RUTHFULLY YOURS

This morning President Donald J. Trump tweeted:

He’s referring to yesterday’s news that, as CNN headlined its story on the matter, “Fusion GPS partners plead Fifth before House Intel.”

Fusion GPS is the firm that paid for and disseminated the discredited dossier that former FBI director James Comey briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump about in January. The almost immediate and well-sourced leak of that briefing to CNN is what got the Russia scare really going in January. BuzzFeed published the dossier very soon after CNN’s story ran.

So, as Trump and CNN note, folks at the firm took the Fifth in a House investigation into that dossier and the firm that helped put it together (Fusion GPS executives similarly refused to testify under oath in a separate Senate inquiry). As to the questions of who paid for it, we still have absolutely no idea, although there have been published reports in The New York Times and Washington Post that Fusion GPS does anti-Magnitsky Actwork on behalf of Russia, that the dossier was funded by Democrats, and that the FBI also tried to pay for the dossier. Fusion GPS has also made the unsubstantiated claim that an unnamed Republican donor got the ball rolling on the dossier.

You might think that Russia-obsessed journalists would share the president’s curiosity about who funded the dossier and why Fusion GPS partners are worried about their legal jeopardy. You might think otherwise. Jake Sherman, a Politico senior writer, was utterly shocked to learn that there are questions about the FBI paying for the dossier. To wit:

Fun fact: the FBI was also in the U.S. government when word first got out that they tried to pay for opposition research on the out-of-power party’s nominee! Here’s theWashington Post’s Karen Tumulty:

Before I respond, a quick digression. Sometimes readers or viewers complain that “the media” haven’t covered a story. And it will turn out that the story was covered, deep in one media outlet’s newspaper. Or for a few seconds of a newscast. The Journolisters of Twitter don’t help the story go viral. They don’t dig further. It dies. But when readers complain that the story wasn’t covered, they point to that piece on page D14 and say, “See! We covered it!”

If I were a Fusion GPS-connected journalist desperate to bury news of the firm’s refusal to cooperate with a congressional investigation into Russian meddling in U.S. affairs, that is the approach I would have taken, instead of the one taken by journalists today. The approach they took today was to pretend that the story was made up. Instead, they could have pointed to the story that ran in the Washington Post on February 28 about how the FBI tried to pay the dossier drafter to continue his work:

The former British spy who authored a controversial dossier on behalf of Donald Trump’s political opponents alleging ties between Trump and Russia reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work, according to several people familiar with the arrangement.

When a Twitter interlocutor pointed out to Tumulty that her own paper had published the report that the FBI had tried to pay for oppo on the Republican nominee, she replied:

She’s quoting from the Post story. That story, incidentally, is based on anonymous sources, as all stories these days are. This from The New York Times also says that the FBI tried to, but ultimately did not, pay Christopher Steele for his dossier work. (Read on to get to the part about how the FBI did pay him, according to CNN’s anonymous sources.) It should be the first of many stories digging into how it was possible that the FBI got into the oppo research business on political opponents. As that story itself notes:

Fred Fleitz, who served as John Bolton’s chief of staff at the United Nations during the George W. Bush Administration, joined Fox Business host Lou Dobbs to discuss the fall of Raqqa (good), progress against North Korea’s nuclear program (better), and the appearance of insubordination among certain prominent members of President Trump’s cabinet (very bad).https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/21/fred-fleitz-to-lou-dobbs/

Lou Dobbs: Joining us tonight Fred Fleitz, former CIA analyst, chief of staff to Ambassador John Bolton at the United Nations, now a senior vice president at the Center for Security Policy and Fred great to have you with us.

Fred Fleitz: Good to be here.

Dobbs: And I think it’s terrific that tonight on this 20th of October, nine months ago the president inaugurated and today Raqqa is in the hands of U.S.-backed forces in Syria. ISIS is being rolled back, the successes as the president promised have been incredible, particularly compared to the passivity of the previous administration and its campaign against ISIS, such as it was.

Fleitz: I think that’s right, I mean, President Trump took the gloves off. There were so many restrictions on our operations in Iraq and Syria and it made a real difference against ISIS. Now, we’re not gonna hear this on other networks. I think we’re seeing some cautious signs of progress on North Korea but I don’t know that sanctions against North Korea will ever work but if they’re going to work, they’re gonna work under this president because he’s twisting the arms of the Chinese and the Russians and others to get them to enforce sanctions. We may have to attack but we have to go down the sanctions road and I’m encouraged.

