Free Republic

FBI declassified a 1999 video of Saudi intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi casing the Capitol and other Washington D.C. sites for the 9/11 attack. How, then, did the CIA-FBI 9/11 report conclude in 2005 that Saudi Arabia was not involved in the attack? And why did the FBI maintain — for 20 years, before its recent retraction — that al-Bayoumi wasn’t a Saudi agent? Such willful deception, practiced increasingly by American intelligence, is the subject of former CIA agent J. Michael Waller’s new book Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains ......

A judge on Thursday issued a furious order targeting a Chinese billionaire and ally of Steve Bannon, a member of Donald Trump’s inner circle, ordering him to either pay $134m or face arrest for his violation of a previous court order. In a ruling, a judge from the New York County Supreme Court excoriated Guo Wengui for hiding billions of dollars’ worth of assets around the US and elsewhere including in the form of a superyacht named the Lady May. Judge Barry Ostrager faulted Mr Guo in his ruling for hiding the craft outside of US jurisdiction in the Bahamas...