Free Republic

In a barbed tweet yesterday, NSA consultant turned whistleblower Edward Snowden said that Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) could “casually [annihilate] the savings of every wage-worker” in the country. Snowden began his attack against the nascent promise of CBDCs—digital currencies backed by the monetary reserves of a central bank—in response to an article by New York Times guest columnist Dr. Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policies at Cornell University. Dr. Prasad highlighted the growing move towards a cashless economy, a move signaled by the research and trials of CBDCs in countries such as China, Sweden, Japan, Britain, as well...

@ggreenwald Trump's failure to pardon Assange and Snowden was one of the worst and most cowardly mistakes he made. Few realize how close he was to doing it. He got scared by threats from GOP Senators that they'd vote for impeachment if he did it.

Is the military handling of a Chinese balloon, identified as a surveillance device, and other unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) in recent days, just being hyped by the lapdog media to divert attention from the news that the Democrat administration of POTUS Joe Biden may have blown up the Nord Stream pipeline? That is a question on the minds of many Americans and many other people around the world. Answers are not so easy to come by as the Democrats have long and rambling press conferences to try to explain why such massive military action has been taken and what the...

'The Senate Intel Committee spent nearly the entirety of its session today furiously demanding that DNI nominee Gabbard condemn me personally, a position now opposed by something like 94% of Americans...' President Donald Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence, faced sharp criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike Thursday during a fiery confirmation hearing focused on her past support for whistleblower Edward Snowden—but Gabbard stood her ground and refused to disavow him. Gabbard started her hearing by telling lawmakers that big changes are needed to address years of failures of America’s intelligence service. She said too often intelligence has...

Deep state whistleblower Edward Snowden may be getting a new lease on life. The famous fugitive, who has been living in Russia since 2013 after leaking classified National Security Agency documents showing the US was engaged in a massive surveillance program, has been a cause célèbre among left-wing and free speech activists, but has received a chillier reception from Republicans. But Snowden has some powerful allies in President-elect Trump’s cabinet, insiders told The Post. Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, co-sponsored a resolution in September 2020 calling on the United States to drop all charges against...

A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Thursday to lying about a $10 million bribe that a Ukrainian businessman paid to then-vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter to “protect” his firm from a looming corruption investigation. Alexander Smirnov, 43, entered into a plea agreement with special counsel David Weiss and confessed to having created “a false and fictitious record” as part of a multi-year federal probe into the Bidens. The falsehoods included the bribery allegation, which was memorialized in an FBI FD-1023 form in 2020 and released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) last year, and other aspects of...

Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes, a Mexican citizen residing in Singapore, was arrested based on a Complaint charging him with acting within the United States on behalf of a foreign government (Russia), without notifying the Attorney General, and conspiracy to do the same.John C. Demers, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; Ariana Fajardo Orshan, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida; George Piro, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Miami Field Office; and Diane J. Sabatino, Director of Field Operations, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Miami Field Office, made the announcement. According to court...

A U.S. Army specialist has been arrested at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska on suspicion of espionage, an Army spokesman said on Tuesday. Specialist William Colton Millay, a 22-year-old military policeman, was taken into custody on October 28, Army spokesman Lt. Col. Bill Coppernoll told Reuters. Coppernoll said Millay, of Owensboro, Kentucky, was arrested following a joint espionage investigation conducted by the FBI and Army Counterintelligence special agents.

Julian Assange's 14-year saga as a fugitive and prisoner may be coming to an end. The Wikileaks founder has agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge with the U.S. Justice Department in exchange for no additional prison time. He has already served 5 years in a maximum security prison in England after spending 7 years hiding in an Ecuadorian Embassy. Assange would only agree to a hearing outside of U.S. soil. Last month he won his right to appeal an extradition order. High Court judges Victoria Sharp and Jeremy Johnson ruled for Assange after his lawyers argued that the...

Did anyone else catch the “discussion” between Hannity and Mark Summers today?I’m not sure if they have some sort of history, but Hannity sure jumped quickly. F. Lee Levin was on too and brought up Summers ordeal with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which I thought was in poor taste.I’m still not sure why Summers even called.

