RUTHFULLY YOURS

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