The United States has called on social-media giants Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to suspend accounts linked to Iranian government leaders until Internet coverage is restored in that country.

"It is a deeply hypocritical regime," Brian Hook, the U.S. special representative for Iran, told Bloomberg News in an interview posted on the official State Department Twitter account.

"It shuts down the Internet while its government continues to use all of these social-media accounts."

British investor Bill Browder has made a name for himself in the West through blaming Moscow for the death of his auditor, Sergey Magnitsky. Der Spiegel has picked apart his story and uncovers it has major credibility problems.

For years Browder - Russian President Vladimir Putin's self-proclaimed "enemy number one" and head of the Hermitage Capital Management fund - has been waging what can only be described as his personal anti-Russian campaign.

The passionate Kremlin critic relentlessly lobbied for sanctions against Russian officials everywhere from the US to Europe - all under the premise of seeking justice for his deceased employee, who died in Russia, while in pre-trial detention, where he'd been placed while accused of complicity in a major tax evasion scheme.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, who has been nominated to become Washington's next ambassador to Moscow, told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that an improvement in bilateral ties depends on Moscow's "disavowal of efforts to undermine our democratic processes" and a commitment to peace efforts in Ukraine.


State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in a statement on November 23 that Sullivan met with the Russian diplomat on the sidelines of the Group of 20 foreign ministers' meeting in Nagoya, Japan.

The statement said Sullivan and Lavrov discussed "a broad range of regional and bilateral issues, including international security challenges such as North Korea and Syria, as well as counterterrorism cooperation and strategic security."

Sullivan reiterated "that improvement in the bilateral relationship is contingent on Moscow's adherence to the Minsk agreements and disavowal of efforts to undermine our democratic processes."

The FBI has reached out to an attorney for the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower reported to be CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella, who filed a complaint over President Trump's July 25 phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodomyr Zelensky, according to Yahoo! News. The move came after a vigorous internal debate at the agency over how to proceed with an investigation of allegations contained in the complaint, according to sources familiar with the matter.

According to the report, an FBI agent from the Washington field office reached out to whistleblower attorney Mark Zaid (The 'Coup has started' guy who loves going to Disneyland alone), who declined comment for the article. From Yahoo! News:

The request from the FBI comes at a sensitive moment when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are making repeated efforts to "out" the whistleblower in order to suggest he may have had political motivations hostile to the president when he filed his Aug. 12 complaint with the intelligence community's inspector general.

It also comes after multiple threats have been made against the whistleblower and his lawyers — some of which have been separately passed along by the lawyers to other officials at the FBI. But the agent who sought to question the whistleblower made no reference to the threats as the purpose of the interview, according to sources familiar with the discussions. Yahoo suggests that an FBI interview will "introduce a new wild card into the debate over whether to impeach the president over his Ukraine dealings."

On 21 November, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin instructed the Knesset to form a coalition government within 21 days following Prime Minister Netanyahu's and Benny Gantz's failure to do so. There have been repeated calls for Netanyahu to resign over his inability to form a government and a recent corruption indictment against him.

The head of Israeli political alliance Blue and White, Benny Gantz, has called upon officials from Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud to form a coalition government, arguing that the Israeli PM was risking to "ignite a civil war" with his actions, Haaretz reported. Gantz told the media:

"Likud leaders, it's time to make your voice heard. The last days and weeks leave no room for doubt - Netanyahu risks igniting a civil war between us.

"I respect you and I call for a partnership with you. Even if we do not agree on everything, you, like my friends and I, share the Zionist values of partnership and unity. It's time for you to put the fears and threats of the past aside, and to march Israeli society as a whole into a new era of healing".

The New York Times has revealed that the "low-level lawyer" under criminal investigation for allegedly doctoring materials used to obtain renewals of the Carter Page surveillance warrant is Kevin Clinesmith - who worked on both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia probe, was part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team, and interviewed Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos.

Clinesmith, a 37-year-old graduate of Georgetown Law, "took an email from an official at another federal agency that contained several factual assertions, then added material to the bottom that looked like another assertion from the email's author, when it was instead his own understanding," according to the report. From the New York Times:

Mr. Clinesmith included this altered email in a package that he compiled for another F.B.I. official to read in preparation for signing an affidavit that would be submitted to the court attesting to the facts and analysis in the wiretap application.

The details of the email are apparently classified and may not be made public even when the report is unveiled.

In other words, we won't get to see whatever the FBI used to trick the FISA court into granting Page's renewals.

Former Vice President Joe Biden threatened Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for launching an investigation into his activities with Ukraine while in the Obama White House, stating the Republican will "regret" the move his "whole life."

On Thursday, Graham sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo requesting documents to aid in determining whether Biden pushed for the firing of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to squash a sweeping probe into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy giant where his son, Hunter Biden, served as a board member. The younger Biden was compensated generously, making up to $83,000 a month for several years while on the Burisma's board.

"Lindsey is about to go down in a way that I think he's going to regret his whole life," Biden told CNN host Don Lemon in a Friday interview in South Carolina. "I say Lindsey, I just — I'm just embarrassed by what you're doing, for you. I mean, my Lord. They have him under their thumb right now. They know he knows that if he comes out against Trump, he's got a real tough road for reelection, number one," the former vice president continued about the South Carolina senator.

As Congress slogs through more monotonous testimony in the impeachment probe against President Donald Trump, the man at the center of the impeachment narrative — Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — appeared on BlazeTV host Glenn Beck's program Wednesday night to give his side of the story.

During the exclusive interview, Giuliani told Beck that his initial job in Ukraine was to gather exculpatory evidence counter to the Mueller investigation and report about allegations of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. During that process, he says, he started turning up information about collusion between Democrats and the Ukrainians to influence the 2016 election.

Giuliani also claimed that United States diplomats — including some who have testified against President Trump in Congress' ongoing impeachment efforts — were doing the bidding of leftist billionaire George Soros in a "massive pay-for-play multimillion-dollar scheme."

The Central Command chief said the US plans to escalate operations against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) militants in Syria, where hundreds of American troops were left to "secure the oil." General Kenneth McKenzie spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a security-themed event in Manama, Bahrain on Saturday.

The US-led anti-IS operations in Syria are "expected to pick up in coming days and weeks," he said. McKenzie also noted that about 500 US troops currently remain in eastern Syria.

US President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of troops from northeastern Syria in October. However, he later clarified that hundreds of soldiers would stay to secure the oilfields in the country.

The president has also repeatedly declared victory over IS in the past, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper claimed to have destroyed "the physical caliphate" in Syria. Despite that, experts at the Pentagon have been warning that the militants would likely resurge and renew their activities should the Americans leave.

Rudy Giuliani on Saturday sought to play down a remark he's repeatedly made about having an "insurance policy" on President Donald Trump to protect himself amid the ongoing impeachment investigation. The president's personal lawyer tweeted:

"TRUTH ALERT: The statement I've made several times of having an insurance policy, if thrown under bus, is sarcastic & relates to the files in my safe about the Biden Family's 4 decade monetizing of his office."

Earlier Saturday, Fox News' Ed Henry asked Giuliani whether he's communicated with Trump after recent head-snapping developments in the impeachment probe relating to Trump and Giuliani's efforts to secure an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden from Ukraine.

"You can assume that I talk with him early and often and have a very, very good relationship with him, and all these comments — which are totally insulting — I mean, I've seen things written like he's going to throw me under the bus. When they say that, I say, 'He isn't, but I have insurance.'"