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Senators aim to limit Trump's ability to remove troops from Germany BY JORDAIN CARNEY - 06/29/20 03:19 PM EDT A bipartisan group of senators is trying to place limits on President Trump's ability to remove troops from Germany unless the administration is able to meet a slew of requirements. The proposal, spearheaded by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), would prohibit the administration from reducing the number of active-duty troops in Germany below 34,500 unless the Pentagon can certify to Congress that it is in the national security interest of the United States and would not negatively undermine European alliances or NATO....

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russians opened the door to Vladimir Putin staying in power until 2036 by voting overwhelmingly for constitutional changes that will allow him to run again for president twice, but critics said the outcome was falsified on an industrial scale. Official results published on Thursday, after 100% of ballots had been counted, showed that the former KGB officer who has ruled Russia for more than two decades as president or prime minister had easily won the right to run for two more six-year terms after the current one ends in 2024. That means Putin, 67, could rule until...

Former U.S Navy Seal Dr. Dan Barkhuff wants to know if @realDonaldTrump is a coward who can't stand up to Putin or if he's complicit. Well, Donald, which is it?

“Nothing will stop” Nord Stream 2, Russia has said, after new US sanctions on a pipeline that is seeing the EU side with Russia against its transatlantic ally. “Our view remains the same: nothing will stop the finalization of Nord Stream 2 [NS2]. And we leave to Germany and other EU member states to pass judgment on such US measures,” Russia’s ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, told EUobserver on Monday (29 June). The Russian-owned firm building the pipe from Russia to Germany, the Nord Stream 2 consortium in Switzerland, was equally bullish. “Our shareholder and the five financial investors...

Vladimir Putin is heading for victory in a referendum that could extend his rule until 2036 as Russia enters its final day of voting today. The Kremlin strongman would normally reach his term limit in 2024, but voters are set to back a plan to reset his tally to zero and allow him to run for two more terms. The package of constitutional changes would also increase Putin's powers to dissolve parliament and expand his influence over courts and prosecutors.

WASHINGTON—The National Security Agency strongly dissented from other intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia paid bounties for the killing of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, according to people familiar with the matter. The disclosure of the dissent by the NSA, which specializes in electronic eavesdropping, comes as the White House has played down the revelations, saying that the information wasn’t verified and that intelligence officials didn’t agree on it.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell flatly rejected on Tuesday the idea of Russia rejoining the Group of Seven (G7). President Donald Trump has suggested allowing Russia to be readmitted to the group of world leaders after it was ousted in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea.

Justice Department official Bruce Ohr is on Capitol Hill Tuesday, answering questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee behind closed doors, Fox News has learned. The former associate deputy attorney general is one of dozens of individuals the committee subpoenaed earlier this month as part of their investigation of the Russia probe and the FBI's abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in obtaining a warrant to conduct surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Ohr, who did not answer questions about his meeting while he was on his way to the committee, was a key contact inside the...

Nancy Pelosi claims Russians have something on President Trump to sway his administration to not to take action after learning that Moscow spies offered bounties to Afghan militants to kill U.S. troops.[snip]Pelosi said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” that throughout Trump’s presidency he has ignored allegations against misdeeds committed by Russia, but that the new reports on bounties “is as bad as it gets.”

The Pentagon said in a statement late Tuesday evening that it had no corroborating evidence that Russian operatives offered bounties to the Taliban for American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. “The Department of Defense continues to evaluate intelligence that Russian GRU operatives were engaged in malign activity against United States and coalition forces in Afghanistan. To date, DOD has no corroborating evidence to validate the recent allegations found in open-source reports,” said Chief Pentagon Spokesman Jonathan Hoffman.

The Defense Department said late Monday that there is “no corroborating evidence” to support the explosive New York Times report last week that said the Russian military offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The report sent shock waves through Washington and prompted President Trump to outright deny knowing anything about the intel cited in the report. “To date, DOD has no corroborating evidence to validate the recent allegations found in open-source reports. Regardless, we always take the safety and security of our forces in Afghanistan—and around the world—most seriously and therefore continuously adopt measures to...