Dobbs: And in the case of North Korea, the Secretary of State today suggesting it might be months before, only months, before North Korea has the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile. This has been a stunning ratcheting up of the estimated timetable for the nuclear threat posed by North Korea.

Fleitz: They could have the capability now. We don’t know, the intelligence community says North Korea has 60 nuclear weapons. Whether they detonated a hydrogen bomb last month or not, we don’t know. It was a 250 kiloton weapon, which was 25 times their previous weapon. This is a very serious threat and I think North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is an offensive arsenal, not a deterrent and they will one day use it.

Dobbs: And as we are watching this, we hear from the secretary of state again, almost impossible to contemplate language. Tillerson’s saying that he wants to balance his views with those of the president. Are you kidding me?

Fleitz: I’m very angry with Secretary Tillerson, who told the Europeans today that they don’t have to worry about their trade deals with Iran, that we’re going to go after them. I immediately tweeted that Tillerson should be fired tomorrow for this. He undermined—well he’s trying to undermine what the president did, but I think the Europeans know that Mr. Trump is serious about the Iran deal and if it isn’t fixed, and it isn’t going to be fixed, but if it isn’t fixed, he’s gonna get out.

Dobbs: This is a very difficult moment for many people to understand. The president is tolerating such abuse from his own cabinet that I mean, I don’t react well to it I will tell you. I just cannot imagine a person not deferring to the president of the United States, any American citizen and to have this kind of arrogant insubordination on the part of a secretary of state is just, it’s infuriating and I have to give the president all the credit in the world. This is a man I don’t think most of us would have ever expected to this tolerant, to be this generous and nor would of I expected Rex Tillerson to be such a small and silly person.

Fleitz: You know, I think we should think of this in light of the really inappropriate speech George W. Bush gave yesterday. The Bush circle is not in Trump’s circle and the Bush circle helps staff Trump’s national security team.

Dobbs: Yes.

Fleitz: And that’s why there’s been all this trouble in the Iran deal, the Paris climate accord, radical Islam. At the end of the year, the president has to take account of who gave him good advice, who gave him good advice on personnel and make some major changes.

Dobbs: Yeah, this is truly the . . . It looks to be the contest of purpose, direction, and will between Bush globalists and Trump nationalists, and I thank the Lord the president seems to be winning nearly all of the battles.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has isolated himself from his own department and allowed subordinates to fill a handful of top positions with people who actively opposed Donald Trump’s election, according to current and former State Department officials and national security experts with specific knowledge of the situation.

News reports often depict a White House “in chaos.” But the real chaos, according to three State Department employees who spoke with American Greatness on the condition of anonymity, is at Foggy Bottom.

Rumors have circulated for months that Tillerson either plans to resign or is waiting for the president to fire him. The staffers describe an amateur secretary of state who has “checked out” and effectively removed himself from major decision making.

Hundreds of Empty Desks
About 200 State Department jobs require Senate confirmation. But the Senate cannot confirm nominees it does not have. More than nine months into the new administration, most of the senior State Department positions—assistant and deputy assistant secretary posts—remain unfilled.

What’s more, the United States currently has no ambassador to the European Union, or to key allies such as France, Germany, Australia, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Meantime, Obama Administration holdovers remain ensconced in the department and stationed at embassies in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East.

The leadership vacuum has been filled by a small group opposed to the president’s “America First” agenda.

At the heart of the problem, these officials say, are the two people closest to Tillerson: chief of staff Margaret Peterlin and senior policy advisor Brian Hook, who runs the State Department’s in-house think tank.

Peterlin and Hook are longtime personal friends who current staffers say are running the department like a private fiefdom for their benefit and in opposition to the president and his stated policies.

‘Boxing Out’ Trump Supporters
The lack of staffing gives the duo unprecedented power over State Department policy. Since joining Tillerson’s team, Peterlin and Hook have created a tight bottleneck, separating the 75,000 State Department staffers—true experts in international relations—from the secretary. As the New York Times reported in August, “all decisions, no matter how trivial, must be sent to Mr. Tillerson or his top aides: Margaret Peterlin, his chief of staff, and Brian Hook, the director of policy planning.” In practice, however, that has meant Peterlin and Hook make the decisions.

