Free Republic

Patrick Ho hardly seemed the profile of a big-time international fixer. A short, pudgy man, affectionately known to friends as “Fat Ping,” Ho had been a Harvard-trained ophthalmologist and a Hong Kong government minister. Yet in the fall of 2017, after landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City, he was arrested by FBI agents and charged in an audacious plot to dole out millions of dollars in bribes to African leaders in exchange for major energy contracts that appeared to advance Chinese government interests. What emerged in his indictment and later trial and conviction in federal court...

Hunter Biden knew he was working with associates who were high up in Chinese intelligence circles, according to a new report. The report published Monday by Yahoo News delves into the connections between Hunter Biden and Patrick Ho, referred to as Patrick Ho Chi-ping in some reports concerning Ho’s 2018 bribery conviction that was linked to arms dealing and bribery in Africa. Yahoo’s report is written by Michael Isikoff, its chief investigative correspondent, and Zach Dorfman, its national security correspondent. Both are veteran and respected journalists. (Isikoff is probably best known as the reporter then working for Newseek who had...

A U.S. intelligence community assessment obtained by Yahoo News concluded that the Russian government is providing “indirect and passive support” to neofascist groups operating in the U.S. and elsewhere, but stops short of accusing the Kremlin of supplying financial or material assistance to Western extremist groups.The Kremlin “probably tolerates some private Russian entities’ support” for U.S. and European white nationalist groups “because it aligns with Kremlin efforts to aggravate societal fissures in the West,” states the report.Russian neofascist groups have attempted to recruit and provide paramilitary training to North American and European extremists in order to “expand their reach into...

The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials. The CIA-trained forces could soon play a critical role on Ukraine’s eastern border, where Russian troops have massed in what many fear is preparation for an invasion. The U.S. and Russia started security talks earlier this week in Geneva but have failed thus...

More than 70 foreign nationals working as spies for the CIA in Iran and China were systematically identified and slaughtered in the past decade, due to a ridiculously weak web-based system the CIA used to communicate with foreign assets it couldn’t reach directly. This according to a devastating November 2 report in Yahoo News written by journalists Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin (center-left, but generally trustworthy). Although the Iranian roll-up occurred in 2011, and the Chinese rout occurred from 2010 to 2012, the CIA did not remedy the root cause of the problem in its transient messaging scheme until 2013,...

"It was considered one of the CIA’s worst failures in decades: Over a two-year period starting in late 2010, Chinese authorities systematically dismantled the agency’s network of agents across the country, executing dozens of suspected U.S. spies. But since then, a question has loomed over the entire debacle. How were the Chinese able to roll up the network? Now, nearly eight years later, it appears that the agency botched the communication system it used to interact with its sources, according to five current and former intelligence officials. The CIA had imported the system from its Middle East operations, where the...