Russia on Friday expelled Dutch diplomats and told Britain it had one month to reduce its diplomatic presence in the country, hitting back at EU countries after a coordinated campaign by the UK and its allies over a nerve agent attack on a former spy. Earlier in the day Russia had summoned the ambassadors of a number of nations including Britain, France, Germany and Canada to inform them of retaliatory measures.
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President Trump expelled 60 Russian intelligence officers Monday and closed Russia’s consulate in Seattle in response to Moscow’s nerve-agent attack on a British former double agent in England. In one of his most dramatic confrontations with Moscow on its covert actions, Mr. Trump ordered the expulsion of 48 officials working at the Russian Embassy in Washington, and 12 intelligence officers assigned to Russia’s mission at the United Nations in New York City.
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In power for almost two decades, Vladimir Putin predictably won a fourth Kremlin term in Russia’s presidential election on Sunday, extending his long rule for another six years. With no successor and no political competition, what are the possible scenarios when his term ends in 2024?
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The United States is brushing aside a series of claims by Russian President Vladimir Putin that he has an array of new strategic nuclear weapons that can hit a target anywhere in the world. Both the White House and the Pentagon dismissed the talk as rhetoric Thursday, saying Russia’s attempts to modernize its nuclear force came as no surprise and would do little to rattle the U.S.
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A federal grand jury investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election on Friday indicted 13 Russian nationals including 12 employees of a St. Petersburg, Russia-based company that carries out online influence operations on behalf of Moscow. The indictment alleges that Internet Research Agency, a propaganda outfit tied to the Kremlin, engaged “in operations to interfere with elections and political processes” during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
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by CHQ Staff Senator Charles Grassley, Chairman of the Senate’s Committee on the Judiciary, claims that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice are actively obstructing his investigation of Obama-era abuses of power. Grassley has demanded that the House Intelligence Committee release its report, which he says the Senate cannot review pre-release, and also the underlying FBI and DOJ documents, with necessary redactions to protect national security. The Federalist’s Sean Davis reports Grassley is outraged that the FBI is using false classification assertions to prevent his office from releasing certain pertinent information to the public, including one piece of information which the FBI says the Senate cannot release that the Deputy Attorney General himself repeatedly shared with Senator Grassley “in unsecure space and on an unsecure phone line.” Davis tweeted: Grassley just leveled both barrels at the dossier operation: “Steele, who was working for Fusion GPS, who was working for the DNC and the Clinton campaign, was working with the Russians. So, who was actually colluding with Russians? It’s becoming more clear.” In the meantime, the Democrats are not letting House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes dominate the narrative on the bombshell revelations contained in a soon-to-be…
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By Robert Romano One mystery still surrounding the outlandish allegations of Trump campaign-Russia collusion by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign-funded vendor Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele is who Steele was talking to in 2016 that led to the formulation of the now infamous dossier. The sources are everything. It’s how you can say this whole thing was Simpson and Steele catching the crime of the century or that it was all made up. In his House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence testimony on Nov. 14, 2017, Fusion GPS CEO Glenn Simpson denied to say who Steele’s sources were, saying, “We did get into assessing the credibility of the sources and whether they were in a position to know the things that they were saying. I didn’t ask for the specific identities of specific people. Some people, I think I know who they are for other reasons. But that’s about as much as I can say.” When asked by U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on how Simpson “assess[ed] the reliability of that information, given the fact that you did not talk to the sources or subsources” Simpson said, “what we did do is look at names and…
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It sounds too good to be true: A top secret memo in possession of the House Intelligence Committee could seriously rupture Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. The memo doesn’t really have much to do with Russia, however, just like many of Mueller’s Republican targets also have nothing to…
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Rep. Ron DeSantis said Friday that he agrees the memo about government surveillance regarding the Trump campaign should be released. “Let’s get that out there so the American people can see how this whole collusion thing was going on during the campaign,” Mr. DeSantis, Florida Republican, said on Fox News.