More important, sources who spoke with American Greatness say, Peterlin and Hook have stymied every effort by pro-Trump policy officials to get jobs at the State Department.
Margaret Peterlin

Margaret Peterlin

“Peterlin is literally sitting on stacks of résumés,” one national security expert told American Greatness. Together, Peterlin and Hook are “boxing out anyone who supports Trump’s foreign policy agenda,” he added.

Peterlin, an attorney and former Commerce Department official in the George W. Bush Administration, was hired to help guide political appointments through the vetting and confirmation process. She reportedly bonded with Tillerson during his confirmation hearings, and he hired her as his chief of staff.
Brian Hook

Brian Hook

Peterlin then brought in Hook, who co-founded the John Hay Initiative, a group of former Mitt Romney foreign-policy advisors who publicly refused to support Trump because he would “act in ways that make America less safe.” In a May 2016 profile of NeverTrump Republicans, Hook told Politico, “Even if you say you support him as the nominee, you go down the list of his positions and you see you disagree on every one.”

Hook now directs the department’s Office of Policy Planning, responsible for churning out policy briefs and helping to shape the nation’s long-term strategic agenda.

NeverTrumpers on Parade

We live in a dangerous world. For the 70,000 officers at Homeland Security and the 40,000 officers within the Department of Justice, proper training and equipment are vital to their daily law enforcement duties. Over a nearly two-year period – the last years of the Obama administration (FY2015 – FY2016), these law enforcement agencies spent $138 million on new guns and ammunition. That seems reasonable.

What’s curious, however, is that traditionally administrative agencies spent more than $20 million. Four notable examples:

1) The 2,300 Special Agents at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are allowed to carry AR-15’s, P90 tactical rifles, and other heavy weaponry. Recently, the IRS armed up with $1.2 million in new ammunition. This was in addition to the $11 million procurement of guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment procured between 2006-2014.

2) The Small Business Administration (SBA) spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to load its gun locker with Glocks last year. The SBA wasn’t alone – the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service modified their Glocks with silencers.

3) The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has a relatively new police force. In 1996, the VA had zero employees with arrest and firearm authority. Today, the VA has 3,700 officers, armed with millions of dollars’ worth of guns and ammunition including AR-15’s, Sig Sauer handguns, and semi-automatic pistols.

4) Meanwhile, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agents carry the same sophisticated weapons platforms used by our Special Forces military warriors. The HHS gun locker is housed in a new “National Training Operations Center” – a facility at an undisclosed location within the DC beltway.

Last year, we released our OpenTheBooks.com Oversight Report: The Militarization of America in an editorial published with former-U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn at The Wall Street Journal. Our report quantified the $1.48 billion spent by 67 non-military federal agencies on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment from 2006-2014.

This week, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com updated our data to include gun and ammo purchases over fiscal year 2015 and a partial FY2016. Spending on guns and ammo at 58 non-military federal agencies – including 40 regulatory, administrative agencies – amounted to $158 million.

The continued growth of the federal arsenal begs the question: Just whom are the feds planning to battle?

More examples of agencies amassing firepower over the last two years:

Loading the Gun Locker – Federal agencies spent $44 million on guns, including an “urgent” order for 20 M-16 Rifles with extra magazines at the Department of Energy ($49,559); shotguns and Glock pistols at the General Services Administration ($16,568); and a bulk order of pistols, sights, and accessories by the Bureau of Reclamation whose main job is to build dams, power plants, and canals ($697,182).

Buying Bullets in Bulk – The government spent $114 million on ammunition, including bulk purchases by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ($66,927); the Smithsonian ($42,687); and the Railroad Retirement Board ($6,941). The Social Security Administration spent $61,129 on bullets including 50,000 rounds of ammunition plus 12-gauge buckshot and slug ammo.

The EPA special agents purchased ammunition for their .357 and 9mm revolvers and buckshot for their shotguns. While Bernie Sanders claimed that the biggest adversary to the United States was climate change, the EPA stood ready to fight in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

Hollow-Point Bullets – Despite being outlawed by the Geneva Convention, federal agencies spent $426,268 on hollow-point bullets, including orders from the Forest Service, National Park Service, Office of Inspector General, Bureau of Fiscal Service, as well as Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Let’s put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: The cool half-million bucks the Putin regime funneled to Bill Clinton was five times the amount it spent on those Facebook ads — the ones the media-Democrat complex ludicrously suggests swung the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.

