Free Republic

An American contractor held hostage in Afghanistan for more than two years has been released in exchange for a convicted Taliban drug lord jailed in the United States, the White House said Monday, announcing a rare success in U.S.-Taliban talks since the militant group took power a little more than a year ago Mark Frerichs, a Navy veteran who had spent more than a decade in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor, was abducted in January 2020 and is believed to have been held since then by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network. He was traded for Bashir Noorzai, a Taliban associate convicted...

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley is pressing Vanita Gupta, the nominee for the number three position at the Justice Department, over millions of dollars in stock holdings she has in a chemical company that makes a key ingredient that Mexican drug cartels use to make heroin. Gupta holds between $11 million and $55 million in shares of Avantor, a Pennsylvania-based chemical company, according to financial disclosures she has filed with the Office of Government Ethics. Gupta’s father, Raj Gupta, serves as chairman of the board of Avantor. Gupta is the wealthiest political nominee that President Joe Biden has picked while in...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has slapped insider trading charges against Rajat K. Gupta, tying the former Goldman Sachs director to the insider trading at former Forbes 400 member Raj Rajaratnam’s hedge fund Galleon Group. Regulators allege that Gupta, a former board member of Goldman, provided Rajaratnam with information about the bank’s financial results for the second and fourth quarters of 2008 before they were made public. Gupta is also said to have tipped off the hedge fund manager to the $5 billion investment in Goldman made by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway before the deal was announced September 23,...