Oil prices climbed to a six-year high Tuesday as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia continue to tamp down on global output, The Wall Street Journal reported.
An OPEC meeting was called off Monday, the WSJ reported. It was the group’s third attempt to discuss surging prices and an increase in oil consumption amid an opening global economy.
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Within months of President Joe Biden halting the Keystone Pipeline, pausing new oil and gas leases on federal lands, and imposing further restrictions on U.S. oil companies, U.S. oil imports from Russia set a new record in March.
According to International Energy Agency, U.S. imports of crude oil and petroleum products from Russia reached 22.9 million barrels in March, the highest level since August 2010. They had reached over 25 million barrels in April 2009.
Crude oil imports from Russia in March stood at 6.1 million barrels, making Russia the third-largest oil exporter to the United States.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin denied that he was behind the recent cyberattacks across the United States, calling the allegations against him “farcical.”
“We have been accused of all kinds of things,” Putin told NBC News Monday. “Election interference, cyberattacks and so on and so forth. And not once, not once, not one time, did they bother to produce any kind of evidence or proof. Just unfounded accusations.”
Russian intelligence and Russian-speaking groups have launched wide-ranging cyberattacks in recent months, affecting American consumer goods ranging from gasoline to meat. President Joe Biden imposed sweeping sanctions against Russia in April after U.S. intelligence determined that Putin personally ordered a massive SolarWinds hack on federal agencies and for his interference in the 2020 presidential election.
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Think about it: For about five years, anything candidate, president-elect, and President Trump said or did, the media, the Left, and progressive popular culture opposed in Pavlovian fashion.
Anything that Trump touched was ridiculed or discredited—regardless of evidence, data, or cogency. The merits of a Trump policy, a Trump assessment, a Trump initiative were irrelevant—given the primordial hatred of the Left of all things Trump: the president, the person, the family.
Under the reductionist malady of Trump Derangement Syndrome, facts and logic did not matter. Instead, anything not said or done in opposition to Trump empowered the supposed existential Trump threat. Ironically, some of the most deductive and reductionist Trump haters were supposedly professionals, the highly educated, and the self-proclaimed devotees of the Enlightenment. And yet in their uncontrolled aversion and detestation, they suspended all the rules of empiricism, logic, and rationality—and people died as a result.
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A former senior Treasury Department official was sentenced to six months in prison for leaking thousands of confidential reports on financial transactions related to people tied to former President Donald Trump and Russia, including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, 42, pleaded guilty last year to a conspiracy charge. According to federal prosecutors, Edwards leaked the confidential documents to BuzzFeed News reporter Jason Leopold. Leopold then shared thousands of suspicious activity reports with publications worldwide.
Court documents reveal that beginning in 2017, she leaked banking reports related to people being investigated in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of foreign interference in U.S. elections. The material included reports concerning Manafort, his business associate Rick Gates, the Russian Embassy and Maria Butina, among others.
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Representative Mark Green (R-TN-07) introduced a bill Wednesday to sanction Russia for their invasion of the Donbas region of Ukraine.
If enacted, the Restraining Russian Imperialism Act would instruct the Biden administration to impose sanctions if Russia does not completely withdraw from the region within a year.
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Weeks before Donald Trump took office, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer issued an ominous warning.
“You take on the intelligence community? They have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you,” the New York Democrat said in an interview with MSNBC on Jan. 3, 2017.
Schumer was responding to Trump’s criticism of an intelligence community assessment that said Russia interfered explicitly to help the Republican win the 2016 election.
“He’s being really dumb to do this,” Schumer said of Trump.
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United States Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said Tuesday that he was returning to Washington for “consultations” with top American officials as tensions increase between the two countries.
The former deputy secretary of state and appointee of former President Donald Trump said that “it is important for me to speak directly with my new colleagues in the Biden administration in Washington about the current state of bilateral relations between the U.S. and Russia.”
Sullivan added that he was returning to see his family, and that he would “return to Moscow in the coming weeks before any meeting” between President Joe Biden and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
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Five days before the FBI formally opened the Michael Flynn probe in summer 2016, a confidential informant alleged to agents that Donald Trump’s national security adviser had left a 2014 foreign meeting alone with a Russian woman. Agents ultimately deemed the account “not plausible” and “not accurate” but proceeded to investigate Flynn anyway, newly declassified documents show.
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Over 4,000 pro-democracy protesters gathering in support of Alexi Navalny, a vocal Kremlin critic, have been detained by Russian police since the beginning of last weekend, according to local media and pro-democracy organizations.
The arrests have occurred across the country, from European cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg to far-eastern cities like Vladivostok, according to Russian monitoring groups, BBC reported.
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Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the Democratic chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, on Thursday called on FBI Director Christopher Wray to investigate financing for Parler, including whether the social media site has any ties to Russia.
Part of Maloney’s rationale for investigating Parler’s links to Russia is that the social media site’s CEO, John Matze, founded the company shortly after traveling to Russia with his wife, who is Russian.
