RUTHFULLY YOURS

An FBI informant gathered extensive evidence during his six years undercover about a Russian plot to corner the American uranium market, ranging from corruption inside a U.S. nuclear transport company to Obama administration approvals that let Moscow buy and sell more atomic fuels, according to more than 5,000 pages of documents from the counterintelligence investigation.

The memos, reviewed by The Hill, conflict with statements made by Justice Department officials in recent days that informant William Campbell’s prior work won’t shed much light on the U.S. government’s controversial decision in 2010 to approve Russia’s purchase of the Uranium One mining company and its substantial U.S. assets.

Campbell documented for his FBI handlers the first illegal activity by Russians nuclear industry officials in fall 2009, nearly an entire year before the Russian state-owned Rosatom nuclear firm won Obama administration approval for the Uranium One deal, the memos show.

Campbell, who was paid $50,000 a month to consult for the firm, was solicited by Rosatom colleagues to help overcome political opposition to the Uranium One purchase while collecting FBI evidence that the sale was part of a larger effort by Moscow to make the U.S. more dependent on Russian uranium, contemporaneous emails and memos show.

“The attached article is of interest as I believe it highlights the ongoing resolve in Russia to gradually and systematically acquire and control global energy resources,” Rod Fisk, an American contractor working for the Russians, wrote in a June 24, 2010, email to Campbell.

The email forwarded an article on Rosatom’s efforts to buy Uranium One through its ARMZ subsidiary. Fisk also related information from a conversation with the Canadian executives of the mining firm about their discomfort with the impending sale.

“I spoke with a senior Uranium One Executive,” Fisk wrote Campbell, detailing his personal history with some of the company’s figures. “He said that corporate Management was not even told before the announcement [of the sale] was made.

“There are a lot of concerns,” Fisk added, predicting the Canadians would exit the company with buyouts once the Russians took control. Fisk added the premium price the Russians were paying to buy a mining firm that in 2010 controlled about 20 percent of America’s uranium production seemed “strange.”

At the time, Campell was working alongside Fisk as an American consultant to Rosatom’s commercial sales arm, Tenex.

But unbeknownst to his colleagues, Campbell also was serving as an FBI informant gathering evidence that Fisk, Tenex executive Vadim Mikerin and several others were engaged in a racketeering scheme involving millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks, plus extortion and money laundering.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday became the latest liberal luminary to scurry away from Bill Clinton some 20 years too late.

“If it happened today there would have been a very different reaction,” said the mayor in reference to the White House sex scandal involving Mr. Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. “I don’t think you can rework history. I think if it happened today—if any president did that today—they would have to resign.”

The mayor’s comments follow those made last week by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who told the New York Times that she, too, now believes that Mr. Clinton should have resigned after his affair with Ms. Lewinsky was revealed. The senator used the “things have changed” explanation as well, then added that “in light of this conversation, we should have a very different conversation about President Trump, and a very different conversation about allegations against him.”

Put differently, Ms. Gillibrand wants Donald Trump held to a different standard than the one she and her fellow Democrats were willing to hold Bill Clinton to way, way back in the 1990s. Have the liberal politicians and journalists now changing their tune about Mr. Clinton grown a conscience, or do they merely want another pretext for attacking the current White House occupant? The political left had a teachable moment two decades ago and didn’t learn anything from it.

To be fair, some Democratic partisans know rank political opportunism when they see it and aren’t afraid to say so. “Senate voted to keep POTUS WJC,” tweeted Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state. “But not enough for you @SenGillibrand? Over 20 yrs you took the Clintons’ endorsements, money, and seat. Hypocrite.” Much the same could be said about Mr. de Blasio, who served in the Clinton administration and managed Mrs. Clinton’s successful Senate run in 2000.

The previous administration deliberately understated al-Qaeda’s strength in 2012 so President Obama’s worse-than-useless counter-terrorism policy would seem like it was actually working, clearing the way for his easy reelection victory over Republican Mitt Romney, according to new evidence.

Intelligence was just one of the many areas of government activity relentlessly politicized by the Obama administration. In the Obama era, the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Education, to name only a few of the affected federal agencies, were also infested with determined radical ideologues bent on fundamentally transforming American society. Many of the left-wing extremists are still in positions of authority in the government as they undermine President Trump’s policies and directives every day.

For conservatives and other patriots, proof Obama twisted the facts about al-Qaeda for his own gain is yet another painful reminder of the Left’s virtually unchallenged mastery of the art of story-telling, even when, as in this instance, the story is a complete and utter lie, one of many propagated by Team Obama. Led by creative writer and Obama aide Ben Rhodes, left-wingers also managed to trick reporters and others into disseminating dangerous falsehoods about the laughably weak, unenforceable nuclear nonproliferation deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Rhodes is also credited with writing Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech, a piece of public relations outreach intended to flatter Muslims.

