Clinton Foundation benefited amid shady
uranium deal
Hey, mainstream media! We finally found it — a real
Russia scandal involving the 2016 election. With actual evidence of
criminal wrongdoing and everything! So come on, New York Times, CNN and MSNBC,
let’s ...
Hey, where’d everybody go?
For months I’ve been doing TV hits as the token
conservative and getting grilled over “Russiagate.” Did Donald Trump and the
Russians collude to steal the election from Hillary Clinton?
Well, the wait is over. The Hill and Circa media have
broken a story the FBI spent years investigating — and actually sent someone to
jail over — involving bribery, blackmail and corruption by Russians who
wanted to buy up a big chunk of the world’s uranium, located here in North
America.
We’ve known for a while that then-Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton both approved the deal and her family foundation
received millions of dollars from Russians backing the deal. That’s one reason
the nickname “Crooked Hillary” stuck.
What we didn’t know until now is that “the FBI had
evidence as early as 2009 that Russian operatives used bribes, kickbacks and
other dirty tactics to expand Moscow’s atomic energy footprint in the U.S.,”
according to Fox News.
Not only did Hillary’s State Department
approve Russia’s purchase of Uranium One — handing 20 percent of the U.S.
uranium supply over to allies of Vladimir Putin — but the Obama FBI and
Department of Justice let it happen unchallenged. All
while the Clinton Foundation collected millions in “donations” from these
Russians, and Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 by a Russian investment bank
to give a speech in Moscow.
Then there’s the story of the Donald Trump dossier.
You may have heard about a dossier of Donald Trump dirt
gathered from Russian sources by a former British intelligence agent. The
content is extremely inappropriate for a family newspaper (yes, even in my
column — so you know it’s bad) and almost nothing in it has ever been
verified.
That dossier was ordered by an opposition research outfit
called Fusion GPS, which got its money from various opponents of Donald
Trump. What does that have to do with Russia? From The Wall Street Journal:
“Fusion by its own admission has worked in the past on a
lobby campaign for a Russian company with ties to the Kremlin. Investigators
want to know if ... foreign actors had anything to do with the commissioning or
production of the Steele dossier.”
Good question, particularly since it appears
this now-debunked dossier was used as evidence by the FBI to get the wiretaps
on the Trump campaign that started this entire mess in the first place. In
other words, it’s possible that the entire #RussiaGate story started with
“evidence” planted by the Russians themselves.
Now that’s a scandal! It’s just not the one the media or
Democrats wanted. So the media mostly shrug as Russia-friendly Fusion GPS
ignores congressional subpoenas. Even the FBI’s shocking decision to refuse to
cooperate is largely ignored by the media.
Why would the FBI try to shut down this probe? It could
be related to the fact that the Obama Justice Department had actually
considered putting the British spook on the taxpayers’ dime to continue his
work digging up dirt on The Donald. Apparently someone remembered at the
last minute that America is not, in fact, a banana republic and we don’t sic
government agents on our political enemies.
Do we?
If the media really cared about Russia’s role in the 2016
election, they would be all over this story. It has everything they need: Paper
trail, facts, actual criminal behavior. All the “collusion” story has is
politics and partisan speculation.
Care to guess which one will be leading the evening news?
Michael Graham is a regular contributor to
the Boston Herald. Follow him on Twitter @IAMMGraham.
http://www.bostonherald.com/opinion/op_ed/2017/10/graham_hillary_implicated_in_russia_probe?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow________________
The Fusion Collusion
Democrats are trying to protect the firm’s
secrets—so the GOP should keep digging.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Washington is obsessed with the word “collusion” but has
little understanding of its true meaning. The confusion might explain why D.C.
has missed the big story of collusion between Fusion GPS and the Democratic
Party.
To read the headlines, a poor, beleaguered
opposition-research firm was humiliated and constitutionally abused this week
by partisan Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Fusion’s lawyers
sent a 17-page letter to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, accusing
him of misdeeds, declaring his subpoenas invalid, and invoking a supposed First
Amendment right to silence. Yet the firm’s founders, the story went, were
hauled in nonetheless and forced to plead the Fifth. “No American should
experience the indignity that occurred today,” Fusion’s lawyer, Joshua Levy,
declared.
Fusion is known as a ruthless firm that excels in smear
jobs, but few have noticed the operation it’s conducting against the lawmakers
investigating it. The false accusations against Mr. Nunes—that he’s acting
unethically and extralegally, that he’s sabotaging the Russia probe—are
classic.
This is a firm that in 2012 was paid to dig through the
divorce records of a Mitt Romney donor. It’s a firm that human-rights activist
Thor Halvorssen testified was hired to spread malicious rumors about him. It’s
a firm that financier Bill Browder testified worked to delegitimize his efforts
to get justice for Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer beaten to death in a Russian
prison.
It’s the firm behind the infamous “dossier” accusing
Donald Trump of not just unbecoming behavior but also colluding with Russia.
Republicans are investigating whether the Fusion dossier was influenced by
Russians, and whether American law enforcement relied on that disinformation
for its own probe.
But Fusion’s secret weapon in its latest operation is the
Democratic Party, whose most powerful members have made protecting Fusion’s
secrets their highest priority. Senate Democrats invoked a parliamentary
maneuver in July to block temporarily Mr. Browder’s public testimony. Rep. Adam
Schiff, the Democratic ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, has been
engineering flaps to undercut and obstruct Mr. Nunes’s investigation. Democrats
on the House Ethics Committee have deep-sixed what was meant to be a brief
inquiry to clear Mr. Nunes so as to keep him sidelined.