Julian Assange tried to contact Hillary Clinton and the White House when he realized that unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables given to WikiLeaks were about to be dumped on the internet, his lawyer told his London extradition hearing on Tuesday. Assange is being sought by the United States on 18 counts of hacking U.S. government computers and an espionage offense, having allegedly conspired with Chelsea Manning, then a U.S. soldier known as Bradley Manning, to leak hundreds of thousands of secret documents by WikiLeaks almost a decade ago. On Monday, the lawyer representing the United States told the hearing that Assange,...

A last-ditch effort to persuade President Donald Trump to issue a pre-emptive pardon to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is reportedly being blocked by White House counsel Pat Cipollone, according to reports. A high-level source in the Trump administration reported to Breitbart News that while the President is sympathetic to pardoning Assange, Cipollone is not — and the continued opposition of the White House counsel is making a pardon increasingly unlikely. Trump could still overrule Cipollone if he wished – he has the legal authority to do so – but it appears that the President continues to heed the latter’s advice....

A federal grand jury returned a second superseding indictment today charging Julian P. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.   The new indictment does not add additional counts to the prior 18-count superseding indictment returned against Assange in May 2019.  It does, however, broaden the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged.  According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions...

Hours after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange struck a plea deal with the Justice Department for his alleged role in the historic government data breach, former Vice President Mike Pence responded to the news in a lengthy X post. "Julian Assange endangered the lives of our troops in a time of war and should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Pence wrote.

During the first Cold War, American and British spies would sometimes place coded messages in newspaper classified ads to communicate with each other. And according to new reports in the New York Times and The Intercept, the National Security Agency (NSA) has updated the tactic, using its public Twitter account to send secret messages to at least one Russian spy.... According to the reports, the unnamed Russian met with US spies in person in Germany, and the NSA sometimes communicated with the Russian spy by sending roughly a dozen coded messages from the NSA’s Twitter account. The one important question.......

Sarah Ashton-Crillo has been suspended from duties as Ukrainian military spokesperson pending an investigation, following comments by the transgender former US soldier threatening to "hunt down" critics of the US’ involvement in the Ukraine war.

Robert Hanssen was one of the most damaging spies in the history of the FBI. The former US agent, who has died in prison, leaked top secrets to Moscow for nearly 20 years - betrayals that the agency says cost lives. It took 300 agents to finally bring him down. Two of them who played a central part tell us how they did it. In December 2000, FBI agent Richard Garcia had a curious visit from a colleague overseeing the Russia desk. "He asked, 'Do you know a guy named Robert Hanssen?'" Mr Garcia recalled. "I said, 'No'." The official...

Tara Reade, a former Senate aide who accused President Joe Biden of sexual assault, announced Tuesday she defected to Russia. The shocking confession was made during a Russian state press conference, where Reade was sitting next to alleged Kremlin spy—and pal—Maria Butina. Reade told the pro-Putin press the “very difficult” decision to move came after the realization that she no longer feels safe in Biden's America. “I'm still kind of in a daze a bit but I feel very good,” Reade told Sputnik. “I feel very surrounded by protection and safety. And I just really so appreciate Maria [Butina] and...

A vast trove of Jeffrey Epstein's private calendars and emails are being revealed today by DailyMail.com. The hundreds of pages in the files give an unprecedented insight into the late pedophile's extraordinary network of power and influence. Among the revelations is that Epstein appeared to know personal details about the marriage of Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda – while magician David Blaine had numerous dinners with the financier.

Jack Parsons via Wikimedia Commons John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons’s life seems too improbable to be believed. But it’s all there in the biographies, Sex and Rockets and Strange Angel (the basis of a TV series of the same name), among other places, including a streaming series based on Strange Angel. Born in 1914, Parsons died in 1952 while working on an explosive special effect for a movie in his home laboratory. The explosion has been called an accident, a suicide, or an assassination, depending on the source. An obituary in the Pasadena Independent described Parsons as “a down-to-earth explosives...