Free Republic

When the Trump administration swept into the Department of Justice on Jan. 20, it moved swiftly to purge, demote, transfer and otherwise sideline career lawyers not perceived to be team players or sufficiently committed to the MAGA legal agenda. [snip] Inside, nearly a dozen of the government's most seasoned civil rights, environmental and national security lawyers have been reconstituted as members of a newly created group called the Sanctuary Cities task force. At first glance, the job seemed promising — a legal strike team that would sue municipalities the administration claimed were facilitating the violation of immigration laws, a task...

… the remarkable reach of the global-terror network A little-noticed investigation by Swiss federal police has uncovered the existence of an apparent terror-support network with ties to the upper levels of Al Qaeda — including an operative believed to have played a role in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the May 2003 bombing of a housing complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The discovery of a largely invisible Al Qaeda network in the peaceful alpine nation has gotten virtually no public attention outside of Switzerland. But criminal charges outlined in a July 30 Swiss prosecutor’s report —...

Jack Smith’s top hatchet man, Jay Bratt, abruptly resigned from the Justice Department last week, according to Deep State reporter and fake Trump-Russia dossier peddler Michael Isikoff. Jay Bratt was one of the main prosecutors who spearheaded the Mar-a-Lago raid, he threatened a lawyer defending Trump’s valet driver and admitted the DOJ tampered with evidence. Via Michael Isikoff for SpyTalk: A top Justice Department national security prosecutor has become an early casualty of the incoming Trump administration, abruptly resigning from the department last week before incoming appointees can retaliate against him for his key role in special counsel Jack Smith’s...

A NEWSWEEK article by investigative reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball about the memo linking Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein dismisses a recent WEEKLY STANDARD report as "hype" and concludes, the "tangled tale of the memo suggests that the case of whether there has been Iraqi-al Qaeda complicity is far from closed." While it's refreshing to see the establishment media pick up the story, the Newsweek article is less than authoritative. The authors write: "The Pentagon memo pointedly omits any reference to the interrogations of a host of other high-level al Qaeda and Iraqi detainees--including such notables as Khalid...

VIDEOMichael Isikoff during an interview tried to defend incredibly CORRUPT Fani Willis but as you can tell not only by his words but by his body language that not even he believes what he is saying. Isikoff's main goal is to avoid total humiliation since his book "Find Me The Votes" portrayed Willis as a dynamitic and incorruptible District Attorney. Keep in mind that the last time we heard from Isikoff in a big way was his total HUMILIATION in the wake of him pushing the Russiagate Hoax based on the discredited Steele Dossier. And now he is desperate to...

Democrat Fani Willis’ legal troubles extend beyond recent revelations that she deceptively hired her otherwise under-qualified, secret, married lover to run the political prosecution of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans in Georgia. A new book from Mike Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman admits that a widely misunderstood phone call, on which Willis’ political prosecution rests, was illegally recorded. That means the entire prosecution could crumble with defendants having a new avenue to challenge Democrat lawfare. Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election is a fawning political biography...

VIDEOOnly one person had more at stake inside the hearing at Judge Scott McAfee's courtroom than Fani Willis today. That was Michael Isikoff because he just spent two years of his life writing, along with co-author Dan Klaidman, "Find Me The Votes" whose premise went on life support almost at the very moment of publication when the Willis-Wade scandal broke. It would be no surprise to see his book soon appearing on Dollar Store shelves based on what happened on the first day of the hearing.

VIDEOImagine spending two whole years of your life working hard on a book, another in a series of books proclaiming Donald Trump a criminal, and at almost the very moment your book is published the entire premise falls apart. In the case of Michael Isikoff and Dan Klaidman this happened when their book "Find Me The Votes" which hyped Fani Willis as a dynamic prosecutor chock full of integrity was discovered to be corrupt to the tune of enriching her unqualified boy toy Nathan Wade as an overpaid investigator who in turn repaid the almost $700,000 favor by taking Fani...

VIDEO Imagine putting tons of work into a book and just as it is released, the entire premise of the book is completely upended. Such was the case of Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman who wrote a book, "Find Me The Votes," hyping Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis as a brilliant and dynamic prosecutor only to have her personal corruption scandal exposed shortly before the release of the book on January 30, 2024. What to do? What to do? Well, what Isikoff and Klaidman are doing is going ahead with their planned book tour. However, despite being interviewed by friendly...

WASHINGTON - A White House official attacked House Republicans on Tuesday for engaging in “political stunts” over the classified documents found in President Biden’s home and former office, declining to say whether it will cooperate with congressional investigations into the issue. “They’re faking outrage,” White House communications officer Ian Sams told reporters, pointing to Republicans’ apparent lack of dismay after highly sensitive documents were found last summer at Mar-a-Lago, the estate where Donald Trump retired after his White House term concluded. “When it comes to Congress we intend to review and respond to oversight inquiries in good faith,” Sams said....

