RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Friday, an anonymous source leaked to CNN that a federal grand jury had approved the filing of charges against a person involved in the Russian collusion investigation. CNN could not identify that person or the charges against him, and a spokesman from Robert Mueller’s special counsel office declined to comment.

The timing of this report is suspicious. Earlier in the week, the Hillary campaign and the DNC had been identified as having funded the famous Trump dossier, in which the first allegations of Trump-Russia collusion appeared. This had been the week’s top story, until the leak from Mueller’s office.

Is the special counsel’s office trying to divert media attention? Are Mueller’s people timing leaks to undercut the focus on Hillary? The leaker told CNN to expect an arrest today. When we learn the identity of the culprit and the charges against him, MSM commentators will speculate about what these new developments imply about Trump’s involvement and the future of his presidency, and Hillary’s pay-for-Russian-gossip story will be yesterday’s news.

Hillary has been on TV quite often these days as she’s gone around the country hawking her book What Happened. Up to now, she’s been taking questions from friendly moderators; on C-Span last week, she said, “Trump and his allies, including Fox News, are really experts at distraction and diversion.” Projection, anyone?

Hillary continued: “So the closer the investigation about real Russian ties between Trump associates and real Russians… the more they just want to throw mud on the wall. I’m their favorite target. Me and President Obama, we are the ones they like to put in the crosshairs.”

As Hillary’s book tour proceeds with ten more appearances before the end of the year, it will be interesting to see if she continues to take questions and whether she continues to speak about “ties between Trump associates and real Russians.” In light of recent information, that message would appear to be non-operational.

In the meantime, the investigative calendar is packed. A former FBI informant has just been released from an FBI-imposed nondisclosure agreement and will testify before Congress about his personal knowledge concerning the Russian purchase of Uranium One. Expect new revelations about Clinton corruption.

And expect more anonymous leaks from Mueller’s office.

The Trump presidency has been consumed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s efforts to uncover collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Mr. Mueller reportedly has secured one or more indictments that he will announce Monday. Some Republicans now seek a new special counsel to investigate if the Clinton Campaign “colluded” with Russians to smear Candidate Trump, along with other aspects of the Clintons’ relationship with Russia and Russian nationals. But one special counsel already is one too many.

During the 1980s and ’90s, American politics was repeatedly distorted, and lives devastated, through the appointment of independent counsels under the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act. These constitutionally anomalous prosecutors were given unlimited time and resources to investigate officials, including President Clinton, and scandals, such as Iran-Contra. Once appointed, almost all independent counsels built little Justice Departments of their own and set out to find something—anything—to prosecute. Hardly anyone lamented the expiration of this pernicious law in 1999.

But special counsels, appointed by the attorney general and in theory subject to Justice Department oversight, haven’t proved any better in practice. Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already morphed into an open-ended inquiry. It is examining issues—like Donald Trump’s private business transactions—that are far removed from the Russian question. It also has expanded its focus beyond the original question of collusion with the Russians to whether anyone involved in the Russia investigation has committed some related offense. That is evident from investigators’ efforts to interview White House aides who were not involved in the 2016 campaign, and from leaks suggesting that Mr. Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey might have “obstructed” justice.

That claim is frivolous, and it damages America’s constitutional fabric even to consider it. A president cannot obstruct justice through the exercise of his constitutional and discretionary authority over executive-branch officials like Mr. Comey. If a president can be held to account for “obstruction of justice” by ending an investigation or firing a prosecutor or law-enforcement official—an authority the constitution vests in him as chief executive—then one of the presidency’s most formidable powers is transferred from an elected, accountable official to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats and judges.

Mr. Mueller’s investigation has been widely interpreted as partisan from the start. Mr. Trump’s opponents instantaneously started talking of impeachment—never mind that a special counsel, unlike an independent counsel, has no authority to release a report to Congress or the public. Mr. Trump’s supporters count the number of Democratic donors on the special-counsel staff. The Mueller investigation is fostering tremendous bitterness among Trump voters, who see it as an effort by Washington mandarins to nullify their votes.

