RUTHFULLY YOURS

As Democrats and the scientific establishment howl over President Trump’s proposed budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Congress is investigating whether that agency misspent U.S. tax dollars to fund two European cancer institutions now under scrutiny for conflicts of interest and dubious science. Key lawmakers are also trying to understand the nature of the cozy relationship between federal bureaucrats with budgets and foreign researchers who are eager to accept grants to promote a political agenda at taxpayers’ expense.

On March 24, House Science, Space, and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price (who oversees NIH) requesting information about millions of dollars paid to the Ramazzini Institute, an obscure but controversial cancer non-for-profit based in Italy. The funds were given out by NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), run by Linda Birnbaum; she is also, coincidentally, a Ramazzini fellow.

Birnbaum seems to be at the center of a tangled web of federal contracts, agenda-driven scientists and the largely unaccountable organizations that give them cover. Smith accuses Birnbaum’s office of awarding at least $92 million to Ramazzini and Ramazzini fellows since 2009: “The Committee is concerned that contracts awarded to the Ramazzini Institute and its affiliates may not meet adequate scientific integrity standards. If true, this raises serious questions about the integrity of the acquisition process at NIEHS.” Of the payments made directly to Ramazzini, several are from sole-source contracts that did not go through a bidding process. According to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, which filed suit this month seeking public documents about the payments, NIH has awarded Ramazzini fellows more than $315 million in grants since 1985; Chairman Smith says that it’s “unclear what services were rendered” under NIH contracts with Ramazzini.

According to the Ramazzini Institute’s website, it achieves “extremely important results at international level [sic] in research into carcinogenic substances present in the environment we live in and in the food that we eat.” Ramazzini claims to work with NIH to develop “experimental data from long-term cancerogenesis bioassays . . . and make available to the scientific community the data of the studies published, and therefore to allow qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the risk and other research.” Despite this claim, no scientific research or budget information is available on their website.

Remember: Obamacare is not imploding:

Says Vox

Says USA Today

Says Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber

Says the Daily Beast

Says Rep. Sander Levin

Says…well, you get the idea.

The New York Times doesn’t come right out and say it, but the Times published an article detailing how millions of Americans are going to be left high and dry next year by insurance companies that are fleeing the state exchanges to avoid losing their shirts.

Two of the largest remaining insurance companies involved with Obamacare will not be offering any plans on the state exchanges next year. Since those companies were the sole provider of Obamacare insurance in dozens of counties, this means that large swaths of the country will not be able to purchase subsidized insurance policies, forcing many of them to go without.

Many counties already have just one insurer offering health plans in the Obamacare marketplaces, and some of those solo insurers are showing signs that they are eyeing the exits.

Humana announced this year that they’d be leaving the markets altogether next year. That means there are parts of Tennessee that will have no insurance options unless another insurer decides to enter.

And Anthem, which operates in 14 states, is getting nervous, an industry analyst told Bloomberg News this week. Its departure would be a much bigger problem. According to an analysis of government data by Katherine Hempstead at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Anthem is currently the only insurance carrier in nearly 300 counties, serving about a quarter of a million people.

Even Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of Obamacare’s biggest boosters in the industry, is running away from the exchanges.

One thing is certain. Any help for insurance companies and consumers will not be coming from Washington. There will be no congressional bailout for insurance companies. There will be no White House support either.

Anthem could well stay in the markets. It may simply be floating the option of departure to improve its negotiating position with the Trump administration over various regulatory requests. Or it may be expressing anxiety about the future. Insurers around the country are worried about the policy environment surrounding the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Trump has said that the health law “will explode” — a comment that may suggest he will do little to help the markets, or could even set the fuse.

When insurers left communities in recent years, the Obama administration and local officials worked hard to recruit replacements. The Trump administration might not do the same. So far, no carrier has come forward publicly to say it will serve the counties in Tennessee that Humana is leaving.

‘Horrifying!” inveighed an indignant Hillary Clinton at the last presidential debate, less than three weeks before Election Day. What so horrified her? Donald Trump’s refusal to pledge that he would accept the legitimacy of the election.