The Facebook-ad buy, which started in June 2015 — before Donald Trump entered the race — was more left-wing agitprop (ads pushing hysteria on racism, immigration, guns, etc.) than electioneering. The Clintons’ own long-time political strategist Mark Penn estimates that just $6,500 went to actual electioneering. (You read that right: 65 hundred dollars.) By contrast, the staggering $500,000 payday from a Kremlin-tied Russian bank for a single speech was part of a multi-million-dollar influence-peddling scheme to enrich the former president and his wife, then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton. At the time, Russia was plotting — successfully — to secure U.S. government approval for its acquisition of Uranium One, and with it, tens of billions of dollars in U.S. uranium reserves.

Here’s the kicker: The Uranium One scandal is not only, or even principally, a Clinton scandal. It is an Obama-administration scandal.

The Clintons were just doing what the Clintons do: cashing in on their “public service.” The Obama administration, with Secretary Clinton at the forefront but hardly alone, was knowingly compromising American national-security interests. The administration green-lighted the transfer of control over one-fifth of American uranium-mining capacity to Russia, a hostile regime — and specifically to Russia’s state-controlled nuclear-energy conglomerate, Rosatom. Worse, at the time the administration approved the transfer, it knew that Rosatom’s American subsidiary was engaged in a lucrative racketeering enterprise that had already committed felony, extortion, fraud, and money-laundering offenses.

The Obama administration also knew that congressional Republicans were trying to stop the transfer. Consequently, the Justice Department concealed what it knew. DOJ allowed the racketeering enterprise to continue compromising the American uranium industry rather than commencing a prosecution that would have scotched the transfer. Prosecutors waited four years before quietly pleading the case out for a song, in violation of Justice Department charging guidelines. Meanwhile, the administration stonewalled Congress, reportedly threatening an informant who wanted to go public.

Obama’s ‘Reset’

To understand what happened here, we need to go back to the beginning.

The first-tier military arsenal of Putin’s Russia belies its status as a third-rate economic power. For well over a decade, the regime has thus sought to develop and exploit its capacity as a nuclear-energy producer. Naïvely viewing Russia as a “strategic partner” rather than a malevolent competitor, the Bush administration made a nuclear-cooperation agreement with the Kremlin in May 2008. That blunder, however, was tabled before Congress could consider it. That is because Russia, being Russia, invaded Georgia.

In 2009, notwithstanding this aggression (which continues to this day with Russia’s occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia), President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton signaled the new administration’s determination to “reset” relations with Moscow. In this reset, renewed cooperation and commerce in nuclear energy would be central.

There had been such cooperation and commerce since the Soviet Union imploded. In 1992, the administration of President George H. W. Bush agreed with the nascent Russian federation that U.S. nuclear providers would be permitted to purchase uranium from Russia’s disassembled nuclear warheads (after it had been down-blended from its highly enriched weapons-grade level). The Russian commercial agent responsible for the sale and transportation of this uranium to the U.S. is the Kremlin-controlled company “Tenex” (formally, JSC Techsnabexport). Tenex is a subsidiary of Rosatom.

Tenex (and by extension, Rosatom) have an American arm called “Tenam USA.” Tenam is based in Bethesda, Md. Around the time President Obama came to power, the Russian official in charge of Tenam was Vadim Mikerin.

In 2010, the FBI arrested ten Russian spies as part of “Operation Ghost Stories.” According to a top FBI official, the agency had to act quickly because the “deep cover” agents had come very close to “a sitting US cabinet member.” They had already infiltrated then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, befriending a Democratic fundraiser close to Clinton.

Clinton’s Russian connections have attracted more scrutiny following recent revelations of an FBI investigation into Russian company Rosatom, which gained control of 20 percent of U.S. uranium in the 2010 Uranium One deal. The fact that the Russian spies attempted to infiltrate Clinton’s network just before the Uranium One deal has been previously reported by PJ Media’s Pat Poole, and the connection to the recent revelations of the FBI investigation into Rosatom was reported by Center for Security Policy analyst J. Michael Waller in The Daily Caller Friday.