And it turns out the picture Obama’s people painted of Osama bin Laden, who was dispatched to the hereafter by U.S. Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011, was completely wrong. In the lead-up to his death, bin Laden wasn’t some out-of-touch, semi-retired, has-been figurehead in al-Qaeda, the Muslim terrorist group that engineered the 9/11 attacks. From his nondescript compound in jihadist-friendly Pakistan, he was in fact minutely involved in day-to-day operations and planning for al-Qaeda, as thousands of documents recently released by the Trump administration show. The U.S. military seized the material from bin Laden’s home.

It was New York Times foreign correspondent Rukmini Callimachi who spilled the beans Friday at an event at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), putting into context the 17 cherry-picked documents the Obama administration made public in May 2012 in an effort to downplay the continuing significance of al-Qaeda.

There is lots of talk about a new nationalist populist worker movement.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/20/never-mind-trumpism-what-is-deplorablism/

Supposedly, something quite new would institutionalize, define, and solidify the Trump base of aging Reagan Democrats, old Ross Perot independents, Tea Party remnants, newly disaffected Democratic workers, and a few returning libertarians and paleocons. Certainly, together they helped to swung the election in 2016.

But what exactly would be the formal agenda of the proverbial deplorables and irredeemables? And how would it differ all that much from conservative Republicanism of generations past?

After all, despite a much-hyped conservative civil war, a bitter primary, and a NeverTrump movement that won’t quiet, 90 percent of the Republicans in 2016 still voted for Trump. These voters assumed, like deplorable and irredeemable Democrats and Independents, that Trump would push conservative agendas. And they were largely proved correct.

After 10 months of governance, Trump’s deregulations, a foreign policy of principled realism, energy agendas, judicial appointments, efforts at tax reform and health care recalibration, cabinet appointments, and reformulation at the Departments of Education, the EPA, and Interior seem so far conservative to the core.

Illegal Immigration, Trade, and Realism
In the few areas where Trump conceivably differed from his 16 primary Republican rivals—immigration, trade, and foreign policy—the 20th-century Republican/conservative orthodoxy was actually closer to Trump’s positions than to those of recent Republican nominees, John McCain or Mitt Romney.

Vast majorities of conservatives always favored enforcement of federal immigration law rather than tolerance of sanctuary cities. They wanted to preserve legal, meritocratic, diverse, and measured immigration, not sanction open borders. And they championed the melting pot over the identity politics of the salad bowl.

In sum, voters did not believe the United States could continue with open borders, or the idea that foreign nationals could cross the border illegally and at will, and then dictate to their hosts the circumstances of their continued residence—much less accuse their magnanimous hosts of racism and nativism for not accepting the demands of their advocates.

All Trump did was return prior orthodoxy on border enforcement to the fore, albeit often with blunter rhetoric. He called out a loud but minority corporate interest on the Right that wanted cheap labor. And he questioned the wisdom of Republican officials who apparently saw appeasement of illegal immigration as a way to compete for the eventual votes of inevitable and huge annual influxes of illegal aliens.

Friendship is a beautiful thing, and it’s really good to know that Robert Mueller, Comey, Brennan, and Clapper have known each other for many years. They’re loyal friends.

Mueller is a former top FBI dude, who helped to clear Bill Clinton after that impeachment mess, and like Mr. Comey, he did his very best. Clapper was the single most powerful man in the “intelligence” “community,” a centralized directorate (as the Soviets used to call it), which was George W. Bush’s principal response to 9/11/01.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m sure all these brave men (or persons, I should say) made great contributions to the safety and welfare of all of us. But here they are at the peak of their careers, each one of them, and Democrat candidate Hillary is suddenly exposed to the world with her email fiasco as SecState. Violating the very first rule of intelligence and statecraft, to protect your country’s secrets. And she obviously sold secret and sensitive information to Clinton Foundation “donors” around the world, including old friend Vladimir Putin (who now owns 20 percent of U.S. uranium, or possibly more), the Muslim Brotherhood (friends of Huma), the Iranians (who sponsor half the terror attacks in the world), the Chinese (who want more of our secret high tech), and probably the French (who understand bribery and just wanted to get access to Hillary as POTUS).

We’ve seen how Bill sold U.S. rocket-launching secrets to the Chinese for campaign money…or personal money. It’s so hard to tell the difference.

Well, skip that.

So the wife of the perp becomes a senator from the State of New York, which is well known for the purity of its politics. Why did she become senator? Was she a resident of N.Y. State? Was she the best qualified person to represent the Great State (etc.)? Or did the N.Y. machine just pick her and scare everybody else away?

So Hillary has violated any number of laws all of her adult life, ever since she was hired by the Senate Watergate Committee to lynch Richard Nixon – which worked just as it was meant to. Nixon resigned, but for the Democrats, he should have been hanged, drawn, quartered, waterboarded, and made to read the NYT op-ed page for extra punishment. I know Democrats who still hate Richard Nixon with a hellish fury. Nixon is the gift that keeps on giving. Hillary’s major role in the persecution of President Nixon – a duly elected POTUS – was to urge that all his constitutional rights be taken away. That was the young Hillary right after law school.

The major difference from Watergate today is that no sane and sentient human being believes the NYT or the WaPo anymore. They have permanently blown their cover.