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House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence members were able to gain access to all Department of Justice and FBI documents it possesses on the Trump dossier, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
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By Robert Romano “Paul Manafort is absolutely correct that the charges he is facing far exceed the original mandate of potential contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and have gone years into the past prior to the 2016 election campaign and in many cases do not even invoke official Russian government contacts.” That was Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning’s reaction to a legal complaint filed by one-time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort against the Justice Department contending that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has far exceeded the original mandate set forth by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. According to the complaint, “The investigation of Mr. Manafort is completely unmoored from the special counsel’s original jurisdiction to investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.’” The complaint added, “Those alleged dealings had no connection whatsoever to the 2016 presidential election or even to Donald Trump.” Here, Manafort absolutely has a point. In the 31-page Manafort and Gates indictment, Russia is only mentioned four times. The first to name Manafort’s company, Davis Manafort Partners, Inc., which had some staff in Russia, which is not a crime. And…
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A Republican congressman said Sunday that the Justice Department and the FBI have until next week to turn over documents about the Trump dossier, or else Congress will pursue other measures to obtain them. Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis’ comments come after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes sent a letter Thursday to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein about the Justice Department and the FBI failing to hand over the documents about President Trump.
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Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is “bad for the country,” and the only collusion with Russia during the presidential campaign was by Democrats, President Trump said in an interview published Friday. “It makes the country look very bad, and it puts the country in a very bad position,” Mr. Trump told The New York Times of the Mueller probe. “So the sooner it’s worked out, the better it is for the country.”
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A steady drumbeat of liberal commentators for months has been predicting — hoping? — that President Donald Trump will fire independent counsel Robert Muller, but a man who knows a thing or two about the jobs said Thursday it won’t happen. Ken Starr, who served as special prosecutor during the Whitewater probe that eventually led to…
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The Department of Justice has started asking FBI agents what they found when investigating the 2010 Uranium One deal linked to Bill and Hillary Clinton. On the orders of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the DOJ has interviewed FBI agents who looked at the deal, where a Russian-backed company bought a uranium firm with mines in the U.S., NBC News reports.
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The Pentagon is voicing growing alarm that the risky flying of Russian pilots in Syria could lead to a mishap — or even the nightmare scenario of a US jet shooting down a Russian warplane. Defense officials this week highlighted several recent close calls with Russian planes, including one Wednesday where a pair of US F-22s intercepted two Russian jets over a part of Syria the Pentagon says they are not meant to be operating in.
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Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm whose Democrat-financed Russia dossier fueled an FBI investigation into Donald Trump, pitched other stories about the Republican presidential candidate to Washington reporters, including an attempt to tie him to a convicted pedophile who was once buddies with former President Bill Clinton. Journalist sources told The Washington Times that Fusion founder…
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Rep. Ron DeSantis said Monday that Congress is prepared to hold members of the FBI and Justice Department in contempt for not complying with requests related to the Trump-Russia investigation. “Devin Nunes has been trying to get this information from DOJ and the FBI for months and they’ve stonewalled every step of the way,” Mr. DeSantis, Florida Republican, said on Fox News.
