Free Republic

While Democrats weaponized invented Russia collusion claims in an attempt to sink President Donald Trump’s first term, in retrospect the party’s leaders have often gone soft on Russia when it wanted to reap financial or political benefits for themselves or allies. From the Obama-era "Russian Reset" and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Skolkovo investment project to Hunter Biden’s business in Moscow and President Joe Biden’s waiving of sanctions against a Russian pipeline, key Democratic figures reaped political and financial benefits from going soft on Moscow. Newly declassified documents produced by the FBI and the Department of Justice’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation...

Last week the Department of Justice’s inspector general released a report on some of the DOJ’s tracking of communications from media and congressional figures as part of its purported investigation into who was leaking classified information against President Donald Trump in 2017. Three significant bombshells about the Russia collusion hoax were hidden inside the dense and dry 100-page report. For context, when Trump won the 2016 presidential election, anonymous Democrat operatives in the federal government and Congress began leaking like sieves as part of a coordinated effort to paint Trump as a mastermind spy who had worked with Russian President...

Tapper served up an opportunity for Johnson to characterize Trump as a Russian stooge. He did the exact opposite. CNN talking head Jake Tapper gave former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson an opportunity this week to help the American media establishment advance its latest Trump-Russia smear. Johnson, whose time as prime minister and foreign secretary overlapped Trump's first four years in the White House, not only proved unwilling to cosign the narrative but highlighted President Donald Trump's historic efforts to keep Russia in check — something the Biden-Harris administration has alternatively had difficulty with. Johnson went on CNN to promote...

Special Counsel John Durham may have issued his final report last month, but the Russiagate scandal is far from over. This is not because there is no more to learn about the years-long effort by the Democratic Party, the FBI, CIA, and major news outlets to advance the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump teamed with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election. Rather it’s because Russiagate never ended. Unlike political scandals of the past – from the XYZ Affair to Watergate and Iran-Contra – it is not a discrete set of events with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, it...

Twelve years ago, FBI agents in Baltimore sought to wiretap former Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko on suspicions he was spying for Russia. But the counterintelligence analyst they were assigned to work with ‒ Brian Auten ‒ told them he could not find their target and assumed the Russian national had fled back to Moscow. But Danchenko had not left the U.S., court documents show. He was living in the Washington area. In fact, he had been arrested in Maryland in 2013 by federal Park Police for being drunk and disorderly, something the FBI analyst could have easily discovered by...

Just a week after then-CIA Director John Brennan warned President Barack Obama that Hillary Clinton's campaign was "stirring up" a Russia scandal to harm Donald Trump, the agency's former acting chief became one of the first high-profile intelligence community figures to claim that the 2016 Republican nominee was a possible agent of Vladimir Putin. In an Aug. 5, 2016 op-ed in the New York Times, Michael Morell cited his CIA experience to make the Trump allegation and he also endorsed Clinton for president. "In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting...

PROLOGUE: THE INFORMATION WAR In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era. For more than half a...

So, is Bob a Deep State operator who swims in the prosecutorial end of the Swamp? Your call. The Mueller Investigation of Russia-Trump Collusion was a successful Deep State operation that achieved its 3-D goals of Distraction, Distortion, and Diversion. Weeping media dolts, now replaying their shock-n-grief over Hillary’s defeat, either don’t get it, or are masking joy with long faces. They successfully captured and dominated the news cycle for two-plus years—half of Trump’s first term.

House Intel Committee’s top Dem on Friday blasted GOP chairman Devin Nunes after he cancelled Tuesday’s public hearing with members of the Obama administration. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates all had agreed to testify publicly before the committee on what they knew about Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. Nunes canceled the public hearing, and then held a news conference to announce President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort had “volunteered” to be interviewed by the committee. That announcement was nothing but a bright...

On Monday, Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on a House intelligence committee, delivered his opening statements at a hearing where he laid out the case for alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Schiff repeatedly raised questions about alleged collusion between Moscow and members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Here are four serious problems with Schiff’s charges, which include wild conspiracy theories and heavy reliance on a questionable source: 1 – Throughout his opening statement, Schiff repeatedly relied on information provided by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who was reportedly paid by Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans...

The disclosure came in a report Wednesday night, citing unnamed U.S. officials. FBI suggests that President Donald Trump may have worked alongside Russian officials to release information aimed at Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. The FBI has information indicating that associates of President Donald Trump were in communication with suspected Russian agents and that they may have coordinated on releasing hacked emails and other information to undercut Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, CNN reported Wednesday, citing unnamed U.S. officials.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said there could be a connection between the firing of former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and investigations into President Trump. During an interview on ABC's "This Week," Cummings, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, said the president has the right to fire U.S. attorneys. But he noted that not very long ago, the president said he was willing to "keep the U.S. attorney there in New York." "And then suddenly, he's, I guess, changed his mind," Cummings said. "I'm just curious as to why that is and certainly there's a lot of questions...

To Dems "election" = "coronation" A: We still don’t have any actual evidence that John Podesta’s hacked emails were given to Wikileaks by the Russians. There’s a lot of speculation, but no proof. B: The validity of those emails has NEVER been disputed.

Americans should vote for Donald Trump as president next month or risk being dragged into a nuclear war, according to a Russian ultra-nationalist ally of President Vladimir Putin who likes to compare himself to the U.S. Republican candidate. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a flamboyant veteran lawmaker known for his fiery rhetoric, told Reuters in an interview that Trump was the only person able to de-escalate dangerous tensions between Moscow and Washington. By contrast, Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton could spark World War Three, said Zhirinovsky, who received a top state award from Putin after his pro-Kremlin Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR)...