Tag Archives: Corruption

News

Was the Trump-Russia Steele dossier the FBI’s “insurance policy” against Trump?

3 Comments
Why do people think that CNN are biased leftist clowns?
Why do people think that CNN are biased leftist clowns?

This is an article from the venerable Andy C. McCarthy, writing for National Review. He knows something investigations of this sort, having investigated and successfully prosecuted the men responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. What does he think about the Trump-Russia dossier that dominated the far-left mainstream media news cycle for months after Trump’s election?

He writes:

The FBI’s deputy director Andrew McCabe testified Tuesday at a marathon seven-hour closed-door hearing of the House Intelligence Committee. According to the now-infamous text message sent by FBI agent Peter Strzok to his paramour, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, it was in McCabe’s office that top FBI counterintelligence officials discussed what they saw as the frightening possibility of a Trump presidency.

That was during the stretch run of the 2016 campaign, no more than a couple of weeks after they started receiving the Steele dossier — the Clinton campaign’s opposition-research reports, written by former British spy Christopher Steele, about Trump’s purportedly conspiratorial relationship with Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia.

Was it the Steele dossier that so frightened the FBI? I think so.

There is a great deal of information to follow. But let’s cut to the chase: The Obama-era FBI and Justice Department had great faith in Steele because he had previously collaborated with the bureau on a big case. Plus, Steele was working on the Trump-Russia project with the wife of a top Obama Justice Department official, who was personally briefed by Steele. The upper ranks of the FBI and DOJ strongly preferred Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, to the point of overlooking significant evidence of her felony misconduct, even as they turned up the heat on Trump. In sum, the FBI and DOJ were predisposed to believe the allegations in Steele’s dossier. Because of their confidence in Steele, because they were predisposed to believe his scandalous claims about Donald Trump, they made grossly inadequate efforts to verify his claims. Contrary to what I hoped would be the case, I’ve come to believe Steele’s claims were used to obtain FISA surveillance authority for an investigation of Trump.

There were layers of insulation between the Clinton campaign and Steele — the campaign and the Democratic party retained a law firm, which contracted with Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the former spy. At some point, though, perhaps early on, the FBI and DOJ learned that the dossier was actually a partisan opposition-research product. By then, they were dug in. No one, after all, would be any the wiser: Hillary would coast to victory, so Democrats would continue running the government; FISA materials are highly classified, so they’d be kept under wraps. Just as it had been with the Obama-era’s Fast and Furious and IRS scandals, any malfeasance would remain hidden.

This is what we know about who paid for the Trump-Russia dossier (the Clinton campaign), and who passed the dossier to the news media (the Clinton bloggers).

I think we need to read these resignations the same way as we read the resignations of high-ranking Obama officials who were investigated and discovered to be using their political positions as weapons to attack Republicans, e.g. – Eric Holder, Lois Lerner, etc.

Basically, the lesson from all of this is that Democrats are no different than corrupt left-wing politicians in other communist regimes. They don’t understand any sort of standard of morality that would require them to do their jobs with integrity. To be a Democrat is to think that morality is a delusion, and that anything is permissible. This is a consequences of abandoning God as author of objective moral values and duties. And that’s why we should not be electing secular leftists to have power over us. It’s too dangerous to let godless people have that kind of power. We shouldn’t see the abuses of power in other left-wing regimes of the past as something different and distinct from the secular leftists in our own country.

News

Silence about Clinton-Russia scandals shows mainstream media’s bias

3 Comments
Hillary Clinton and Vladimir Putin shake hands, such a happy occasion
Hillary Clinton and Vladimir Putin shake hands, such a happy occasion

The leftist media has been desperately trying to find some evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, since Trump stole the election from their beloved Hillary. Nowhere is this more evident than in the media’s continuous covering up for Hillary’s Russia connections. But it’s more than just the media covering up, it’s the leftists in government, as well.

Here is the story from the center-left The Hill:

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They 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.

Rather than bring immediate charges in 2010, however, the Department of Justice (DOJ) continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions.

