Free Republic

Obama Used National Security to Spy on Americans Opposed to Islamic Terrorists Obamagate redefined opposition to Islamic terrorism as a national security threat. Mon Jun 8, 2020 Daniel Greenfield 55 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. We know when Obamagate ended, but we don’t know when the policy of spying on Americans began. The tangled roots of the domestic surveillance of political opponents by the NSA predate the alarmism about Russia. Tracing them back into the fetid swamp takes us not toward...

“Progressive” ideology always rests on a conviction that the current “regressive” system is comprehensively unjust and must be destroyed by exploiting its weaknesses. The most famous proponent of such tactics in recent years has been the late Saul Alinksy, the intellectual godfather of the modern Democrat Party, but former Soviet journalist and KGB informant Yuri Bezmenov laid out an even more concise strategy for subversion in a 1984 interview.Alinksy’s seminal book specified 13 Rules for Radicals, but Bezmenov had only four “stages of ideological subversion,” and they will sound very familiar to anyone following the current wave of left-wing riots,...

At approximately 8 PM on Sunday, February 18, 2001, there was a knock on my front door. At the time I was a Special Agent (SA) with the FBI, so imagine my shock when I opened the door and found the two top officials in the Division on my doorstep. I knew this couldn't possibly be good news, but they quickly sought to reassure me. "Everything is all right, but Bob Hanssen has been arrested." All right? Bob Hanssen was my brother in law, and a longtime counterintelligence (CI) official at FBIHQ, privy to a vast range of sensitive intelligence...

On this date in 1987, a once-promising American intelligence asset was executed with a single gunshot to the head in Moscow — his treachery exposed by two of the most infamous Soviet moles in U.S. intelligence history. A Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB posted to the Soviets’ official Washington, D.C. offices in 1980, Martynov had turned in 1982 and begun funneling intelligence to the CIA and FBI under the cryptonym “Gentile”. Truth be told, he was a mediocre source, but he was a younger officer with the chance to grow into a more important asset in the years ahead. Fate...

North Korea has axed its spy chief as well as the long-running head of Kim Jong Un’s security — signs of a major shakeup during the ongoing mystery over the dictator’s status. Jang Kil Song was ousted as head of the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), the North’s military intelligence agency, according to the Korea Herald, citing a report by South Korea’s Unification Ministry. The RGB is behind the Hermit Kingdom’s most high-profile attacks as well as spy missions, including those against the US, the report says.

The FBI arrested an Arkansas professor who failed to disclose ties to the Chinese government and Chinese companies before securing funding for a NASA research project, the Justice Department announced Wednesday. Simon Saw-Teong Ang, 63, was arrested Friday and charged with wire fraud. The Justice Department alleges that the electrical engineering professor and researcher at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville (UA) has committed fraud against NASA and the university since 1988 "by failing to disclose that he held other positions at a Chinese university and Chinese companies.” Ang faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. His ties came to...

Chinese spies have targeted Belgian biological warfare and vaccine experts, Belgium's security service suspects. They are also targeting British pharmaceutical giant and vaccine-maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in Belgium and Belgian high-tech firms, Belgian intelligence fears. The suspicions were detailed in confidential Belgian reports dated from 2010 to 2016, seen by EUobserver. They were meant to alert Belgian authorities to the threat of Chinese military, scientific, and medical espionage. But the Belgian suspicions have no direct link to the current coronavirus pandemic, which started in China in December 2019 due to natural causes, according to the scientific consensus. And the reports, which...

Few Americans could fathom the notion that the United States is so indebted to China that one of Beijing’s spies could get away with espionage – especially with an White House in love with espionage prosecutions. But that might be the only reasonable explanation for the Obama administration’s decision to pass on prosecuting a State Department contractor who was allegedly paid thousands of dollars to someone believed to be a Chinese agent seeking information on Americans. According to Fox News, a November 2014 FBI affidavit that was filed in U.S. district court in Maryland indicates that the FBI launched a...

Venezuela’s ex-vice president and now the top confidant of Nicolas Maduro is said to have tried sneaking in Hezbollah militants into his country, made a business deal with a drug lord and became extremely wealthy as the once-rich country turned into an economic basket case. Tareck El Aissami has emerged as a hardliner of Maduro’s socialist regime as the country remains on the brink of an all-out civil war due to economic misery. **SNIP** But El Aissami, while not having the same scrutiny as Maduro, has long been the subject of various investigations both at home and in the U.S....

A recent gala fund-raiser in South Beach might have dispelled the question, "Can she dance?" but Florida gubernatorial candidate and former U.S. attorney general Janet Reno still must face the music over concerns about whether she is fit to run the Sunshine State. Those with long memories will recall that, during the middle of the Clinton impeachment debacle, Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell wondered whether Reno, a fellow Democrat, was the most corrupt attorney general in U.S. history or merely the most incompetent. My own experience with the boogie-down madam suggests that either description will do. I worked as a...

