The major developing stories this week
have been so scantily and poorly covered in the mainstream press that you may
want an easy primer. To fully understand it you have to look at alternative
media, because just as Harvey Weinstein counted on complicit enablers -- his
colleagues, victims and the press -- Hillary Clinton, Robert Mueller and a cast
of characters, including a press determined to cover for them have hidden what
occurred. It’s taken some time, to be sure, but the evidence of their
wrongdoing is becoming harder and harder to hide. Stalling and misdirection are
their last redoubt.
WHO:
Here are some of the principal figures:
Robert Mueller. Former head of the FBI and now special
counsel purportedly investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with the
Russians to win the election.
Andrew McCabe, appointed by former president Obama, was
Assistant FBI Director in charge of investigating charges by the FBI’s own
underground informant to the effect that the Russians, engaged in bribery to
obtain uranium supplies in the U.S. His wife received nearly half a million
dollars from Hillary Clinton buddy Terry McAuliffe for her 2015 Virginia
state senate campaign which he had not disclosed to the Department nor sought
clearance for from its ethics office. Presently he is the deputy attorney
director of the FBI and is himself under investigation by the Justice
department inspector general respecting this contribution.
The unnamed FBI undercover informant, represented by criminal attorney
Victoria Toensing, was witness to the scheming, kickbacks and corruption in the
Russian effort to obtain 20% of U.S. uranium supplies held by Canadian-based
Uranium One. He reported to his bosses at the FBI -- which is to say McCabe and
Mueller -- prior to the October 2010 approval of the sale to Uranium One. He
says Lynch has threatened him with criminal prosecution if he reveals what he
knows to Congress. Senator Grassley has asked present Attorney General Jeff
Sessions to waive the nondisclosure agreement -- which appears in any event to
be untoward and unconstitutional -- so he can tell the Senate Judiciary
Committee what he knows.
CFIUS (The Committee on Foreign Investment in
the US) is the interagency organization which is supposed to review such
transactions to be sure they did not jeopardize national security. If it determines
such sales will harm national security, they are supposed to block them.
The
U.S. Intelligence Community – through the Director of National
Intelligence – serves as ex officio member and is required to provide an
intelligence assessment to CFIUS for review.
The Secretary of Labor was also added as an ex officio
member.
In total, CFIUS is comprised of nine agencies, two ex
officio representatives and other members as appointed by the U.S. President
representing major departments and agencies within the U.S. federal executive
branch. In addition to Treasury, the U.S. Departments of Energy, Commerce,
State, Homeland Security, Justice, Trade, Science and Technology Policy and
Defense are represented.
Author
Jim Rickards claims that James Clapper, former Director of National
Intelligence, disbanded the CFIUS advisory for the intel community just before
the Uranium One deal was approved.
The Chairman of Uranium One is on the Clinton Foundation Board and
a close friend of the Clintons, and as the deal was being considered by
approval by CFIUS, nine members of Uranium One contributed more than $145
million to the Clinton Foundation, long exposed as a Clinton
family piggy bank. Yellow cake from these uranium mines “has gone to
some unknown destination” since the sale was approved.
Loretta Lynch, Obama’s Attorney General, reportedly
threatened the informant that he’d be subject to criminal prosecution if he revealed
to Congress what he’d find out.
Hillary Clinton, former first lady and most recently
failed candidate for President, was Secretary of State when the Uranium Sale
was approved by the CFIUS.
Mystery witness claims millions of dollars in Russian nuclear
funds went to “an entity” assisting the Clinton Foundation.
Bill Clinton, former president and husband of
Hillary Clinton and recipient of a $500,000 dollar speaking fee for a speech in
Russia from Renaissance Capital (a Russian finance corporation) prior
to the approval of the sale to Uranium One.
Rod Rosenstein, former U.S. Attorney for the District of
Maryland, presently Deputy Attorney General for the Department of Justice
overseeing the Mueller investigation into claims that the Russians colluded with
the Trump campaign (2005-2017).
Andrew Weisman, presently a member of Mueller’s
team, and formerprosecutor of
the Russian briber Vadim Mikerin and the American Trucking executive whom Vadim
worked with and through. (the latter pleaded guilty June 2015, but the
court record shows he has not yet been sentenced.)
He pursued those convictions under Rosenstein’s supervision.
Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining mogul, with whom the
Clintons had a long relationship, sought and obtained uranium in Kazakhstan
(UrAsia Energy). Uranium One bought his company, and the Russians were sniffing
around about how Giustra had obtained the Kazakhstan deal.
Rosatom, a Russian government corporation, which
bought into Uranium One, but needed U.S. approval to obtain Uranium One,
because the latter held 20% of U.S. uranium supplies.