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Photos have resurfaced of Jen Psaki, the incoming Biden White House press secretary, meeting with Russian officials in 2014 while wearing a hat stitched with the hammer-and-sickle, a symbol of the communist Soviet Union, which caused the deaths of tens of millions of people in the 20th century.
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Establishment media outlets have largely downplayed and dismissed new revelations about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings and how much his father, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, may have known about those dealings.
Media outlets have offered a variety of rationales for downplaying the revelations, which have come from newly surfaced emails and from one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, Tony Bobulinski.
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It is hard to keep up with the Biden Family Scandal (yes, it’s worthy of a title) because more information unfolds daily. Joe Biden is counting the hours, no minutes, until this election is over. For every moment that passes and the Democrat media, in lock step with Democrat Big Tech, censors, Joe is hoping few will learn that the Biden family got millions of dollars from foreign entities and even foreign governments by using Joe’s position as Vice President of the United States.
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The election campaign, now finally approaching its climax, will long be studied because of the paradoxical reactions of American public opinion to an astonishing series of events and revelations. It is now clear from intelligence declassifications—now temporarily taking the place of indictments by the special counsel on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation—that the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, knew that she was transmitting reports compiled by Russian intelligence agents and transmitted via former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. These were presented to the U.S. intelligence and justice communities and ultimately to the public through the media as hard intelligence evidence of treasonable conduct by her opponent Donald Trump. The solid evidence of these facts is now in the public domain.
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A near-majority of voters say FBI agents and leaders should be prosecuted for their role in the Russian collusion conspiracy theory, according to a new Just the News Daily Poll with Scott Rasmussen.
Among the voters, 46 percent said FBI officials should be criminally charged over the scandal, while only half that number — 23 percent — said they shouldn’t.
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In a wide-ranging interview on “Just the News AM,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine touted his agency’s innovations in 3D-organ printing, immunization, and fiber optics made possible through microgravity in space.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on Thursday applauded the United States’ recent ending of nine years of reliance on Russia to transport American astronauts to the International Space Station, while also warning of the growing threat of Chinese and Russian anti-satellite technologies.
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The U.S. attorney investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia probe is seeking grand jury testimony from a group of computer scientists behind a since-debunked allegation that Donald Trump’s real estate company had covert computer contacts with a Russian bank, according to a report.
The New Yorker reports that John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, has contacted the scientists in recent weeks seeking their testimony.
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Harvard University professor and CNN analyst Juliette Kayyem alleged that it is “very likely” that Russian spies infiltrated Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and gained access to information about President Donald Trump’s medical condition.
President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday. The president experienced symptoms before moving to Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, out of an “abundance of caution” the following day.
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President Donald Trump is working to declassify documents related to the Russia investigation while he recovers from coronavirus at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, his chief of staff said Monday.
“This morning we’ve already had a couple of discussions on items that he wants to get done,” Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, said in an interview on “Fox & Friends.”
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The New York Times published a lengthy report over the weekend based, they say, documents they obtained from “sources.”
Speaking at a news conference Sunday at the White House, Trump dismissed the report as “fake news” and said he has paid taxes, though he gave no specifics. He also vowed that information about his taxes “will all be revealed,” but he offered no timeline for the disclosure.
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An FBI special agent who worked on Crossfire Hurricane told prosecutors last week that he saw little reason to investigate Michael Flynn and that he believed that members of the special counsel’s team prosecuted the former national security adviser in order to “get Trump,” according to a memo released late Thursday.
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A former Army Green Beret living in northern Virginia was arrested on Friday, charged with divulging military secrets about his unit’s activities in former Soviet republics during more than a decade of contacts with Russian intelligence.
Peter Rafael Dzibinski Debbins, 45, told Russian intelligence he considered himself a “son of Russia,” according to an indictment made public after his arrest.
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An FBI document released Friday details at least 14 inaccuracies in a New York Times report from early 2017 that leveled shocking allegations of Trump associates’ contacts with Russian intelligence officers.
The document shows then-FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok’s comments on a Feb. 14, 2017 article entitled “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.”
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America was at a historic crossroads in 1971. The war in Vietnam increasingly was seen as unwinnable, while triggering ongoing unrest in cities and college campuses across the nation. The economy was challenged with rising inflation and rising trade deficits. In August 1971, the British ambassador turned up at the Treasury Department to request that $3 billion be converted into gold. That same week, President Nixon ordered a freeze on all prices and wages in the United States.
In the Communist world, America’s problems were trumpeted as the inevitable collapse of capitalist imperialism. Russia and China stood triumphant over a declining West. And what did Nixon do? He stunned the world by traveling to China. His goal: To drive a wedge between the two Communist superpowers.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday called on two top intelligence officials to provide a briefing to all members of Congress regarding reports that Russian intelligence has paid bounties to Taliban fighters to attack U.S. service members in Afghanistan.
“Congress needs to know what the intelligence community knows about this significant threat to American troops and our allies and what options are available to hold Russia accountable,” Pelosi wrote to John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence and Gina Haspel, the director of the CIA.