“We were becoming very concerned,” Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s assistant director of counterintelligence, told the BBC in 2012. “They were getting close enough to a sitting US cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue.”

There are many reasons to suggest Clinton was this “sitting US cabinet member.” In June 2010, Barbara Morea, president of Morea Financial Services in Manhattan, confirmed that “Cynthia Murphy,” Russian External Intelligence Service (SVR) spy Lidiya Guryeva, was a longtime employee and vice president at the company. The company managed the finances of Alan Patricof, one of New York’s top Democratic donors, who fundraised for Clinton’s Senate and presidential campaigns.

Federal court documents reported that Guryeva had “several work-related personal meetings” with “a prominent New York-based financier.” The complaint added that Guryeva and her husband reported back to Moscow that the financier was “prominent in politics,” “an active fundraiser for” a major political party, and a “personal friend” of a current Cabinet official. Patricof fit every one of these descriptions.

Orders from Moscow suggested Patricof might “provide [Guryeva] with remarks re US foreign policy, ‘roumors’ [sic] about White house internal ‘kitchen…'” Worse, the court document also noted that Guryeva “explained to [her husband] that he would not be able to work at the top echelons of certain parts of the United States Government — the State Department, for example.”

While the documents never mention Hillary Clinton by name, the evidence all points in her direction. Guryeva was focused on Patricof, a close friend of Clinton’s, sought to gain information about the White House from a source close to Clinton, and expressed a familiarity with the State Department, the agency Hillary Clinton ran.

Patricof confirmed that he appeared to have been the target, and said he had never talked politics with Guryeva.

Clinton spokesmen at the time insisted that the secretary of State was not the Russian spy ring’s target, but Figliuzzi’s comment suggests a fear that the SVR agents would get too close to a certain cabinet member.

The FBI arrested the Russian spies on June 28, 2010, one day before Bill Clinton gave a speech in Moscow to a Kremlin-connected investment bank, Renaissance Capital. Clinton received $500,000 for this speech. CONTINUE AT SITE

Once again, the Left—in its frenzy to deploy any weapon at hand to damage President Trump—made the critical mistake of allowing us to peer behind the curtain and see what they’re really up to. https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/20/kelly-exposes-ugliness-on-the-left-limpness-on-the-right/

Democrats and their accomplices in the media attempted to gin up controversy following the deaths of four service members killed in Niger earlier this month. They pounced again after a notorious Democratic Party hack, and self-proclaimed “rock star,” Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.), said Trump’s call to one of the Gold Star families was “insensitive.”

Wilson announced with indignation that Trump told a widow of one of the slain soldiers her husband “knew what he signed up for…but when it happens, it hurts anyway.” The furrowed brows crowd populating our illustrious Democratic-media complex ran with the story, eager to tar Trump and turn Niger into his Benghazi—only this time, it would be a Benghazi that actually mattered to them.

This was not to be, however, because we no longer live in the Bush era. Trump and his team understand the importance of fighting back in the face of reckless criticism. Absorbing low blows from your political adversaries serves no good purpose when they are beyond shame.

So General John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, stepped in and gave them a much-deserved thrashing.

Kelly manfully detailed the heart-wrenching process of what happens after a member of our armed services dies in combat. He spoke of how a family is notified—an experience with which he is all too familiar, both as a commander and as a father who has lost a son in Afghanistan. He defended Trump from the media’s attacks but, even more important, he eviscerated the credibility and the honor of Rep. Wilson and her characteristically self-serving misrepresentations. (Misrepresentations that have been refuted now by other families, too.)

After doing so, he took us back to a place of honor—back to the “stones” of Arlington National Cemetery that mark the final resting places of the finest men and women our great nation has ever produced. These stories about the sacrifices made by our men and women in the military (and the sacrifices of their families) should shame us all as we gobble up this media-created spectacle. How can we reflect on these incredible acts of valor and then wish to wallow in the latest attempt to exploit every misfortune and turn it into an anti-Trump talking point?

