Free Republic

Now that Republicans have narrow control of the House of Representatives, the GOP is investigating the Biden administration with gusto. Still, Republicans seem not to have noticed one major foreign policy scandal that's hiding in plain sight. As I recently reported , the rising scandal surrounding retired FBI senior official Charles McGonigal is perhaps the worst in the bureau’s history. Multiple sources have told me that McGonigal, while still serving with the FBI as head of counterintelligence in New York, shook down Balkan business people, most of them Albanian, in an audacious political corruption scheme worth many millions of dollars....

New FBI information about corruption in a Clinton-approved uranium deal with Russia raises questions about Clinton’s actions after the FBI broke up a deep-cover Russian spy ring in 2010. For a decade, the FBI ran an operation called Ghost Stories to monitor and rip apart a deep-cover Russian agent network. Ghost Stories tracked a ring Russian spies who lived between Boston and Washington, D.C., under false identities. It was one of the FBI’s most elaborate and successful counterintelligence operations in history.

The Rightosphere is well-acquainted with stories about the mainstream media working against US interests, but even so, this is still a bit much. Less than a week after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited the United States, the Justice Department announced Monday that 10 people were arrested on charges of being Russian agents involved in a long-term mission in the country. Another suspect was still being sought.Five of the arrested suspects appeared in a New York courtroom Monday. Four of the five, including a longtime U.S.-based columnist for the Spanish-language “El Diario” newspaper, were advised of their rights and ordered held...

Charles McGonigal may be the most corrupt FBI official in modern history—and yet somehow, his name has barely made a blip on the radar. This wasn’t some mid-level pencil-pusher. McGonigal was one of the top counterintelligence agents at the FBI’s New York field office. He was directly involved in the bureau’s most sensitive operations, including the infamous “Crossfire Hurricane” probe into (phony) Trump–Russia “collusion.” And after that whole fraudulent mess, it turns out that he was secretly taking money from a Kremlin-linked oligarch and helping shake down Albanian oligarchs on the side. You can’t make this up, right? Now here...

A female Russian spy -- possibly flame-haired media darling Anna Chapman -- was close to seducing a member of U.S. President Barack Obama's cabinet in 2010, the assistant director of the FBI for counterintelligence revealed in a recent interview with British television. Frank Figliuzzi said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been tracking a 10-person Russian spy ring for years but had to act sooner than planned because the female agent was getting close to drawing a U.S. official into a "honey trap." The individual "got closer and closer to higher and higher ranking leadership. She got close enough to...

Former deep-cover Russian spy Anna Chapman plays a starring role in a new promotional video for President Vladimir Putin's military and it sounds a whole lot like Cold War propaganda. Chapman, you may recall, was the femme fatale rolled up by the FBI in the early summer of 2010 with nine other "illegals" – all working undercover for the SVR, Moscow's foreign intelligence service. Their job was to gather U.S. political and economic secrets for the motherland. But unfortunately for them, they had reportedly been betrayed by one of their own. The FBI had secretly snooped on them for years...