Trump speculated that the electoral process could be rigged. Until he saw how it played out, the Republican nominee said, he could not concede that the result would be on the up-and-up.

Trump offered a three-part “rigging” claim. There was the allegation for which he’d already been roundly derided: A foreign element could swing the election — specifically, “millions” of ineligible voters, a reference to illegal immigrants, the bane of his campaign. Further, there was the gross one-sidedness of the media’s campaign coverage — scathing when it came to him; between inattentive and fawning when it came to his opponent, whose considerable sins were airbrushed away. Finally, there was deep corruption: Clinton, he maintained, should not have been permitted to run given the significant evidence of felony misconduct in her mishandling of classified information. Meanwhile, law-enforcement agencies of the Democratic administration bent over backwards to give her a pass, and congressional Democrats closed ranks around her — conducting themselves in committee hearings more like her defense lawyers than investigators searching for the truth.

A flabbergasted Clinton responded that she was shocked — horrified! — to hear Trump “talking down our democracy.” This was a top theme in her campaign’s closing days: The election was absolutely legitimate; Trump was traitorously condemnable for refusing to say so.

Of course, Clinton and the Democrats who parroted her would prefer that you forget that now. And given her strained relationship with the truth, they’re right to calculate that you’d never retain anything she said for very long. Nobody does. Corporate big wheels who paid to hear her vaporous speechifying couldn’t tell you a memorable thing she’d said after paying $250,000 for her “insights.”

The media-Democrat indictment of Trump’s election-rigging spiel was not rooted in patriotic commitment to the American democratic tradition of accepting election outcomes. They said what they said because they fully expected to win — all the polls said so! Hillary and her chums, Barack Obama included, would not abide a taint of illegitimacy affixing itself to her inevitable presidency.

Except she wasn’t so inevitable.

So now, there is just one very inconvenient problem for the “Russia hacked the election” narrative, the tireless media-Democrat harangue since November 8: Everything of substance that is known to the U.S. government about Russian meddling was already known in those pre-election weeks when Clinton and the Democrats were hailing the legitimacy of the process.

They’ve changed their tune not because the facts changed, but because they lost.

And exactly what would you do if you were in General Michael Flynn’s shoes?

It is not just that the long knives are out for him. The arena in which they bay for Flynn’s blood is no longer one of truth and justice but of social justice. No distinctions between partisan disagreement and crime, between intelligence and law-enforcement, between responsibly discreet investigation and political theater.

Put Flynn aside. The country in which we live has become so infected by partisan rage that federal courts are not embarrassed to invalidate a perfectly lawful executive order (restricting alien travel) on the sole ground that it was issued by Donald Trump. Had the same order, word-for-word, been issued by Barack Obama, it would have been swiftly upheld, if challenged at all. Politically “progressive” judges, however, have adopted an irrebuttable “Trump is evil” presumption. The new president’s allegedly guilty mind outweighs his every action, no matter how solidly rooted in law.

The object of the Left’s game is to nullify Trump’s presidency, whether by impeachment or withering rebuke. The best way to get there is to demonize his associates, such that they are criminals and their crimes are his crimes. On that list, it doesn’t get higher than Mike Flynn.

Long before riding the front of the Trump Train, Flynn made himself the bête noire of the intelligence community, accusing it of politicizing intelligence analyses and concealing the ineffectiveness of Obama’s approach to jihadist terror – claims which, to the great embarrassment of Obama’s spy chiefs, have been corroborated by intelligence agency operatives. Like Trump, moreover, Flynn – brash, unpolished, and erratic – has a knack for making enemies on all sides, such that Washington is now full of two kinds of people: those out to get Flynn and those who whisper that he had it coming.

Even that does not begin to describe the jeopardy Flynn had to be sensing when his lawyer reportedly offered his cooperation with investigations into Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential campaign in exchange for some form of immunity from prosecution. But it does provide a sense of the poisonous atmosphere in which, as night follows day, government officials leaked the offer to the media, spinning it as an admission of guilt – although, of what offense, no one seems able to say.