Regarding what Trump said to the widow, Kelly maintained it was nothing more than advice he gave the president prior to the call:

Well, let me tell you what I told him. Let me tell you what my best friend, Joe Dunford, told me—because he was my casualty officer. He said, Kel, he was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining that 1 percent. He knew what the possibilities were because we’re at war. And when he died, in the four cases we’re talking about, Niger, and my son’s case in Afghanistan—when he died, he was surrounded by the best men on this Earth: his friends. That’s what the President tried to say to four families the other day.

Kelly also hit back hard against Wilson’s despicable attacks:

I was stunned when I came to work yesterday morning, and broken-hearted at what I saw a member of Congress doing. A member of Congress who listened in on a phone call from the President of the United States to a young wife, and in his way tried to express that opinion—that he’s a brave man, a fallen hero, he knew what he was getting himself into because he enlisted. There’s no reason to enlist; he enlisted. And he was where he wanted to be, exactly where he wanted to be, with exactly the people he wanted to be with when his life was taken.

If Wilson had any part of character or virtue, she would silently accept Kelly’s damning judgment. Instead, and unbelievably, she reacted to Kelly’s emotional presser by stating that he was simply “trying to keep his job.” “He will say anything,” she said. And this newly-minted “rock star” then debased herself further:

Her appalling words are surpassed only by her abominable behavior. In truth, she ought to resign immediately.

Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense and First Amendment lawyer and writer, is WGBH/News’ “Freedom Watch” columnist. He practices law in an “of counsel” capacity in the Boston law firm Zalkind Duncan & Bernstein LLP. He is the author, most recently, of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (New York: Encounter Books, updated edition 2011). The author thanks his research assistant, Nathan McGuire, for his invaluable work on this series.

Is special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, appointed in mid-May to lead the investigation into suspected ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and various shady (aren’t they all?) Russian officials, the choirboy that he’s being touted to be, or is he more akin to a modern-day Tomas de Torquemada, the Castilian Dominican friar who was the first Grand Inquisitor in the 15th Century Spanish Inquisition?

Given the rampant media partisanship since the election, one would think that Mueller’s appointment would lend credibility to the hunt for violations of law by candidate, now President Trump and his minions.

But I have known Mueller during key moments of his career as a federal prosecutor. My experience has taught me to approach whatever he does in the Trump investigation with a requisite degree of skepticism or, at the very least, extreme caution.

When Mueller was the acting United States Attorney in Boston, I was defense counsel in a federal criminal case in which a rather odd fellow contacted me to tell me that he had information that could assist my client. He asked to see me, and I agreed to meet. He walked into my office wearing a striking, flowing white gauze-like shirt and sat down across from me at the conference table. He was prepared, he said, to give me an affidavit to the effect that certain real estate owned by my client was purchased with lawful currency rather than, as Mueller’s office was claiming, the proceeds of illegal drug activities.

My secretary typed up the affidavit that the witness was going to sign. Just as he picked up the pen, he looked at me and said something like: “You know, all of this is actually false, but your client is an old friend of mine and I want to help him.” As I threw the putative witness out of my office, I noticed, under the flowing white shirt, a lump on his back – he was obviously wired and recording every word between us.

Years later I ran into Mueller, and I told him of my disappointment in being the target of a sting where there was no reason to think that I would knowingly present perjured evidence to a court. Mueller, half-apologetically, told me that he never really thought that I would suborn perjury, but that he had a duty to pursue the lead given to him. (That “lead,” of course, was provided by a fellow that we lawyers, among ourselves, would indelicately refer to as a “scumbag.”)

This experience made me realize that Mueller was capable of believing, at least preliminarily, any tale of criminal wrongdoing and acting upon it, despite the palpable bad character and obviously questionable motivations of his informants and witnesses. (The lesson was particularly vivid because Mueller and I overlapped at Princeton, he in the Class of 1966 and me graduating in 1964.)

Years later, my wariness toward Mueller was bolstered in an even more revelatory way. When he led the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, I arranged in December 1990 to meet with him in Washington. I was then lead defense counsel for Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, who had been convicted in federal court in North Carolina in 1979 of murdering his wife and two young children while stationed at Fort Bragg. Years after the trial, MacDonald (also at Princeton when Mueller and I were there) hired me and my colleagues to represent him and obtain a new trial based on shocking newly discovered evidence that demonstrated MacDonald had been framed in part by the connivance of military investigators and FBI agents. Over the years, MacDonald and his various lawyers and investigators had collected a large trove of such evidence.

