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This is collusion. The real thing. Dossier author Christopher Steele identified a former Russian spy chief and a top adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin as being involved in handling potentially compromising information about President Donald Trump, State Department notes show. In her notes, State Department official Kathleen Kavalec also referred to the two Russians — former Russian foreign intelligence chief Vyacheslav Trubnikov and Putin aide Vladislav Surkov — as “sources.” The references to Trubnikov and Surkov, which have not previously been reported, are not definitive proof that either were sources for Steele’s dossier or that they were involved in an...

The words sound a lot like a confession: “Mom, those documents, I screwed up.” During Reality Leigh Winner’s bond hearing last week, Assistant U.S. attorney Jennifer Solari told the world that the 25-year-old federal contractor charged with leaking top-secret documents to the news media uttered those words to her mother during a recorded phone call from jail. Before her arrest, Reality Winner, 25, worked for Alexandria, Va.-based Pluribus International Corp., a contractor for the NSA, assigned to Fort Gordon. She also served six years as an Air Force linguist. But did Winner really fess up to her mother? Did her...

Andrew P. Bakaj is the lawyer representing the whistleblower who came forward with information about President Donald Trump and his conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about an investigation into 2020 democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The whistleblower’s intel, which has now been turned over to Congress confidentially, pushed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to announce a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump on September 24, 2019. Lead counsel on this high-profile case is the 36-year-old Bakaj, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, who now works as the founding & managing partner of Compass Rose Legal...

The DOJ and US Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of Virginia said in a press release Monday that a former FBI linguist was arrested and indicted on obstruction charges in a terrorism investigation. “According to court documents, Abdirizak Jaji Raghe Wehelie, aka Haji Raghe, 66, of Burke, was a federal contractor for the FBI and worked as a linguist translating communications captured by court-authorized surveillance of a suspect (Person A) in a terrorism investigation. Wehelie allegedly intentionally misidentified his own voice that was captured when Person A left a voicemail message on Wehelie’s mobile telephone,” the US Attorney’s office...

Inside the government, some officials called her “Wayward Storm.” Her real name was Monica Elfriede Witt, an exemplary Air Force counterintelligence agent who had studied Persian and carried out covert missions in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But by mid-2013, Ms. Witt had become disillusioned with the government — why, exactly, remains a mystery — and had left the military. Thoughts of betrayal consumed her, federal prosecutors now say, until she finally acted on them at the Iranian Embassy in Kabul, where they say she “told all.”

Shortened title. Full title: Email Logs Reveal Correspondence Between Clinton Associate, Fusion GPS, and Russians at Trump Tower Meeting Attorney Edward Lieberman, whose late wife Evelyn served as Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, exchanged numerous emails with the co-founder of the controversial Fusion GPS firm and Russian participants in the infamous June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting, documentation provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee shows. The correspondence, part of a series of exhibits provided to Senate investigators and reviewed by Breitbart News, took place in the weeks leading up to the Trump Tower meeting. Earlier this week, Breitbart News cited...

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...

Democratic Rep. Joe Kennedy III called on the White House Wednesday to publicly recount what occurred in the private meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. If the White House does not come forward, Congress should bring the president's translator to testify, under subpoena if necessary, the Massachusetts congressman suggested during an interview on CNN’s "New Day." Mr. Kennedy acknowledged that the proposal is complicated by potential legal issues around privilege, but he said "it shouldn’t get that far."

* Sergei Millian was named as the source of the dirty dossier claims on Tuesday * The 38-year-old is accused of telling friends he knew about Trump's 2013 Moscow visit * Boasts he allegedly made to third parties were passed on to Christopher Steele, the British ex-MI6 spy who compiled the dossier for Trump's political enemies * Among explosive, unverified allegations is that Trump cavorted with prostitutes * Millian previously boasted about having a business friendship with the president * President Trump's camp claims no such relationship between the pair exists * They say they have asked Millian, who attended...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – A judge has ruled that a woman charged with leaking secrets to a reporter will remain jailed until her trial after prosecutors argued that she might possess more stolen intelligence and could try to flee the country. Winner worked for a U.S. government contractor in Augusta. She is a former Air Force linguist who speaks Farsi and Arabic. Prosecutors don't think Winner is a jihadist or terrorist sympathizer, they say that before she left the military, she inserted an external hard drive into a top-secret computer there. They say they don't know what happened to it or...