Ian Teifer, Chair of Uranium One
(since 2007 when it merged with Ur Asia) and other individuals
contributed millions to the Clinton Foundation from 2009-2013, which were
not disclosed publicly as she had pledged to do.
There are actually three Russian Collusion Stories – two,
involving Hillary and present and past FBI and DOJ officials, have merit. The
third, the subject of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, is nonsensical.
1. Hillary and the Uranium One deal
What is Being Charged About the Clinton’s Role in the Uranium One
Sale?
The same year that Hillary brought over her ‘Reset Button’,
the FBI was investigating a top Rosatom figure in America for
racketeering, extortion, bribery and money laundering. The investigation was
supervised by the controversial current Deputy FBI Director Andrew
McCabe who has his own financial ties to the Clintons. The
investigation dragged out for five years. Just enough time for the Rosatom deal
to be approved. When the charges were brought in ’14, the Russians had gotten
it all…
Holder’s DOJ, like Hillary’s State, signed off on the
Rosatom-Uranium One deal despite the ongoing investigation. Holder and his
associates at the DOJ kept the investigation under their hats. The trails
leading to the Clintons were closed off…
“Victim 1”, the FBI’s confidential witness in the case, was
an American businessman who was making payments to a Rosatom figure. He knew
firsthand about the Russian efforts to influence Bill and Hillary, and through
them, the Obama administration, but wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Instead
Obama’s DOJ threatened him with criminal charges if he revealed what
he knew. And what he knew included comments by FBI agents about political
pressure from the DOJ during the Uranium One-Rosatom approval process.
Meanwhile, during the approval process, Bill Clinton was
getting paid $500,000 by a Russian bank with Russian government ties, even as
his wife had the power to block a deal by Rosatom. While Clinton and Obama
cronies are scurrying around to tie Trump to Russia, their own bosses were
giving a Russian state corporation whose branches included the nuclear weapons
complex access to our nuclear materials.
[snip]
Not only did Obama and his people at the DOJ and FBI turn a
blind eye to Russian nuclear malfeasance in America, but they covered up
evidence tying that malfeasance to the Clintons, and then threatened an
informant to protect that cover-up. Democracy really does die in darkness. Just
ask the media.
At the same time the Russians were paying Clinton half a
million dollars to speak and topping up the Clinton Foundation coffers to the
hilt, Bill Clinton sought permission in May 2010 to meet with Arkady
Dvorovich, one of the highest-ranking members of the Russian government to
sit on Rosatom’s Board, and then when approval dragged on, he met directly
with Vladimir Putin. [snip] Inside the Clintons' inner circle, there also
was a debate in 2010.
A close associate of Bill Clinton who was directly
involved in the Moscow trip and spoke on condition of anonymity, described to
The Hill the circumstances surrounding how Bill Clinton landed a $500,000 speaking
gig in Russia and then came up with the list of Russians he wanted to meet.
The friend said Hillary Clinton had just returned in late
March 2010 from an official trip to Moscow where she met with both Putin and
Medvedev. The president’s speaker’s bureau had just received an offer
from Renaissance Capital to pay the former president $500,000 for a
single speech in Russia.
Documents show Bill Clinton’s personal lawyer on April 5,
2010, sent a conflict of interest review to the State Department asking for
permission to give the speech in late June, and it was approved two
days later.
The Clinton friend said the former president’s office then
began assembling a list of requests to meet with Russian business and
government executives whom he could meet on the trip. One of the goals of the
trip was to try to help a Clinton family relative “grow investments in their
business with Russian oligarchs and other businesses,” the friend told The
Hill.
“It was one of the untold stories of the Russia trip.
People have focused on Uranium One and the speaking fees, but opening up a
business spigot for the family business was one only us insiders knew about,”
the friend said.
But that is not the end of the story. Without revealing anything
about the Rosatom-Uranium One background of bribery and corruption,
Rosenstein-McCabe supervised the investigation and two people, including
Russian Vadim Mikerin,were
prosecuted.
Although the FBI and DOJ knew of the corruption involved in
getting the Uranium One deal approved before the CFIUS
approved the deal, no charges were brought until 2014, and neither the public,
the intelligence community, nor the Congress were informed of the cases until
after a plea was entered with little fanfare by the defendants.
Bringing down a major Russian nuclear corruption scheme
that had both compromised a sensitive uranium transportation asset inside the
U.S. and facilitated international money laundering would seem a major feather
in any law enforcement agency’s cap.
But the Justice Department and FBI took little credit in
2014 when Mikerin, the Russian financier and the trucking firm executives were
arrested and charged.
The only public statement occurred a year later when the
Justice Department put out a little-noticed press release in August 2015, just
days before Labor Day. The release noted that the various defendants had
reached plea deals.