Mr. Trump can end this madness by immediately issuing a blanket presidential pardon to anyone involved in supposed collusion with Russia or Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign, to anyone involved with Russian acquisition of an American uranium company during the Obama administration, and to anyone for any offense that has been investigated by Mr. Mueller’s office. Political weaponization of criminal law should give way to a politically accountable democratic process. Nefarious Russian activities, including possible interference in U.S. elections, can and should be investigated by Congress.

Partisan bitterness will not evaporate if lawmakers take up the investigation. But at least those conducting the inquiry will be legitimate and politically accountable. And the question of whether Russia intervened in the 2016 election, and of whether it made efforts to influence U.S. policy makers in previous administrations, is first and foremost one of policy and national security, not criminal law.

The president himself would be covered by the blanket pardon we recommend, but the pardon power does not extend to impeachment. If Congress finds evidence that he was somehow involved in collusion with Russia, the House can determine whether to begin impeachment proceedings. Congress also is better equipped, as part of its oversight role, to determine whether and how the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agencies might have been involved in the whole affair, including possible misuse of surveillance and mishandling of criminal investigations. CONTINUE AT SITE

Republicans have made impressive use of the Congressional Review Act, overturning 14 last-minute Obama rules. They might be able to do more now that a government agency has confirmed that Congress can also use the law to repeal diktats the Obama Administration slipped in under the regulatory radar.

One example is the 2013 “guidance” that federal financial regulators issued on leveraged lending. This was another example of Obama officials ducking formal rule-making by claiming they were merely issuing “voluntary” suggestions. The banking industry knew better and chose to cut back on leveraged loans, denying a vital source of capital for indebted companies that lack access to public capital markets, and pushing such activity to nonbank lenders that are even less regulated and make riskier bets.

In light of this migration and uncertainty, Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey recently asked the Government Accountability Office to judge whether the guidance counts as a “rule” under the Congressional Review Act. The GAO has now confirmed that it does.

The opening words of the 1996 CRA read: “Before a rule can take effect,” a federal agency must submit a report to Congress. But regulators never did on the leveraged lending guidance. No one has tested the legal limits of the CRA language, but in theory it means the lending guidance is null and void until the Trump Administration submits a report.

As Mr. Toomey notes, even a more limited reading of the law gives Republicans the ability to strike down the lending guidance. The CRA says the clock for Congress’s review of a rule doesn’t begin until a report is submitted. Congress then has 60 legislative days to override with simple majorities in both chambers. Mr. Toomey says the Senate parliamentarian has found that the GAO ruling counts as the official report, and so the clock is now ticking.

Republicans would do well to override the lending guidance on policy grounds. After the financial crisis, regulators subjected banks to new capital and liquidity requirements. They then layered on new restrictions on banking activities, such as leveraged lending. The combination has needlessly driven up costs and curtailed lending.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/10/27/its_time_for_trump_to_kill_the_regulatory_swamp_monsters_135384.html President Trump has successfully taken a chainsaw to some of the most onerous, economy-crushing regulations we have seen in modern times, which have disproportionally hurt consumers and small businesses. However, there are still very punitive Obama-era regulations that career bureaucrats at various federal agencies are using to undermine President Trump’s anti-regulation agenda and further […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/453205/print Have you noticed that we are no longer talking merely about “the Trump Dossier”? Ever since the Washington Post’s startling revelation this week that the dossier was commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, there’s been a subtle tweak in the coverage. Now, reports allude to the research […]

The Clinton team is ramping up its old war room tricks to deal with what is emerging as its own real Russian collusion scandal. One example is its handling of an embarrassing report by the Washington Post that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), through a lawyer representing both parties, helped bankroll the largely discredited Fusion GPS dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, on alleged Trump-Russian connections. The dossier was reportedly based at least in part on information he collected from Russian officials. After first denying any involvement of the Clinton campaign in funding the GPS dossier project until such denial was no longer tenable, the campaign team tried to spin its involvement as somehow being a patriotic act. When the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, who has not been shy in writing critical stories about Donald Trump, tweeted, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year,” Hillary supporters denounced her with ad hominem attacks.

