Free Republic

President of Russia Vladimir Putin and President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko attended the ceremony to unveil the Rzhev Memorial to the Soviet Soldier.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) told reporters Tuesday that bombshell media reports that Russia’s military intelligence paid bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill U.S. troops is “absolutely inaccurate,” making the claim after she and other Republicans were briefed at the White House. “I think that reporting was absolutely inaccurate. I had a briefing this morning and I know that the evidence is not corroborated,” she said, emphasizing that she was putting “evidence” in air quotes. “We take threats seriously. At the tactical level, obviously making sure our positions are hardened and we’re watching out for adversaries,” she added. Ernst was one...

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.

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”...

Despite their roots in reality, there is no doubt that these crises -- and the White House and Senate's attempts to tackle them -- would be reported differently if Hillary Clinton were president. It took more than five years, but the corporate media finally have the tools and strategy to successfully defeat President Donald Trump.The corporate media have these, mind you, despite the Democratic Party, whose foibles, stumbles, and misfires over those same five years have only complicated efforts, kicking off with a disastrous 2016 defeat and eventually culminating in a near-invisible and increasingly senile presidential candidate stumbling through a...

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...

Top U.S. intelligence officials released statements Monday criticizing leaks to the media as the Trump administration continues to defend against allegations that it knew Russia had offered bounties to incentivize Taliban-linked militants to kill coalition troops in Afghanistan. CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe released similar statements Monday night slamming leaks as detrimental to intelligence investigations. “The selective leaking of any classified information disrupts the vital interagency work to collect, assess, and mitigate threats and places our forces at risk. It also, simply put, a crime,” Ratcliffe said in a statement. Haspel said that “leaks...

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House...

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...

VIDEO Apparently the media didn't learn its lesson when they happily hyped the Trump-Russia collusion HOAX based on NO evidence. They are now doing a repeat performance by eagerly hyping a new Trump-Russia hoax, that he knew about the Russians supposedly paying the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Of course, this latest conspiracy theory is also based on no evidence since the New York Times fable about this relied on "anonymous sources." This video shows how in both cases the media was all too eager to hype these FAKE NEWS stories. Perhaps the Times can come up...

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...

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...

The other day, the New York Times was subtly and not so subltely promoting the claim that President Trump was standing callously by and coddling Russia's Vladimir Putin even as Putin was busily offering the Taliban bounties for the bodies of dead U.S. servicemen. It was the old 'Trump is a Russian agent' canard whipped out in a new form. The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a...

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...

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...

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...

Giorgi Rtskhiladze, an American citizen originally from the former-Soviet nation of Georgia, is suing Robert Mueller and the Department of Justice, claiming that a footnote in Mueller's Russia report falsely characterized him and linked him to an unverified, scandalous allegation involving President Trump contained in Christopher Steele's infamous dossier. Rtskhiladze claims in the complaint, filed Wednesday in D.C. federal court and first reported by Law & Crime, that Mueller falsely described him as a "Russian businessman," and improperly implied that he had detailed knowledge of purported recordings of Trump in a Moscow hotel in 2013. "Footnote 112 of Volume II...

Hey! Anybody up for the “China Collusion” fantasy scam? – That’s what’s coming next from the Democrat/Media Axis of Disinformation, as was made clear on the Sunday morning talk shows. Democrat activist hosts Martha Raddatz of ABC and NBC’s weaselly Chuck Todd kicked off the festivities, with Fake Jake Tapper playing a supporting role. Hilariously, this entire scam will revolve around the media’s former whipping boy, John Bolton, who has suddenly become their newest turncoat hero now that he’s taking shots at President Donald Trump. Todd interviewed bug-eyed Adam Schiff on his gabfest, “Meet the Press.” There he practically begged...

Whereas the Resistance mob tried to paint Trump as a maniacal genius, Hill saw what most non-crazy people suspected: that Trump treats his presidency like a business and diplomacy like dealmaking. "He just wants to go in and shoot the breeze with these guys, because he thinks he's got great chemistry with them," Hill said. BINGO! In short, Hill knows that in Trump's case, it's incorrect to ascribe to malice what mannerism and shortsightedness can easily explain. If the nation's leading expert on Russian interference in our politics (and one with every reason to loathe the Trump administration) doesn't buy...