And yet the Axis of NYT-WaPo tells us that Donald Trump is just suspected of nefarious dealings with the Russians, which presumably caused the Russians to break into Hillary’s ridiculous emails and the DNC file system, sending truthful (but wicked) information to WikiLeaks, to be dumped at strategic moments of the election campaign.

Notice well that nobody claims that the Hillary dumps were false. They were true enough. That’s why they hate Trump and his imaginary Russian sources. It’s the truth that hurt Hillary.

The spirit of the times has opened the floodgates of long-suppressed heartache. Victimized women are thus coming forward a decade or more after being abused by this political don or that show-biz celeb — who, in Al Franken’s case, could be the same guy.

It is vital that we hear their stories. There should be no expectation, though, of a courtroom reckoning. While prosecution is practically impossible, that doesn’t absolve the culprits. Public office is a public trust, and weighing fitness for it is a matter of everyday discernment, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. You know this when the un-convicted sociopath, fresh off his second or third harassment arrest, shows up on the doorstep looking to take your daughter out. Do you really need a jury to decide that one for you?

No, they’ll never stand trial, but Franken should go away, and Roy Moore should stay away.

No sooner had yet another Moore accuser come forward than did Senator Franken’s infamia burst on the scene. True to the way these things go now, the Minnesota Democrat’s scandal had worsened by evening when a second harassment complainant (citing verbal rather than physical abuse) emerged. Past being prologue, by the time you read this, there are apt to be more victims and more outed predators.

Felony Sexual Battery
The freshet of commentary about Moore, Alabama’s Republican Senate candidate, has continued for a week. We are all too familiar with the anguish of his accusers and the difficulty — probably, the impossibility — of proving their claims, some of which stretch back 40 years.

The Franken allegations, leveled by newscaster and model Leeann Tweeden, are at once less abominable (a creepy kiss during a rehearsal and a grope while she was asleep) but more certain (there is photographic evidence of the grope). Franken garnered some sympathy by a prompt apology, but he is playing out a shopworn stratagem. When evidence is equivocal or in the nature of a “he said, she said,” you deny — as Moore has, and as Franken has regarding the forcible kiss (“I certainly don’t remember the rehearsal for the skit the same way” as Ms. Tweeden). But where the evidence is incontestable, don’t contest it — no point fighting an authentic picture, but saying “I’m sorry” might convince the credulous that you really are.

Does overwhelming evidence equate to a slam-dunk conviction? No. As with Moore, the case against Franken is too stale for prosecution.

The last thing the world needs is another opinion on the Roy Moore scandal, so I will spare you my revelatory and game-changing lowdown on the whole thing.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/16/moore-is-yet-to-come-in-2018/

I will, however, say this: If you think this is bad, just wait until 2018.

By this time next year, the Moore story will seem like one of those weightless, superfluous amuse-bouche concoctions the server gives you courtesy of the kitchen, which always turns out to be more of a vanity project of the chef than anything intended to satiate you. Yet it arouses your appetite, and after you’ve gorged yourself on multiple courses, shifting uncomfortably in your chair from overindulgence, cursing your excess yet gratified by the experience, the amuse bouche is long forgotten. But it was the first bite of the feast.

If Doug Jones wins the Alabama senate seat next month, Democrats will need two more pick-ups next year to take control of the U.S. Senate. (According to the recent Cook Political Report, just two Republican seats are now listed as toss-ups: Arizona, a state Trump won, and Nevada, a state Trump narrowly lost. The rest are in safe R states.) Although the outlook for Democrats to regain control of the House of Representatives is bleaker—“if Democrats were to hold all of the seats we rate as leaning towards them, all 12 of the Toss Ups, and half of the seats in Lean Republican, they would still fall two seats shy of a majority,” according to an October 6 analysis in Cook—Dems are now emboldened by big wins in Virginia earlier this month and the dumpster fire that is now the GOP panicking over Roy Moore’s stubborn candidacy.

While most normal people view the Roy Moore scandal as another example of America’s rotting political sewer, Democrats are downright giddy about what they think is an early Christmas present. Party operatives—and their minions who work in the media—are undoubtedly plotting how to replicate this debacle, resuscitate long-dormant rumors about sexual misconduct, lure victims out of the shadows and into Gloria Allred’s loving talons, er, arms. No yearbook or shopping mall will be spared. It is but a small, if tawdry, taste of what’s to come.

There are already ominous clues about what 2018 will offer our hide-the-children electorate. Liberals are now in self-flagellation mode over how they handled serial-abuser Bill Clinton for the past 25 years. A generation raised on Clinton-worship is learning a history they probably never knew, and victims who have been vilified and ignored are finally getting some measure of justice in the court of public opinion. But don’t kid yourself; this collective mea culpa is nothing more than a way for Democrats and the media to erase their past culpability to regain future credibility. How can they attack Republican offenders next year if they defended Clinton for so long? They learned a lesson when voters seemed largely anesthetized to allegations against Donald Trump, and the media will not let that happen again. So, now that they have offered up their phony apologies—and have an arsenal of tweets and articles to prove their repentance—the left has immunized itself against criticism. It’s about as cynical a move as you can get.