Hillary’s former press secretary, Brian Fallon, exclaimed to CNN’s Don Lemon, “It would be malpractice in my view for the campaign to not to want to turn over every rock and learn everything it could about Donald Trump.”

Really? Then why try to hide the campaign’s involvement for so long? Perhaps one explanation is that the Russian lawyer who had offered Donald Trump Jr. damaging information about Hillary Clinton was also involved with the Clinton campaign-funded Fusion GPS. In other words, a Russian lawyer connected with the firm paid in part by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to come up with dirt on Donald Trump could well have been setting a trap for his son in order to expose him to charges of Russian collusion and worse. Through intermediaries, she may have set out to lure Donald Trump Jr. into attending a meeting with her, using the bait of opposition research about Hillary that never materialized.

The real collusion story is Hillary Clinton’s own willingness to benefit Russia for financial gain despite the risk of compromising national security. During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as former President Obama’s Secretary of State, the FBI had compiled substantial evidence of money laundering, bribery and other criminal activities by Russians reportedly involved with the Uranium One deal, which Hillary subsequently signed off on even though it placed about 20 percent of the U.S. uranium reserves under Russian control.

“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,” the Hill reported.

Hillary Clinton approved the deal along with other members of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, comprised of the leaders of fourteen U.S. government agencies involved in national security and commerce. The only such Obama administration leader reported to have gained financially in connection with the approval of the Uranium One deal was Hillary Clinton. Her family foundation received one hundred forty-five million dollars of donations from investors who benefited from the transfer of Uranium One to Russian control. Bill Clinton received a huge $500,000 speaking fee from a Kremlin-tied Russian bank that promoted the Russian company Rosatom, which had the dual distinction of being the subject of the FBI criminal investigation and of being the firm subsequently approved to assume control over Uranium One.

Congress was kept in the dark regarding the FBI investigation. Prosecution of the case put together by the FBI was placed on hold until years later. The FBI informant who was so instrumental in the case has been kept under wraps until now.

How do you legally spy on your political opponents?

At some point in time that question was asked in the White House, at the DNC or in the hotel suites where Hillary and her staff were staying during her speaking tours. It wasn’t exactly asked that way.

But it was asked. And now we know more of the answer.

What Hillary and Obama did wasn’t Watergate. That was amateur hour. Its sophistication is a tribute to the left’s deep knowledge and control of the workings of Washington, D.C. The men and women who planned this and carried it out understood not only government, but had an intimate familiarity with the loopholes in the laws and the networks of contacts that could realize their highly illegal plans.

The eavesdropping on Trump officials carried the ‘fingerprints’ of an administration that bypassed Congress to fund left-wing groups by blackmailing banks into huge settlements paid out to political allies in a billion dollar slush fund and sent pallets of foreign currency to Iran on unmarked planes. A complete lack of ethical norms was combined with the careful use of legal loopholes to protect the actions of the perpetrators even while they were engaging in a criminal conspiracy.

The revolutionary cell is embedded into left-wing organizing. These cells combined into networks across government, the media and the non-profit sector to pursue a collective agenda. The latest revelations about the Trump dossier give us greater insight into how Obama and Hillary’s people conspired to legally eavesdrop on political opponents by breaking up that eavesdropping into a series of legal actions carried out across different cells.

The road that led to Susan Rice and Samantha Power ‘unmasking’ Trump officials began with the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funding a dossier pushing Trump-Russia conspiracies. The dossier was sourced through Fusion GPS which is notorious for handfeeding material to reporters.

The Clinton campaign was seeing to it that whatever Fusion GPS produced would make its way into media stories without having Hillary’s fingerprints on it. Indeed the only reason we learned that Hillary and the DNC were ultimately behind the dossier was a congressional subpoena that risked exposing other Fusion GPS clients.

But the second reason was far more devious and devastating.

Fusion GPS’ man for the job was Christopher Steele. The former British intelligence figure had connections with FBI people. Hillary Clinton wasn’t just doing “opposition research” as her former press secretary has claimed. The best way to do opposition research in an American election doesn’t involve hiring a Brit in London with contacts in Russian intelligence and the FBI.