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President Trump said Saturday the guilty plea of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn showed “no collusion” between his aides and Russia. “What has been shown is no collision,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for New York City. “There’s been absolutely no collusion, so we’re very happy.” Mr. Flynn pleaded…
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A Russian man arrested in Prague last year in connection with allegedly hacking LinkedIn and other American Internet companies may be extradited to the United States to face related charges, a Czech court agreed Friday. Prague’s High Court on Friday upheld an earlier ruling authorizing the extradition of Yevgeniy Nikulin to the U.S., putting the accused…
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WASHINGTON — When he was named special counsel in May, Robert S. Mueller III was hailed as the ideal lawman — deeply experienced, strait-laced and nonpartisan — to investigate whether President Donald Trump’s campaign had helped with Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The accolades squared with Mueller’s valor as a Marine rifle platoon commander in Vietnam and his integrity as a federal prosecutor, a senior Justice Department official and FBI director from 2001 to 2013, the longest tenure since J. Edgar Hoover. He was praised by former courtroom allies and opponents, and by Democrats and Republicans in Congress. …
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Fusion GPS, the liberal research firm that funded and distributed the anti-Trump dossier, has paid three journalists for work related to Congress’ Russia probe, according to court filings. Lawyers representing the House Intelligence Committee made the assertion in a bid to force Fusion to turn over additional bank transactions involving reporters, law firms and a media company. …
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Russia is considering designating CNN, Voice of America and Radio Liberty as foreign agents, now that the U.S. has forced state-run RT to register as a foreign agent. Russian officials said Friday that they’re thinking of making private and government-run American media entities register as foreign agents, which is exactly what Russia warned it would do…
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by CHQ Staff Our friends at the Center for Security Policy have issued one of their “occasional papers” on a scandal that we think is worse and more threatening to national security than the Uranium One scandal through which Hillary Clinton and Obama transferred 20 percent of America’s uranium to Russia. What could be worse than giving 20 percent of our uranium to Russia one might ask? How about giving a 35-year lease to one of America’s largest container ports, located just minutes from the Kennedy Space Center, to a Middle Eastern company with ties to Iran, North Korea, Russia and the evil genius behind Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program? But that’s exactly what the same players involved in the Uranium One deal did when they leased the cargo container operations at Port Canaveral, Florida after two years of secret talks with the Obama administration. Now the Center for Security Policy’s dogged and fearless team of Alan Jones and Mary Fanning have revealed exactly what could go wrong, with potentially catastrophic consequences for U.S. national security. Jones and Fanning originally broke the news that the family of Iraqi nuclear physicist Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar – known as Saddam Hussein’s…
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The FBI originally planned to say that Hillary Clinton was “grossly negligent” in her handling of her secret emails, a top senator said Monday, revealing early drafts of the statement former FBI Director James Comey drew up. Sen. Charles E. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, demanded the FBI detail why Mr. Comey nixed that phrase…
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Former Democratic party leader Donna Brazile called the Hillary Clinton campaign’s takeover of party fundraising a “cancer.” Writing in Politico Thursday, Brazile said it “broke my heart” to discover that her predecessor as party chair had given the Clinton campaign power over the Democratic National Committee’s “finances, strategy, and all the money raised” during her primary…
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The appointment of Robert Mueller as the Department of Justice special counsel was supposed to shine a light on Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election. Instead, it shed light on the finances of Paul Manafort and Robert Gates, two former top dogs in President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Manafort and Gates were charged with 12…
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The suspense is over, and we all now know who the first to be charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller – himself in peril of being sucked into the giant vortex known loosely as the ‘Clinton-Russia Scandal.’ The indictment itself runs thirty-one pages and specifically names Paul Manafort and his aide, Richard Gates. Allegations run the gamut from conspiracy to launder as much as $21 million and funneling millions more to foreign bank accounts, to working as foreign agents (Ukraine) and making false statements. The indictment contains twelve allegations (crimes or violations of law), however, that number can change over the course of adjudication. INDICTMENT The Grand Jury for the District of Columbia Charges: Introduction: At all times relevant to this indictment: 1. Defendants Paul J. Manafort, Jr. (MANAFORT) and Richard W. Gates III (GATES) served for years as political consultants and lobbyists. Between at least 2006 and 2015, MANAFORT and GATES acted as unregistered agents of the Government of Ukraine, the Party of Regions (a Ukrainian political party whose leader Victor Yanukovych was President from 2010 to 2014), Yanukovych, and the Opposition Bloc (a successor to the Party of Regions that formed in 2014 when Yanukovych fled to…
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WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, has been indicted on 12 charges of money-laundering and conspiracy, the first charges filed in the investigation of possible connections between the Trump campaign and a Russian effort to influence last year’s presidential election. Manafort, 68, turned himself in at FBI headquarters early Monday for his…