Imagine that. During the months of the Hillary Clinton email scandal, we learned that the major subjects of the investigation – involving felony mishandling of classified information and destruction of tens of thousands of government records – retained counsel and sought various forms of immunity in exchange for their cooperation. Mind you, this was under circumstances in which they knew the Justice Department was in the tank for them – so in the tank that Mills and Samuelson were permitted to appear as lawyers representing Hillary Clinton, the main subject with respect to whom they had a five-alarm conflict of interest.

No matter. When the conduct of Democrats was at issue, the media told us not to read too much into immunity requests. Standard fare to get a lawyer and seek immunity – doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. Even when subjects of the Clinton investigation claimed their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination rather than testify before Congress; even when reports surfaced of bizarre Justice Department agreements that evidence from the subjects’ computers would be destroyed rather than preserved; even when publication of the subjects’ FBI interviews detailed patently misleading statements – the media-Democrat complex steadfastly maintained there was nothing to see here.

But Mike Flynn, against whom there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing? He is apparently a cross between Robert Hanssen and Al Capone.

Flynn lost his job as Trump’s national security advisor because he provided to Vice President Pence (among other Trump officials) an incomplete version of his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition. The withheld information involved sanctions imposed by Obama, and consequent Russian hopes that Trump would undo them.

It may be that Flynn, belatedly realizing that any mention of sanctions was politically explosive, was “economical” with the facts when briefing Pence. But it could instead be that there was a garble on both sides – i.e., that Flynn took Pence to be asking whether he’d made any promises to Kislyak, but Pence took Flynn’s “no” to mean the subject never came up. Whatever the explanation, Pence was mortified when his public defense of Flynn turned out to be wrong. Flynn was cashiered in short order.

We can be confident, however, that Flynn gave Kislyak no satisfaction – not that doing so would have been a crime, as opposed to a galactic political lapse. We can be confident because the FBI was monitoring Kislyak’s phone, and – although national-security eavesdropping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is classified – Obama officials leaked the intelligence to the New York Times, which actually is a crime. The newspaper thus reported:

Obama advisers heard separately from the F.B.I. about Mr. Flynn’s conversation with Mr. Kislyak, whose calls were routinely monitored by American intelligence agencies that track Russian diplomats. The Obama advisers grew suspicious that perhaps there had been a secret deal between the incoming team and Moscow, which could violate the rarely enforced, two-century-old Logan Act barring private citizens from negotiating with foreign powers in disputes with the United States.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s determination to reconnect with voters in localized, informative settings is commendable, but is in danger of being overshadowed by questions about the interplay of politics and wealthy foreign donors who support the Clinton Foundation.

Nothing illegal has been alleged about the foundation, the global philanthropic initiative founded by former President Bill Clinton. But no one knows better than Mrs. Clinton that this is the tooth-and-claw political season where accusations are going to fly for the next 19 months. And no one should know better than the former senator and first lady that they will fester if straightforward answers are not offered to the public.

The increasing scrutiny of the foundation has raised several points that need to be addressed by Mrs. Clinton and the former president. These relate most importantly to the flow of multimillions in donations from foreigners and others to the foundation, how Mrs. Clinton dealt with potential conflicts as secretary of state and how she intends to guard against such conflicts should she win the White House.

The only plausible answer is full and complete disclosure of all sources of money going to the foundation. And the foundation needs to reinstate the ban on donations from foreign governments for the rest of her campaign — the same prohibition that was in place when she was in the Obama administration.

The messiness of her connection with the foundation has been shown in a report by The Times on a complex business deal involving Canadian mining entrepreneurs who made donations to the foundation and were at the time selling their uranium company to the Russian state-owned nuclear energy company. That deal, which included uranium mining stakes in the United States, required approval by the federal government, including the State Department.

The headline on the website Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when its precursor served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”

The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.

But the untold story behind that story is one that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.

At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.