That is however the best way to independently produce information that can be injected into an intelligence investigation. (It’s also, perhaps not coincidentally, a great way for the Russians to inject their own material into a presidential election without getting their fingerprints on it.)

Remember that infamous Russian “dossier,” the unverified document that BuzzFeed unceremoniously dumped into the public square earlier this year? You might recall it as making a series of incredibly salacious and completely unproven accusations against the sitting president of the United States. Well, it turns out that it was a piece of partisan opposition research, bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, both of which then denied having anything to do with it after the fact.

Last night the Washington Post reported that the Clinton campaign and the DNC used a lawyer named Marc Elias to retain the oppo-research firm Fusion GPS to conduct research on the Trump campaign (the firm had previously worked on behalf of a still-unidentified Republican to investigate Trump). Fusion GPS then hired a former intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, who conducted an investigation and authored the dossier. According to the Post, the Clinton campaign and the DNC used the law firm to pay Fusion GPS right until the end of October 2016.

As my colleague Andrew McCarthy notes, it’s a clever arrangement. The use of the law firm adds a layer of deniability, and when controversy arises, Fusion GPS is able to appeal to attorney-client privilege to shield itself from scrutiny.

It would be easy, at this point, to start to wander down the rabbit hole, to wonder how much of the so-called “Russia controversy” is based on the Clinton campaign’s opposition research, but let’s not speculate. The truth will emerge. Instead, let’s do something else: Let’s consider how the Russian-dossier story has thus far represented a perfect storm of classic Clintonism, media irresponsibility, and Democratic moral blindness.

First, the Clintonism. The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman responded to the Post story with a perfect tweet:

Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year https://t.co/vXKRV1wRJc
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 24, 2017

“Sanctimonious lying” is Clintonworld’s M.O. From Bill to Hillary to key members of her team, they lie constantly, repetitively, and with style, and the lies often conceal no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle politics designed to win races and destroy political opponents.

The lies here are important. It’s one thing to review a dossier compiled by a “former intelligence agent” and consider its contents as the product of an objective process. It’s another thing entirely to review that same work as the direct product of an opposing campaign’s opposition research. The goal of an opposition researcher is to collect everything and share everything with the client. A proper intelligence analysis, however, involves separating truth from fiction and provable claims from unverifiable allegations.

Those who pitched the Russian dossier treated it not as opposition research but rather as a form of intelligence report. It had distinctive formatting. It used terms of art. It looked like a government document. How many people did it fool?

Bravo, Charles Grassley! The Iowa senator has turned into something of an aging Mr. Smith taking on corruption in the Obama administration (and its Justice Department) and calling for a special investigator for the metastasizing Uranium One Scandal. But is it enough?

As has been reported, this 2010 deal was made despite a hitherto unknown FBI investigation that exposed bribery, kickbacks, etc. on the part of the Russian company involved. The pact resulted in 20% of U.S. uranium in Putin’s hands (some of whic, in lethal yellow cake form, has already disappeared into the ether) and millions of dollars in the Clinton Foundation’s coffers, basically at the same time.

Or should we now call this the Podesta, Podesta & Manafort Scandal, because an ongoing and related report on Tucker Carlson’s cable show is unmasking a series of connections that make the most paranoid conspiracy theorist seem rational?

A thus-far-reliable source who used to be involved with Clinton allies John and Tony Podesta told Tucker Carlson that press reports appearing to implicate President Trump in Russian collusion are exaggerated.

The source, who Carlson said he would not yet name, said he worked for the brothers’ Podesta Group and was privy to some information from Robert Mueller’s special investigation.

While media reports describe former “Black, Manafort & Stone” principal Paul Manafort as Trump’s main tie to the investigation, the source said it is Manafort’s role as a liaison between Russia and the Podesta Group that is drawing the scrutiny….

Manafort was, at the time, representing Russian business and political interests during the Obama era.

