoric of Pordenone, who set out for China in 1318, after being commissioned by the Pope to establish contact with the its...

One of the most dramatic pieces of evidence for a pre-Columbian crossing of the Atlantic is to be found in a single Latin marginalia, that is some words scribbled into the margin of a book. The sentence in question appears in a copy of the Historia rerum ubique gestarum by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini which was published in Venice in 1477. In that work Piccolomini discusses the arrival of Indians in Europe blown from across the Atlantic at a date when America was unknown to Europeans (another post another day). Next to this passage a reader has written in Latin the...

Many modern East Asian currencies have roots in Ming dynasty trade and Chinese traders’ faith in the Mexican silver dollar. Attempts to dislodge it, such as the Hong Kong-minted silver British dollar, were not always successfulAt the antiques market near the old Qingjing mosque in central Quanzhou, a city in China’s south-eastern Fujian province, it is sometimes possible to purchase unusual silver objects that reveal much about the currencies in circulation in East Asia today. On one stall, crammed with opium pipes, blue-and-white ceramics and jade trinkets, is a small, dome-shaped lump of metal in a rusty tin box. It...

BEIJING — China is aiming to re-create Marco Polo's ancient "Silk Road" that connected Europe to Asia. But instead of the camels and caravans that transported spices and silk hundreds of years ago, a $1.4 trillion network of modern trading routes would be built. On Sunday, Chinese President Xi Jinping will host 28 heads of state at the opening of a two-day summit focusing on the so-called "Belt and Road" initiative. Analysts suggest the project could shift the center of global economy and challenge the U.S.-led world order. Beijing hopes the gathering will rally international support for the plan. Xi's...