Watch nearly the entire corporate media establishment run wild with claims from completely anonymous sources in the intelligence community this week. Much of the case for the Iraq War was based on the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. When the United States declared an end to the war late in 2011, more than 4,400 American military members had been killed and nearly 32,000 wounded. No weapons of mass destruction had been found. It’s one of the most significant and catastrophic intelligence errors in U.S. history. A bipartisan commission found that U.S. intelligence “seriously misjudged”...

In this Friday, Oct. 26, 2018 file photo, released by Oman News Agency, Oman's Sultan Qaboos, left, receives Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Muscat, Oman. (Oman News Agency via AP, File) The “last decade,” notes James Sinkinson in a perceptive article, has seen a “sea change” in Israel’s ties with “key Arab states.” And that last decade is also the one in which Benjamin Netanyahu (again, after a stint in the 1990s) has been Israel’s prime minister — specifically since March 2009.True, conditions for enhanced Arab-Israeli ties have been propitious — particularly the behavior of regional bully Iran, a...

Trump administration officials will brief members of Congress about intelligence regarding Russian bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the White House confirmed on Monday. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” that a briefing would take place on Monday. She did not offer details regarding who would conduct the briefing and what members of Congress would attend. “There will be a briefing today,” McEnany said. “I think it will clear up a lot of the false reporting from The New York Times. The president has made clear that he’s never been briefed.” McEnany...

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton criticized on Sunday President Trump’s response to reports that Russian military operatives offered bounties to Afghan militants to kill U.S. troops – saying Trump’s decision-making is “not connected to reality” and bashing the president for denying that he was aware of the bounties. The comments by Bolton, whose upcoming memoir about his time in the Trump White House has drawn the ire of the president, come as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are calling on action to be taken against Moscow following reports in the New York Times that a Russian spy...

Joe Scarborough believes the Trump administration is lying in saying the president wasn't briefed about a reported Russian bounty on US soldiers in Afghanistan. But if indeed the president wasn't informed of the reported Russian plot, on today's Morning Joe Scarborough offerered two execrable explanations for the omission: President Trump is either too "addled," i.e., demented, to make informing him worthwhile. Or, the president is a Russian "source," who couldn't be "trusted." That is tantamount to accusing President Trump of treason, of being a Russian spy. Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Members of the American intelligence community have concluded that members of the Russian intelligence unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants if they successfully killed members of the American military, the New York Times reported. The problem, however, is that almost everyone involved in this story says it isn't true. The White House, Russia and even the Taliban have said the Times' story is false. According to the anonymous source that spoke to the Times, the Russians intending "to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year." The source claimed that President...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Sunday that President Donald Trump "wants to ignore any allegation against Russia" as he and his administration deny ever being briefed about intelligence that Russians have offered to pay bounties to Taliban fighters who kill Americans. Speaking with ABC's "This Week," Pelosi said, "This is as bad as it gets." "And yet the president will not confront the Russians on this score, denies being briefed," Pelosi said. "Whether he is or not, his administration knows and our allies — some of our allies who work with us in Afghanistan had been briefed and accept...

The building of nuclear subs and other naval vessels takes no break despite the increasingly serious virus situation in Severodvinsk. Approximately 43 percent of all infections in the region of Arkhangelsk are registered in Severodvinsk, regional authorities recently announced. That indicates that there now are more than 2,000 cases in the city. The lion’s share of the people infected are affiliated with Sevmash and Zvezdochka, the two naval yards. Despite the introduction of protective measures, the virus has continued to spread among the local population of about 180,000. Only over the last week, more than 320 new cases have been...

Invisible for humans, but detectable for radiation-filters. A cloud with tiny levels of radioactivity, believed to originate from western Russia, has been detected over Scandinavia and European Arctic. First, in week 23 (June 2-8), iodine-131 was measured at the two air filter stations Svanhovd and Viksjøfjell near Kirkenes in short distance from Norway’s border to Russia’s Kola Peninsula. The same days, on June 7 and 8, the CTBTO-station at Svalbard measured tiny levels of the same isotope. CTBTO is the global network of radiological and seismic monitoring under the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. Norway’s nuclear watchdog, the DSA, underlines that...