The source said the Podesta Group was in regular contact with Manafort while Hillary Clinton was America’s chief diplomat….

According to Carlson, “Manafort was clear that Russia wanted to cultivate ties to Hillary” because she appeared to be the presumptive 45th president.

In other words, as the French say, it’s the world upside down. Russia? Trump? Oh, sorry, no, it’s the Brothers Podesta and, through them, Hillary. Meanwhile, over at the also related (phony) Trump Dossier Scandal:

In the midst of a court case that threatened to reveal the dossier’s funding, it emerged Tuesday night that political consulting firm Fusion GPS was retained last year by Marc E. Elias, an attorney representing the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. The firm then hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to write the dossier that contained unverified and lurid allegations about Trump and his team’s ties to Moscow.

In the latest news, it appears Elias’ firm was being used as a cut-out to avoid campaign disclosure laws in the promulgation of Fusion’s garbage. Possible criminal liability looms. It’s “unclear” whether Mrs. Clinton herself knew about this utterly disgusting behavior in her name, though loyalist Brian Fallon hinted as much on cable news Wednesday.

More disturbingly, indications are that the FBI itself relied on this execrable pack of nauseating lies to jump-start the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. They may even have made additional payments to Fusion GPS themselves. [bold decidedly mine]

Holy Toledo! Has the FBI turned into CNN? Or are they just dumber than the proverbial stones?

Speaking of which, we also have the unanswered questions about Deborah Wasserman Schultz and her Pakistani computer expert who had access to the data of dozens of congressional Democrats, not to mention the unsolved mystery of the murder of Seth Rich and the hacking of the DNC server. The FBI and the DOJ have told us next to nothing about either. In general, we learn more from Julian Assange, like him or not. CONTINUE AT SITE

As Rich noted last night, we have learned finally, courtesy of the Washington Post, that Fusion GPS, the research firm that produced the notorious “Trump Dossier,” was funded by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Of course, the Clinton campaign and the DNC always want layers of deniability and obfuscation – and let’s note that it has served them well – so they hire lawyers to do the icky stuff rather than doing it directly. Then, when the you-know-what hits the fan, outfits like Fusion GPS try to claim that they can’t share critical information with investigators because of (among other things) attorney-client confidentiality concerns.

Here, the Clinton campaign and the DNC retained the law firm of Perkins Coie; in turn, one of its partners, Marc E. Elias, retained Fusion GPS. We don’t know how much Fusion GPS was paid, but the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $9.1 million to Perkins Coie during the 2016 campaign (i.e., between mid-2015 and late 2016).

A friend draws my attention to an intriguing coincidence.

In its capacity as attorney for the DNC, Perkins Coie – through another of its partners, Michael Sussman – is also the law firm that retained CrowdStrike, the cyber security outfit, upon learning in April 2016 that the DNC’s servers had been hacked.

Interesting: Despite the patent importance of the physical server system to the FBI and Intelligence-Community investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the Bureau never examined the DNC servers. Evidently, the DNC declined to cooperate to that degree, and the Obama Justice Department decided not to issue a subpoena to demand that the servers be turned over (just like the Obama Justice Department decided not to issue subpoenas to demand the surrender of critical physical evidence in the Clinton e-mails investigation).

Instead, the conclusion that Russia is responsible for the invasion of the DNC servers rests on the forensic analysis conducted by CrowdStrike. Rather than do its own investigation, the FBI relied on a contractor retained by the DNC’s lawyers.

The most significant pressing question about the so-called Trump Dossier is whether it was used by the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to get a warrant from the FISA court to conduct national-security surveillance on people connected to the Trump campaign. As I have previously pointed out, this would not be as scandalous as it sounds if (a) the Justice Department had a good faith basis to believe the people the Bureau wanted to surveil were acting as agents of Russia, and (b) the FBI first corroborated whatever information it took from the dossier before presenting it to the FISA court.

But it certainly is interesting that we are once again, in a case involving alleged Russian espionage, reviewing a situation in which the FBI relied on a contractor retained by the DNC’s and the Clinton campaign’s lawyers at Perkins Coie.