The dossier on cancer researcher Wu Xifeng was thick with intrigue, if hardly the stuff of a spy thriller. It contained findings that she’d im­properly shared confi­den­tial information and accepted a half-dozen advisory roles at medical institutions in China. She might have weathered those allegations, but for a larger aspersion that was far more problematic: she was branded an oncological double agent. In recent decades, cancer research has become increasingly globalised, with scientists around the world pooling data and ideas to jointly study a disease that kills almost 10 million people a year. International collaborations are an intrinsic part of...

Would-be defector Wang Liqiang seemed to confirm Australia’s worst fears of Chinese infiltration. The fresh-faced, bespectacled 27-year-old, dubbed the “first Chinese operative to ever blow his cover”, recounted alarming tales of espionage and political sabotage in Australia, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Wang recalled meeting with the head of a spy ring operating freely down under, coordinating a “cyber army” to manipulate public opinion during elections in Taiwan, working with a front company charged with infiltrating Hong Kong universities and media, and ordering the kidnapping of one of the five Hong Kong booksellers known to sell titles critical of the leadership...

Foreign-born researchers working for U.S. agencies were secretly on China’s payroll, signing side agreements to send sensitive research to that country as part of a recruitment operation called the Thousand Talents Plan, a Senate report found. 10,000 Chinese nationals in 2018 conducted research in the Department of Energy’s National Labs, and one even had colleagues write him letters of recommendation to the Communist Party-run recruitment program, the bipartisan report stated. Agencies like NIH do not even track attempted foreign influence, the Department of State denies only 5% of suspicious visas, and the FBI shut down a key program, according to...

So long as the world is entertaining worst-case scenarios, the media does Americans no favors in omitting that Iran-Hezbollah has for years prepared to strike in their own hometowns. Weirdly absent from much of the professional speculation about where and how Iran will exact its promised “severe revenge” for the U.S. drone strike killing of Quds Force Gen. Qassem Suleimani is mention of the dead man’s highly suggestive hint. During a time of intense saber rattling between Iran and President Donald Trump in July 2018, Suleimani gave a speech during which he called out the American president: “Mr. Gambler, Trump!...

On March 15, 1995, by Executive Order 12957, the President declared a national emergency with respect to Iran to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States constituted by the actions and policies of the Government of Iran.  On May 6, 1995, the President issued Executive Order 12959, imposing more comprehensive sanctions on Iran to further respond to this threat.  On August 19, 1997, the President issued Executive Order 13059, consolidating and clarifying those previous orders.  The President took additional steps pursuant to this national emergency in Executive Order 13553...

For over a year, we have been waging a relentless, nearly solitary battle in apprising the Congress and the American public about a billion dollar boondoggle and scandal: the lack of credible Arabic translators for our national security and intelligence agencies. As a result hundreds have been killed in Iraq from infiltration of our military and civilian intelligence agencies by agents of Islamist terrorists. Our FBI and CIA have been infiltrated by Muslim linguists who have successfully evaded polygraph tests and been able to pass on vital information to terror groups in the Middle East such as Hezbollah. Tens of...

An FBI translator assigned to investigate a German rapper-turned-terrorist instead traveled to Syria to marry him, according to CNN. Daniela Greene lied to the FBI about her whereabouts and warned her new husband, Denis Cuspert, about the investigation. Cuspert, who rapped under the name Deso Dogg, has been featured in videos for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria holding severed human heads, CNN reports. According to the report, Greene realized she had made a mistake just weeks after marrying Cuspert. She then fled back to the U.S., where she was arrested and agreed to cooperate with authorities.

A contractor for the Pentagon has been charged with providing classified U.S. intelligence to a Lebanese national connected with terrorist group Hezbollah, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday. The department alleges Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, began transmitting the classified intelligence around December 30, when Iraqi militiamen stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Thompson is a linguist who at the time was working at a U.S. special forces base in Erbil in northern Iraq. The classified “files contained classified national defense information including true names, personal identification data, background information, and photographs of the human sources, as well as operations cables...

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,...

Full title............................EXCLUSIVE: How Russian lawyer and Soviet spy who met Don Jr schmoozed the Washington elite with wine and hors d'ouevres days later - and Republican lawmaker's staff sent the invitations.............. Natalia Veselnitskaya held a controversial film party at elite venue the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue last summer - just after she met Donald Trump Jr Also there was Rinat Akhmetshin, the ex-Soviet spy who on Friday admitted he was in the meeting too Screening was of The Magnistsky Act - Behind The Scenes, a documentary about the whisteblower who supporters say was murdered to cover up tax fraud Documentary...