By that time, the criminal cases against Mikerin had been
narrowed to a single charge of money laundering for a scheme that officials
admitted stretched from 2004 to 2014. And though agents had evidence of
criminal wrongdoing they collected since at least 2009, federal prosecutors
only cited in the plea agreement a handful of transactions that occurred in
2011 and 2012, well after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United
States’s approval.
The final court case also made no mention of any connection
to the influence peddling conversations the FBI undercover informant witnessed
about the Russian nuclear officials trying to ingratiate themselves with the
Clintons even though agents had gathered documents showing the transmission of
millions of dollars from Russia’s nuclear industry to an American entity that
had provided assistance to Bill Clinton’s foundation, sources confirmed to The
Hill.
The lack of fanfare left many key players in Washington
with no inkling that a major Russian nuclear corruption scheme with serious
national security implications had been uncovered.
The Second
Hillary-Russian scandal (The Ghost Story)
So here are the key facts: the FBI found that Russian
intelligence had targeted Hillary Clinton before and during her time as
secretary of state. Clinton’s spokespersons denied that this was so. Clinton
opposed the Magnitsky sanctions on officials tied to Putin. After her husband
received his half-million dollars… Clinton moved with unusual speed to whisk
the ring of 10 Russian spies out of the country and back to Moscow. She had the
lopsided swap take place over a long summer weekend, before the FBI was finished
with the spies, and before the spies could stand trial. While the FBI was
separately investigating Russians involved with buying Uranium One, she
approved the sale of American uranium to Russia’s nuclear weapons agency.
Principals in the sale then plowed $145 million into her family foundation and
projects.
Several questions come to mind. Precisely what did the FBI
know about Russia’s spy service targeting Hillary Clinton and her inner circle?
Why did Clinton deny through spokespersons that she had been a Russian target?
Why did she work so feverishly to get the spies out of the United States and
back to Russia? Why has the FBI leadership not been more vocal in touting one
of its greatest counterintelligence successes ever? And why did nobody in the FBI
leadership raise this issue during the 2016 Russian election meddling
controversy?
Once again, the person who should have been and certainly was most
knowledgeable about the details of this scandal is Robert Mueller, then head of
the FBI and now special counsel pursuing the dead end assertion that Russia
colluded with Trump.
Russia and Trump
The overwhelming evidence suggests that Hillary and Bill, consumed
with greed, colluded with the Russians, handed them the right to one-fifth
of U.S. uranium reserves in exchange for cash for themselves and their
slush fund foundation. When she lost, she projected her conduct onto everyone
else, including Trump. It is beyond doubt -- because it has been admitted by
James Comey, the head of the FBI -- that he began his investigation into her
charges based on the GPS-Fusion “Dossier” which even its author Christopher
Steele asserts was “raw intelligence,” not verified and not verifiable.
This week Steele refused a
Congressional demand that he testify as to who paid him and who were
his sources.
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.
As Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) notes: “The obvious
inference is that Fusion’s secrets are their secrets, and they’re devastating.”
Underscoring Reynolds’ point,GPS is even trying an unlikely gambit --
seeking judicial
blocking of Congressional access to its bank records.
Molly Hemingway eviscerates the journalists who claimed to be
shocked about GPS-Fusion, itself a collection of former journalists. She quotes
them and shreds
them for their purported ignorance, and remarks, not without warrant,
I mentioned earlier the Washington Post and New
York Times had anonymously sourced stories alleging that the
FBI tried to pay one of the dossier’s authors but ultimately did not. Well, CNN
has anonymous sources that say the FBI did give him money for his work. “FBI
reimbursed some expenses of dossier author,” CNN reported in March. To
quote Jake Sherman: The FBI is in the U.S. government.
So let’s go back to that tweet. We have reports at CNN of
the FBI paying expenses for the dossier, and trying to pay him even more,
according to the Post and Times. We have
Fusion GPS already claiming that Democratic supporters of Clinton paid for it.
And we have New York Times and various other reports
that Russians paid Fusion GPS for allegedly unrelated work, though no evidence
that those funds were not used on the dossier. So who paid for it? Russia? The
FBI? The Democrats? Or all? Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to know? If only we had
some means of finding out the answers to these questions!
While the fever swamps of the left are still playing on the
credulity of their readers, there’s still no evidentiary basis for claiming any
of the Russian propaganda efforts on Facebook, or Google, or You Tube
influenced the election in Trump’s favor. More likely a “woke” citizenry fed up
with Hillary’s greed, corruption, lies, and incompetence and able to
communicate directly with each other through the internet did it all by
themselves.
Correction: Andrew McCabe's current title is deputy director of
the FBI, not deputy attorney general.