Then there is the intel committee’s meeting this week.
Despite the spin, forcing Fusion to appear was Republicans’ only recourse after
months of stonewalling. Fusion’s letter ludicrously claimed that Mr. Nunes’s
subpoenas were invalid, which essentially forced the committee to show
otherwise. It was a question of authority.
Florida Rep. Tom Rooney put the Fusion attendees through
a series of questions not out of spite but to clarify finally just what topics
the firm is refusing to talk about. The Fifth Amendment doesn’t provide
protection against answering all questions. It only protects against providing self-incriminating
evidence. It is therefore revealing that Fusion took the Fifth on every
topic—from its relationship with British spook Christopher Steele, to the
history of its work, to its role in the dossier.
The untold story is the Democrats’ unprecedented
behavior. Mr. Rooney had barely started when committee staffers for Mr. Schiff
interrupted, accused him of badgering witnesses, and suggested he was acting
unethically. Jaws dropped. Staff do not interrupt congressmen. They do not
accuse them of misbehavior. And they certainly do not act as defense attorneys
for witnesses. No Democratic lawmakers had bothered to come to the hearing to
police this circus, and Mr. Rooney told me that he “won’t be doing any more
interviews without a member from the minority present.”
Private-sector lawyers also tend not to accuse
congressmen of unethical behavior, as Mr. Levy did in his letter to Mr. Nunes.
But Fusion’s legal eagle must feel safe. He’s former general counsel to the
Senate’s minority leader, Chuck Schumer. He has also, I’m told by people
familiar with the committee’s activities, more than once possessed information
that he would have had no earthly means of knowing, since it was secret
committee business. Consider that: Democratic members of Congress or their
staff providing sensitive details of an investigation to a company to which the
committee has given subpoenas.
The Washington narrative is focused on special counsel
Robert Mueller’s probe. But the ferocious pushback and unseemly tactics from
Democrats suggest they are growing worried. Maybe the real story is that
Democrats worked with an opposition-research firm that has some alarming ties
to Russia and potentially facilitated a disinformation campaign during a presidential
election.
The media has its own conflict of interest, since it
would prefer nobody find out about its years of, ahem, colluding with Fusion.
Don’t expect any investigative reporting. But also don’t believe the stories
about GOP harassment. The ferocity of the Fusion-Democrat campaign is proof
Republicans are looking in the right place.
________________________
POWERLINE
The Comey conundrum
By Scott
Johnson
Former FBI Director James Comey knows how to play the
G-Man as a straight arrow on television, but he’s a cynical Washington
operator in real life. His orchestration of the appointment of his friend
Robert Mueller as special counsel to take down President Trump in the
fictitious Russia collusion scandal (and all its penumbras and radiations)
represents a striking case in point. Comey’s hand in it should discredit the
Mueller operation all by itself.
Comey is a sort of Rosetta stone to the Russia
investigation. Interpreting him and his works might allow one to decipher the
hieroglyphics. I’m not saying I’ve done it or that I can do it. Comey is way
over my head, but I’m not alone. Few have the requisite background, knowledge,
expertise and motivation to do it. Yet it needs to be done.
It
is reported, for example, that Comey insisted on
inserting the infamous GPS Fusion Trump Dossier in January’s final intelligence
community report on Russian meddling in the election. Its inclusion lent it a
credibility that it appears not to deserve, to put it mildly.
As we all know by now, there is something funny about
that Trump Dossier. Two knowledgeable witnesses from the company responsible
for it (GPS Fusion) asserted
their right agains self-incrimination before the House
Intelligence Committee yesterday.
This week Comey emerged as a principal in the ed as a key
player in the
bombshell story of the Russian bribery plot behind the sale
of Uranium One to the friends of Vladimir Putin. The plot was uncovered by the
FBI under Comey’s directorship. yet the FBI’s informant in the case was
barred by Obama’s Department of Justice from
testifying to Congress about it.
John Solomon and Allison report today in the Hill: “The
information the [FBI informant] possesses includes specific allegations that
Russian executives made to him about how they facilitated the Obama
administration’s 2010 approval of the Uranium One deal and sent millions of
dollars in Russian nuclear funds to the U.S. to an entity assisting Bill
Clinton’s foundation. At the time, Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary
of State on the government panel that approved the deal, the
[informant’s] lawyer [Victoria Toensing] said.” When do we get to hear from
James Comey on this story?
This week we
learned that an
early draft of Comey’s absolution of Hillary Clinton for
violating the Espionage Act is dated May 2, 2016. The draft is entirely
redacted; the date appears in a related email.
Comey testified to Congress that it was then Attorney
General Loretta Lynch tarmac
meeting with Bill Clinton that compelled him to seize control of
the prosecutorial decision from the Department of Justice. That meeting took
place in Phoenix on June 27, 2016. The timeline undermines Comey’s testimony. It’s
almost enough to make you think we’re dealing with a character whose shadiness
rivals the Clintons’ own.
NOTE: I had completely forgotten the video of Comey that
I clipped for “Comey:
‘I am not a weasel” (below). Ed Driscoll reminded me of it here. As
for Comey, the gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.