Before she became the first person prosecuted by the Trump administration for leaking documents, Reality Leigh Winner received a military commendation for assisting in overseas airstrikes that killed hundreds of enemy combatants. Winner, an Air Force senior airman, was a linguist proficient in Farsi, Dari and Pashto, languages spoken in Iran and Afghanistan. She served with the 94th Intelligence Squadron, 707th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing, at Fort Meade, Md. Though her parents say Winner never deployed outside the U.S., her work was considered so valuable that in October, she earned an Air Force Commendation Medal. That was two months...

“She called us yesterday night. She asked if we could help out with relocating her cat and dog,” Winner-Davis said. Winner-Davis said her daughter never talked about her work, and her family did not know the specifics of her recently acquired job as a government contractor. She added that her daughter, while quiet about her job, was outspoken about her beliefs. “She’s very passionate. Very passionate about her views and things like that, but she’s never to my knowledge been active in politics or any of that,” said Winner-Davis. On Twitter, she expressed frequent dissatisfaction with Trump administration policies, and...

KABUL — When Ahmad Ghyasi fled Afghanistan for Germany last fall, he left with a stack of papers he was sure would help his case for asylum. He had evidence he was a Taliban target and references from the U.S. military. But German authorities made it clear, Ghyasi said, that it was unlikely they would ever grant him asylum. And now Ghyasi, a longtime interpreter for U.S. forces, is back in Afghanistan after just three months abroad. Today, German and Afghan officials are negotiating an agreement that could see thousands of Afghans return to the country on either chartered or...

(Reuters) - Iranian-American Amir Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine whose previous death sentence in Iran on espionage charges was overturned, has been secretly retried, convicted of collaborating with the U.S. government and sentenced to 10 years in prison, the New York Times reported on Friday, quoting his lawyer. The newspaper quoted lawyer Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabaei as saying Hekmati, held since 2011, was not told by Iranian officials about the retrial, conviction or prison sentence. The Times quoted Tabatabaei as saying Hekmati was retried by a revolutionary court in December and convicted of "practical collaboration with the American government." :snip: The...

Iowa National Guard Lt. Pat Hendrickson, right, stands with Nabiullah Mohammadiin Afghanistan. “He was my right-hand man,” Hendrickson said.(Photo: Courtesy photo via The Des Moines Register) The price of aiding and abetting the U.S.? One of the most often repeated phrases in our military culture is “Leave No Fallen Comrade Behind.” Many service members relied so heavily on their Afghan and Iraqi translators that some were considered members of the unit. It goes without saying that, when troops are in the combat zone, their lives are in constant danger. But at the end of their tours, they get to go...

Skype hopes to make its international connections easier — though perhaps still a little awkward — with a new feature that automatically translates conversations almost in real time.Parent company Microsoft unveiled the new technology at the Code technology conference on Tuesday, where Skype vice president Gurdeep Pall made small talk in English with a German-speaking Skype manager in Europe.After saying a sentence in English, an automated voice translated his words into German. (You can watch the video here.)It’s not quite the real-time universal translator that characters on “Star Trek” used to speak to alien life forms. And inevitably for a technology...

The man who sparked an international furor by offering bogus sign language interpretation at a major memorial service for late South African President Nelson Mandela has reportedly been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.

The man who used jibberish sign language at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service also used incoherent hand gestures to sign a notorious anti-white song sung last year by current South African President Jacob Zuma. Thamsanqua Jantjie, 34, late said that he is schizophrenic and was hallucinating during the Mandela memorial speeches. The interpreter also admitted that he’d been prone to fits of violence in the past, an admission that was worrisome given his proximity to President Barack Obama and other world leaders. According to NBC News, Jantjie has worked two other gigs on behalf of the African National Congress (ANC), South...

The schizophrenic South African sign language interpreter who said he hallucinated during Nelson Mandela’s memorial on Tuesday reportedly has an extensive criminal record, including murder, rape and kidnapping charges. According to South African news network eNCA, Thamsanqa Jantjie has “faced rape (1994), theft (1995), housebreaking (1997), malicious damage to property (1998), murder, attempted murder and kidnapping (2003) charges.”(continued)

SNIPPET: "A webmaster from Normandy, northern France was arrested and charged on Thursday for "provoking" and condoning terrorism. He is accused of translating articles from the jihadist magazine Inspire into French." SNIPPET: "The 26-year-old, identified as Romain, was detained Tuesday for his role as administrator of the Ansar al Haqq website, a "reference" for the radical Islamist movement, and as a translator of magazines put out by militant group Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Paris prosecutors said. Detained by intelligence officers in his native Calvados region of northern France, Romain said he converted to Islam when he was 20, prosecutors said. The Ansar...