ATLANTA - In the latest sign that she is moving rapidly in her investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis has sent so-called target letters to prominent Georgia Republicans informing them they could be indicted for their role in a scheme to appoint alternate electors pledged to the former president despite Joe Biden’s victory in the state, according to legal sources familiar with the matter. The move by Willis, a Democrat, could have major political implications in a crucial battleground state with high-profile races for governor and the U.S. Senate...

Another Mistake FBI agent Curtis Heide was asked by prosecutors about a communication drafted by him and fellow agent Allison Sands on Sept. 23, 2016, that stated “the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE provided the FBI with a white paper that was produced by an anonymous third party.” FBI agent Curtis Heide was asked by prosecutors about a communication drafted by him and fellow agent Allison Sands on Sept. 23, 2016, that stated “the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE provided the FBI with a white paper that was produced by an anonymous third party.” “That’s a mistake in our paperwork,” Heide said of the...

Patrick Ho hardly seemed the profile of a big-time international fixer. A short, pudgy man, affectionately known to friends as “Fat Ping,” Ho had been a Harvard-trained ophthalmologist and a Hong Kong government minister. Yet in the fall of 2017, after landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City, he was arrested by FBI agents and charged in an audacious plot to dole out millions of dollars in bribes to African leaders in exchange for major energy contracts that appeared to advance Chinese government interests. What emerged in his indictment and later trial and conviction in federal court...

Hunter Biden knew he was working with associates who were high up in Chinese intelligence circles, according to a new report. The report published Monday by Yahoo News delves into the connections between Hunter Biden and Patrick Ho, referred to as Patrick Ho Chi-ping in some reports concerning Ho’s 2018 bribery conviction that was linked to arms dealing and bribery in Africa. Yahoo’s report is written by Michael Isikoff, its chief investigative correspondent, and Zach Dorfman, its national security correspondent. Both are veteran and respected journalists. (Isikoff is probably best known as the reporter then working for Newseek who had...

MADRID — The Justice Department has failed to respond to multiple requests from Spanish authorities for help in an investigation into a local security firm suspected of being used by the CIA to conduct aggressive — and potentially illegal — surveillance of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “I am not so pleased about it,” said Santiago Pedraz, the investigating judge in charge of the case, in an exclusive interview with Yahoo News, when asked about the failure of officials in Washington so far to cooperate with his probe. “They have absolutely not answered anything.”... ...Since June of last year, Spanish judges...

On the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a federal judge directed the Saudi Arabian government to make as many as 24 current and former officials available for depositions about their possible knowledge of events leading up to the airplane attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which killed almost 3,000 Americans. Those officials include Prince Bandar, the former ambassador to the United States, and his longtime chief of staff. The order was immediately hailed by families of the 9/11 victims as a milestone in their years-long effort to prove that some Saudi officials were either complicit in the attacks...

A former State Department official destroyed reports he received from former British spy Christopher Steele, according to a Senate report released on Tuesday. Jonathan Winer, who was Steele’s point of contact at the State Department, said that Steele asked him to destroy the records in January 2017, the same month that the Trump dossier became public. The Senate report also says that Winer initially denied that he arranged a meeting in October 2016 for Steele at the State Department. Winer corrected his statement in a follow-up interview after he was shown State Department visitor logs. A former State Department official...

Former California Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher confirmed in a new interview that during a three-hour meeting at the Ecuadorian Embassy in August 2017, he told Julian Assange he would get President Trump to give him a pardon if he turned over information proving the Russians had not been the source of internal Democratic National Committee emails published by WikiLeaks. In a phone interview with Yahoo News, Rohrabacher said his goal during the meeting was to find proof for a widely debunked conspiracy theory: that WikiLeaks’ real source for the DNC emails was not Russian intelligence agents, as U.S. officials have...

As the media-deep state Russia Hoax unravels, two journalists deserve special attention: Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball. Isikoff, now chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News, was the first to break the story that the FBI was investigating Carter Page. Hosenball, now a correspondent with Reuters, was first to break the story that candidate Donald Trump was being advised, as the Reuters headline tells us, “By Ex-U.S. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn--Who Favors Closer Russia Ties.” The “closer ties” that worry me, however, are those between America’s intelligence community (IC) and reporters like these two. I first met Isikoff and Hosenball in...

In February 2017, the Washington Post’s Miller had the lead byline on a story based on leaks of Trump’s conversations with Australia’s prime minister and Mexico’s president. Six months later, the Post published the entire transcripts of both conversations in another Miller story. It was through such national security correspondents that anti-Trump sources -- intelligence officials -- pushed leaks of classified information and other tidbits intended to damage Trump into the media. There it merged with other anti-Trump currents in nearly every corner of the press, where it blossomed into Russiagate. After a nearly two-year investigation, the special counsel found...