A Russian company, whose former executive was the target of an FBI investigation and who admitted to corrupt payments to influence the awarding of contracts with the Russian state-owned nuclear energy corporation, paid millions of dollars in consulting fees to an American firm in 2010 and 2011 to lobby the U.S. regulatory agencies and assist the Russians, who would go on to acquire twenty percent of American uranium, according to court documents, a former FBI informant and extensive interviews with law enforcement sources.

Roughly $3 million in payments from 2010 to 2011 were made to APCO Worldwide Inc. The firm also provided in kind pro-bono services to Bill Clinton’s foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, services they begin 2007, according to APCO officials who spoke with Circa and press releases from the company. In 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was part of the Obama administration board that would eventually approve the sale of U.S. uranium supply to a Russian company.

According to the contract obtained by Circa, the “total fee is comprised of the fixed quarterly fee which shall be $750,000 per each of the four three-month periods of rendering Services here under during the validity period of this contract, including the 18 percent Russian VAT payable in the territory of the Russian Federation.”

Long-time Clinton supporter and APCO CEO, Margery Kraus signed the continuing contract on April 12, 2010, with TENEX, as the Russian company’s top executive Russian businessman Vadim Milkerin was being investigated by the FBI for kickbacks and bribery involving American companies, according to the APCO TENEX contract and court documents obtained by Circa. TENEX is a subsidiary of the the Russian state owned nuclear giant Rosatom, according to financial filings of the company.

APCO Worldwide Inc. said in a statement to Circa, “APCO was not involved on any aspect of Uranium One, or the CFIUS process relating to it. APCO Worldwide undertook activities on behalf of Tenex in 2010 and 2011 relating to civil nuclear cooperation, which APCO properly disclosed in detail at the time in public filings. Separately, since 2007-2008, APCO provided services in kind to the Clinton Global Initiative. APCO’s work for Tenex and APCO’s work for the Clinton Global Initiative were separate and unconnected, publicly documented from the outset, and fully consistent with all regulations and US law.”

APCO also told Circa in the statement that “Milkerin was not involved in APCO’s contract with Tenex and APCO did not have any relationship with him.”

“We have never been interviewed by the FBI … and we discovered the charges like everyone else ,” an APCO official familiar with contract said.

The Clinton Foundation did not respond to numerous attempts for comment.

Russian efforts to influence the U.S. political system have fascinated the American media for much of the past year—but not this week. A sudden and likely temporary loss of appetite to explore collusion theories seems to have developed early on Tuesday.

That’s around the time that the The Hill began breaking a series of stories on Russia’s efforts to influence Obama Administration policy and advance the interests of the Russian nuclear industry. Expect the condition to persist until the next leak from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office.

The Hill’s Tuesday’s bombshell noted:

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews…

[U.S. investigators] also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

On Wednesday, the publication added more to the story:

An American businessman who worked for years undercover as an FBI confidential witness was blocked by the Obama Justice Department from telling Congress about conversations and transactions he witnessed related to the Russian nuclear industry’s efforts to win favor with Bill and Hillary Clinton and influence Obama administration decisions, his lawyer tells The Hill.

On Thursday, The Hill reported:

As he prepared to collect a $500,000 payday in Moscow in 2010, Bill Clinton sought clearance from the State Department to meet with a key board director of the Russian nuclear energy firm Rosatom — which at the time needed the Obama administration’s approval for a controversial uranium deal, government records show.

The Rosatom director named Arkady Dvorkovich, was “a top aide to then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and one of the highest-ranking government officials to serve on Rosatom’s board of supervisors, was listed on a May 14, 2010, email as one of 15 Russians the former president wanted to meet during a late June 2010 trip, the documents show,” wrote the Hill.

Mr. Clinton ended up meeting with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin instead. The Russians ended up getting control of the uranium. The sale benefited donors to the Clinton Foundation, which failed to disclose some of the money donated as required by an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama Administration.

The Hill is hardly a conservative publication but its impressive reporting this week seems to have captured little attention beyond right-of-center columnists and websites. Reporters at The Hill must be wondering what it will take to arouse the curiosity of most of their media brethren. The Tuesday report also noted that the Russian plot actually resulted in criminal convictions—although almost nobody knew that at the time: CONTINUE AT SITE