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The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday that he suspects a reported grand jury indictment in the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election is tied to either former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort or retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser. Rep. Adam Schiff said on…
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Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias completely denied his involvement in the anti-Trump dossier that has made up a majority of the Russian collusion allegations in a report released Tuesday, but complained about the “proof” in late August on Twitter. Elias shared a Washington Post op-ed on Twitter Aug. 30, entitled, “What more proof of a secret…
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A trio of Republican representatives announced Tuesday that congressional committees would open a probe into Russia’s acquisition of U.S. uranium reserves, including the Justice Department’s mysterious handling of bribery and money-laundering allegations. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told reporters that it is important to find out what the FBI knew and whether that information…
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Twitter on Tuesday announced steps to make it easier to see who is behind political ads and who they are targeting as social media giants try to thwart skullduggery. The moves include launching an online center with details about advertisers and their messages, according to general manager of revenue and product engineering Bruce Falck. Twitter also…
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Longtime GOP operative and provocateur Roger Stone came out swinging in closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday morning, accusing Democrats of making false allegations against him and the whole committee of being “cowardly” for refusing to allow the testimony to take place in public. Stone skunked the committee, posting a video online at…
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While the liberal news media hunts for evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, the public record shows that Democrats have willfully used Moscow disinformation to influence the presidential election against Donald Trump and attack his administration. The disinformation came in the form of a Russian-fed dossier written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. It contains a series…
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday that he thinks he convinced President Trump that Russia did not interfere in the U.S. presidential election. Russian meddling in the election was the first thing Mr. Trump bought up when he two leaders had their first face-to-face meeting Friday, and Mr. Putin repeated his denials that Moscow was involved.…
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Journalist and co-founder of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald said it is “a really dangerous thing” for the media and Democrats to “ratchet up tensions between Moscow and Washington” to push their narrative that President Donald Trump colluded with Russian election interference, during an interview Wednesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.” Greenwald accused the mainstream media of…
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The Obama administration had a “back channel” to communicate with Russian officials, according to a new report detailing Moscow’s efforts to delegitimize the U.S. presidential election results. The news comes after Trump White House aide Jared Kushner was criticized for allegedly trying to open a back channel line of communications with Russian officials during the transition…
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Former FBI Director James Comey acknowledged that he orchestrated the leak of a memorandum detailing his private interactions with President Donald Trump during testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Thursday morning. “I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter,” Comey said. “I didn’t do it myself…
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By Jeffrey A. Rendall It’s a sad sign of the times that it took something like the Manchester terrorist attack the other night to temporarily drag the public’s mind away from the Democrats’ reoccurring Russia-Trump collusion fixation, but it certainly won’t be long before the focus-challenged media returns to the subject. But now that special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to specifically separate the truth from whatever the Democrats are claiming, Trump’s haters are ostensibly bracing themselves for the prospect that the investigators won’t find anything damaging on the new president. When/if Mueller finds nothing, what then? Apparently the excuses are being prepared well in advance. Eddie Scarry of the Washington Examiner reports, “[Trump critics] Brzezinski, Scarborough and Frum are just the latest voices in the media to suggest that the chase for evidence of collusion may be a waste of time. Last week, other left-leaning people in the media were drawing the same conclusion. “’It may well be difficult to identify any criminal laws violated by the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia,’ CNN commentator and writer for the New Yorker Jeffrey Toobin wrote last Friday. ‘It will be important for Mueller to investigate, for example, whether anyone associated…
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Tennessee’s Senator Bob Corker is once again singing from the Democrats’ hymnal. The chorus Corker joined on Monday is delivering the perennial favorite line for 2017, “the White House is in chaos,” with a dash of the debunked FAKE NEWS from the Washington Post, “White House/Russia classified intel disclosure.” “Obviously they’re in a downward spiral right now and they’ve got to figure out a way to come to grips with all that’s happening,” Corker told Bloomberg News on Monday. Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur tweeted Corker’s additional statement that “The White House has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order.” BOB CORKER: "The White House has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order. It's got to happen." — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 15, 2017 But, as radio talk show host Laura Ingraham noted, the Washington Post “source” for the allegation “didn’t talk to ANY U.S. official” in attendance at the meeting in question: WH source with direct knowledge just told me @washingtonpost didn't talk to ANY U.S. official at mtg w/ Lavrov. "It's Fake News" — Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) May 15, 2017 and followed it up with Meaning of…
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