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A Russian court convicted an American corporate security executive Monday of espionage and sentenced him to 16 years in prison after a closed trial that the U.S. denounced as a “mockery of justice,” and it angrily said his treatment in jail was “appalling.”
Paul Whelan, a former Marine from Novi, Michigan (pictured above), has insisted he was innocent, saying he was set up when he was arrested in Moscow in December 2018 while he was visiting Russia to attend a friend’s wedding.
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A majority of Americans say the Steele dossier’s allegations of collusion between Donald Trump and Russia are accurate, even though two government reports have poured cold water on the salacious Democrat-funded document, according to a recent poll.
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China, Russia and Iran are acting in tandem to promote propaganda suggesting coronavirus is an American bioweapon and that the U.S. economy is buckling under the strain of lockdowns, a State Department report shows.
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Gas prices are falling all over the country as oil prices tumble, yet prices are still relatively high in California, where environmental polices are restricting how oil refineries can produce gasoline.
The price of a gallon of gas has plummeted in Ohio to around $1 in part because Americans are self-isolating to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus. The average price dropped 35.1 cents over the past month, according to data from the AAA and Oil Price Information Service.
A BP station in Kentucky, for instance, posted a price below $1 a gallon, The Washington Post reported Thursday. Four other stations in Oklahoma City followed suit, along with another in Paris, Tennessee. The national average for gas on Thursday was $2.03, down from $2.41 at the beginning of March.
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Oil prices dropped Monday as Saudi Arabia and Russia haggle over whether to reduce crude production amid fears that coronavirus will hamper air travel and potentially wreck the global economy.
Prices fell into the $30s as the Saudis push for a cut in output to prop up prices, while Russia went the other way, and decided to infuse the market with hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil, according to The Washington Post. Moscow is worried that the U.S. will use shale oil to take advantage if Saudi Arabia ease off production.
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A Mexican citizen was charged Tuesday with being an “unregistered foreign agent” for Russia. He is accused of spying on at least one U.S. informant in South Florida.
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Russian military hackers have successfully infiltrated Burisma, the Ukranian gas company that Hunter Biden worked for between 2014 and 2019.
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Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI-13) recently joined several of her Democratic colleagues in calling for the immediate resignations of U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham.
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U.S. officials are considering employing a Russian-style misinformation campaign targeting members of the Moscow elite, effectively turning the tables on Russia, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov heads to Washington for hastily scheduled meetings with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and, possibly, President Donald Trump, on Tuesday.
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As the Russian shells and rockets rained down on them in the frontline town of Debaltseve in February 2015, Ukrainian troops began to receive curious, anonymous text messages on their cellphones.
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President Donald Trump told two Russian officials during a May 2017 meeting at the Oval Office that he was unconcerned with Russian meddling in the election, according to The Washington Post.
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One America News Network (OANN) filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit Monday against MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, alleging that the host “maliciously and recklessly” suggested on the air that the conservative news channel is a paid Russian state propaganda outlet.
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Magically and mystically, this minute the favorite “R” word of the Democrats has shifted from Russia to racist to recession in the blink of an eye — all falsehoods — as they desperately hope that the normal economic cycle turns prior to the Nov. 2020 presidential election.
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The U.S. has announced a new round of sanctions on Russia for its use of a chemical weapon in 2018 during an attempted assassination of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter on British soil.
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President Donald Trump put more sanctions on Russia via executive order Thursday as required by law in response to Russia’s use of chemical weapons in a 2018 attack on an ex-spy in the U.S., two U.S. officials said.
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The United States is withdrawing this week from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a 31-year-old agreement with Russia. The decision to withdraw is the right move.
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The United States on Friday pulled out of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty to develop its own new warheads after the Russians refused to destroy their new missiles NATO says violate the pact.
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A judge in New York on Tuesday dismissed the Democratic National Committee lawsuit against members of the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, saying they were not legally liable for publicizing emails that Russian hackers stole from the party’s computer systems.
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One America News Network (OANN) demanded retractions from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and The Daily Beast, threatening a lawsuit, after both suggested links to the network and Russian propaganda.
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by Kaylee Greenlee Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced recently on Twitter the “need” for a federal investigation into the popular Russia-based image-editing technology for smartphones called “FaceApp.” “BIG: Share if you used #FaceApp: The FBI and FTC must look into the national security and privacy risks now because millions…
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by Fred Lucas Russia isn’t the only threat to election security going into 2020, as Trump administration officials say they are preparing for meddling from Iran, China, and North Korea. The federal government anticipates that Russia will again meddle in the U.S. election in 2020 through “Russian-controlled or influenced…
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by Robert Romano The Hill’s John Solomon made big news on June 6 when he reported that Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, said in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to be a Russian agent, was an intelligence source for the U.S. State Department. “In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman…
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by George Rasley In a bombshell report, former CIA Director John O. Brennan claims the need for secrecy was so great that he hand-delivered information from a critical informant close to Russian President Vladimir Putin to President Barack Obama and required the envelope to be returned after the President…
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