Via the New York Post
Lefty cheers for Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in US politics may soon fade now that he’s reportedly looking into a top Democratic lobbyist.
NBC reports that Tony Podesta (the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta) and his firm are the subjects of a criminal investigation by the special prosecutor.
And this comes amid new reports that the FBI gathered evidence for two years as Russian agents — including a major sleeper cell — worked to gain access to then-Secretary of State Clinton, husband Bill and members of their inner circle.
All of which underscores that, yes, Russia has long been trying to worm its way into US politics. But that effort went far, far beyond any schemes to help elect Donald Trump president.
The Podesta probe concerns suggestions he failed to fully disclose spending (a felony) while lobbying for a pro-Russian Ukrainian group.
The firm updated its foreign agent registration forms only after news reports disclosed Podesta’s payments from the European Center for a Modern Ukraine.
Meanwhile, The Hill is reporting new details of a years-long FBI investigation that tracked Moscow’s covert influence-buying activities — including planting a spy posing as an accountant in the offices of a top Clinton donor.
Team Hillary has long denied that she was a target of the spy ring, but an FBI source told The Hill: “There is not one shred of doubt from the evidence that we had that the Russians had set their sights on Clinton’s inner circle.”
All this, of course, follows reports the Obama administration knew Russia was engaged in a campaign of bribery and extortion — yet allowed a deal to go through giving Moscow control of one-fifth of America’s uranium.
Mueller was the FBI director during the Uranium One scandal and coverup. He deliberately ignored the Democrats’ crimes. He should recuse himself.
The DNC paid for research that led to the lurid, fake Trump dossier.
https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/922994651040169984
When the New York Times actually relayed the truth for a change, the liberals went bonkers:
The big news Tuesday night is, of course, the Washington Post confirming that a lawyer working for both the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC helped fund research for the Russian dossier that was supposed to make it clear beyond a doubt that candidate Donald Trump was subject to blackmail by the Kremlin.
Reporters from all over the spectrum are retweeting the Washington Post, and that includes Maggie Haberman of the New York Times. Haberman formerly worked for Politico and had “a very good relationship” with the Hillary Clinton campaign, according to John Podesta’s leaked emails: “We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed,” wrote Nick Merrill, Clinton’s former campaign press secretary.
So it follows that people who follow Haberman on Twitter are largely fans of Hillary, and their reactions to her retweeting the Washington Post story —and using the words “lied about it” in connection with their funding of the research — are telling.
The tweets from liberals in response to her report (at the link) are wrought with indignation and hurt surprise. It’s a joy to read all that angst.
A report just came about about CNN’s ties to GPS:
CNN’s reporting on the Trump-Russia dossier has left out at least one crucial fact: the close ties between the network and the opposition research firm at the center of the dossier controversy.
CNN’s reporting on the dossier, led by justice correspondent Evan Perez, has been favorable to the firm, Fusion GPS, and hyped the dossier’s credibility. Left out of Perez’s reporting, which has relied largely on unnamed sources, is his personal closeness to Fusion GPS’ operatives. Fusion has repeatedly been described in Senate testimonies as a smear-for-hire operation that manufactures misleading or false media narratives for its clients.
Glenn Simpson, the Fusion co-founder most often associated with the dossier, is used to working on stories with Perez. As reporters at the Journal, Perez and Simpson regularly co-authored stories on national security.
Another Fusion founder, Tom Catan, worked as a reporter for the Journal at the same time as Perez and Simpson. The third Fusion co-founder, Peter Fritsch, worked above Perez and Simpson as the senior national security editor.
Simpson and Fritsch left the WSJ in 2011 to launch Fusion. Perez jumped from the paper to CNN in 2013. Another longtime Journal reporter, Neil King, left the paper to join Fusion in December 2016.
Let’s give plausible accounts of the known facts, then explain why demands that Robert Mueller recuse himself from the Russia investigation may not be the fanciful partisan grandstanding you imagine.
Here’s a story consistent with what has been reported in the press—how reliably reported is uncertain. Democratic political opponents of Donald Trump financed a British former spook who spread money among contacts in Russia, who in turn over drinks solicited stories from their supposedly “connected” sources in Moscow. If these people were really connected in any meaningful sense, then they made sure the stories they spun were consistent with the interests of the regime, if not actually scripted by the regime.
The resulting Trump dossier then became a factor in Obama administration decisions to launch an FBI counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, and after the election to trumpet suspicions of Trump collusion with Russia.
We know of a second, possibly even more consequential way the FBI was effectively a vehicle for Russian meddling in U.S. politics. Authoritative news reports say FBI chief James Comey’s intervention in the Hillary Clinton email matter was prompted by a Russian intelligence document that his colleagues suspected was a Russian plant.
…..But now we come to the Rosatom disclosures last week in The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress.
……After the Cold War, in its own interest, the U.S. wanted to build bridges to the Russian nuclear establishment. The Putin government, for national or commercial purposes, agreed and sought to expand its nuclear business in the U.S.
The purchase and consolidation of certain assets were facilitated by Canadian entrepreneurs who gave large sums to the Clinton Foundation, and perhaps arranged a Bill Clinton speech in Moscow for $500,000. A key transaction had to be approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
Now we learn that, before and during these transactions, the FBI had uncovered a bribery and kickback scheme involving Russia’s U.S. nuclear business, and also received reports of Russian officials seeking to curry favor through donations to the Clinton Foundation.
This criminal activity was apparently not disclosed to agencies vetting the 2010 transfer of U.S. commercial nuclear assets to Russia. The FBI made no move to break up the scheme until long after the transaction closed. Only five years later, the Justice Department, in 2015, disclosed a plea deal with the Russian perpetrator so quietly that its significance was missed until The Hill reported on the FBI investigation last week.
For anyone who cares to look, the real problem here is that the FBI itself is so thoroughly implicated in the Russia meddling story.
Every government agency in the Obama regime engaged in criminal activity and covered it up. The leftwing media and the DNC worked together to concoct the lurid dossier and push it as political fodder.
Related post:
https://sfcmac.com/the-russian-trail-leads-to-dem-lobbyists/
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