UPDATE: More on the Clinton Russian scandal.
J. Michael Waller, writing in the Daily Caller, says that new FBI information about corruption in a Clinton-approved uranium deal with Russia raises questions about Clinton’s actions after the FBI broke up a deep-cover Russian spy ring in 2010. The FBI ran an elaborate and highly successful operation called Ghost Stories to monitor and rip apart a deep-cover Russian agent network. It tracked a ring of Russian spies who lived between Boston and Washington, D.C. under false identities.
In 2010, thanks to the Ghost Stories operation, the FBI arrested 10 spies. According to Waller, “Secretary of State Clinton worked feverishly to return the Russian agents to Moscow in a hastily arranged, lopsided deal with Putin.”
If this is true, why did Clinton do so? Waller ties her actions to the Russia uranium deal:
For the Clintons, the FBI’s biggest counterintelligence bust in history couldn’t have come at a worse time. . .It all happened as the uranium deal was in play: An arrangement to provide Moscow’s state Rosatom nuclear agency with 20 percent of American uranium capacity, with $145,000,000 to pour into the Clinton Family Foundation and its projects.
There are many examples of the corruption of our government. A serious commenter at All Althouse said this’
Blogger buwaya said…
Another difference between the US, the greatest banana republic that has ever been, and your garden-variety banana republic, is that the economic interests that run it are of a vastly different kind.
Your usual banana republic was and is run by people who make money by making things, and mining things, and growing things, and selling them abroad or to local consumers. They may be assholes, they may employ thugs, they can and do cheat and collude and corrupt governments, but their source of wealth is production and there are significant interests shared with the common people, much more than one would think.
In the US though the big money has nearly no interests in common with the commoners. Their wealth rests on exploitation of laws and regulations, paper assets. The people are extraneous and irrelevant.
I have thought for some time that we are being dominated by billionaires that don’t make useful things. Most of it, like Facebook and Google, is vaporware. Some other techie will come along and build a better mousetrap and those entities will disappear.
They don’t make things. Much of the wealth in this country is now created by handling money. It is an old ironic comments that”Even the handling of money can be profitable.”
Now, we are seeing the gigantic scandal that may or may not become apparent. The Democrats are trying to keep the lid on it and Republicans are not a great deal more trustworthy. The story is explained here.
To read the headlines, a poor, beleaguered opposition-research firm was humiliated and constitutionally abused this week by partisan Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Fusion’s lawyers sent a 17-page letter to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, accusing him of misdeeds, declaring his subpoenas invalid, and invoking a supposed First Amendment right to silence. Yet the firm’s founders, the story went, were hauled in nonetheless and forced to plead the Fifth. “No American should experience the indignity that occurred today,” Fusion’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, declared.
Fusion is known as a ruthless firm that excels in smear jobs, but few have noticed the operation it’s conducting against the lawmakers investigating it. The false accusations against Mr. Nunes—that he’s acting unethically and extralegally, that he’s sabotaging the Russia probe—are classic.
This is a firm that in 2012 was paid to dig through the divorce records of a Mitt Romney donor. It’s a firm that human-rights activist Thor Halvorssen testified was hired to spread malicious rumors about him. It’s a firm that financier Bill Browder testified worked to delegitimize his efforts to get justice for Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer beaten to death in a Russian prison.
This is a horrendous scandal begging to get out of the bag that the Obama Justice Department kept it in for years.
There is more here.
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 Act work 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:
As if that mattered. The principals who have kept the lid on for years are Ron Rosenstein, Deputy AG for Trump and Obama, and Alex McCabe, #2 at the FBI in spite of obvious partisan bias. His wife received a half million dollars from Terry McAuliffe for a token House campaign.
The FBI was caught paying for the “dossier” that has been discredited but surface briefly in the Campaign for President last year. Karen Tumulty, a Journolist member in good standing responded.
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:
How does she know and will she share her source with us?
The revelation that the FBI agreed to pay Steele at the same time he was being paid by Clinton supporters to dig into Trump’s background could further strain relations between the law enforcement agency and the White House.
Yes! One might imagine that would put a damper on relations between the two. Also, the reason he was not paid, we’re told in the anonymously sourced story, is precisely because it would look bad if they were to pay him. (Not that this kept the FBI from paying him, if CNN’s reporting based on anonymous sources is correct.)
What the hell is going on ? What happened to the Obamacare repeal bill ? The Senate seems to care little about promises. I wonder why ?
Now, Trump has cancelled the illegal insurance company subsidies and the Senate hurriedly “negotiates” a “compromise.”
As is usually, the case any compromise involved GOP surrender and Democrats’ success at kicking the can down the road.
The authors of a bipartisan plan to calm health insurance markets said Wednesday they’ll push the proposal forward, even as President Donald Trump’s stance ricocheted from supportive to disdainful to arm’s-length and the plan’s fate teetered.
“If something can happen, that’s fine,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “But I won’t do anything to enrich the insurance companies because right now the insurance companies are being enriched. They’ve been enriched by Obamacare like nothing anybody has ever seen before.”
The agreement by Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., on a two-year extension of federal subsidies to insurers that Trump has blocked gained an important new foe. The anti-abortion National Right to Life said it opposed the measure because it lacked language barring people from using their federally subsidized coverage to buy policies covering abortion, said Jennifer Popik, the group’s top lobbyist.
In another blow, Doug Andres, spokesman for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Ryan “does not see anything that changes his view that the Senate should keep its focus on repeal and replace of Obamacare.” With hard-right conservatives wielding considerable influence and unwilling to prop up President Barack Obama’s health care law, it was unclear if Ryan would be willing to even bring the measure to his chamber’s floor.
For once, Ryan seems to see the ugly side of the bill, which would restore illegal subsidies to insurance companies and make them legal.
I am coming to the conclusion that the entire ruling class, Democrat and Republican is corrupt. George Bush;s attack on his success, after 8 years of silence as Obama ripped apart anything good that Bush had done.
George W. Bush: “We know that the desire for freedom is not confined to or owned by any culture. It is the inborn hope of our humanity.”
Yeah. Islam is the “religion of peace” and all that. Jesus !
I am coming to the conclusion that the entire ruling class… is corrupt
Seems to be a growing trend. I was looking back at Bert Lance under Jimmy Carter; Lance got some loans forgiven by a Chicago bank, which was embarrassing for the (allegedly) straight shooter Carter, so Lance resigned.
Came now Hussein Obama who got a loan forgiven by a Chicago bank early in his political career and no one seemed to care too much.
I’m not sure what Nixon wrong, but Ford; Carter; Reagan; and HW seemed pretty straight shooters for the most part. Then Clinton came on the scene and it was like the parents left and the kids got the house to themselves.