Do you remember who was attorney general back in 2010? That’s right, it was Eric Holder under President Barack Obama. And the Obama administration decided that this connection between Hillary Clinton’s Clinton Foundation and Russia was not worth doing anything about. Instead, you’ll recall, the Obama administration weaponized government against conservative political groups, by targeting them for IRS sanctions. And ran assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels that were used to kill Border Patrol agents.

But that uranium scandal is not the only Clinton-Russia scandal. What about selling rights to AMERICAN uranium to the Russians?

Radically-leftist extremist Newsweek reports:

When planning a trip to Moscow for a speaking engagement in June 2010, former President Bill Clinton reportedly tried to meet with an official who was part of a Russian state-run company seeking approval to purchase a uranium company with holdings in the United States. Instead, Clinton ended up meeting Vladimir Putin.

A month prior to the trip, Clinton, whose wife, Hillary Clinton, was secretary of state at the time, asked the State Department if it had any “concerns” about a list of 15 people he intended to meet in Russia, The Hill reported Thursday, citing emails and government records.

Among them was Arkady Dvorkovich, an aide to Russia’s president at the time, Dmitri Medvedev, and a board director of Rosatom, the state-run atomic energy agency that was vying for a majority stake in Canadian company Uranium One. The company had mines in the United States, and if the deal went through, Russia would gain control of 20 percent of the U.S.’s uranium.

The deal did win approval even though the FBI reportedly  discovered that officials in Russia’s nuclear industry were bribing an American uranium trucking company, indicating a potential national security threat.

That Uranium One deal did go through, and the Clinton Foundation got $2.35 million in donations from Russia, including $500,000 for a speaking fee for Bill Clinton. He spoke in Moscow, Russia. Uranium (used for making nuclear weapons) for cash. That’s the real Russia scandal – the one that the mainstream media has said virtually nothing about.

Newsbusters explains:

In a shock to no one, the liberal networks funded by taxpayers — PBS and NPR — have so far ignored the emerging new stories on the emerging new investigative stories on Russian involvement with the Clintons and the Obama administration. A Nexis search finds nothing there. PBS and NPR have hammered on Russia over the last two days, but only as it deals with the Trump angle.

But wait! There’s more! This isn’t even the latest Clinton-Russia scandal. Remember how the mainstream media reported on the findings of a Trump research dossier during the election? Well, did you ever ask yourself who funded that dossier?

Fox News explains:

On the same day, Oct. 4, that the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed three employees of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to testify in the Trump dossier investigation, the committee also subpoenaed TD Bank for Fusion’s bank records.

Now, according to a source familiar with the situation, Fusion has asked a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., judge to prevent the bank from complying with the subpoena.

The move comes just days after two of those three Fusion employees asserted their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination rather than answer questions about the dossier. A third subpoenaed Fusion employee, founder Glenn Simpson, has not yet appeared before the House.

The committee’s intention in sending the subpoena to TD Bank is to see if Fusion’s bank records shed light on who financed the Trump dossier. That is one of the two most important questions in the dossier investigation — the other being whether any U.S. intelligence or law enforcement agencies used the unverified dossier as a basis for surveillance applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Fusion has flatly refused to provide any information on its funding to either House or Senate investigators. The two officials refused to answer all questions from the House this week, and in an appearance before Senate Judiciary Committee investigators in August, Simpson also refused to answer the question.

It is not unprecedented for Congress to subpoena bank records. As a general rule, according to congressional investigators, banks usually comply without much fuss. But of course, this is not a routine case.

Wow, the Trump-Russia dossier creators took the fifth, rather than incriminate themselves by telling who funded it. Who could it be? Who stood to benefit most if Trump won the election? The Washington Times has reported that donations to the Clinton Foundation have dried up now that Clinton is no longer in a position of political power.

During the writing of this post, I found another scandal – this one reported in the New York Post, about Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chairman John Podesta. He’s involved (75,000 shares) with a company that “received $35 million from the Russian government while Clinton served as secretary of state.”

If you haven’t heard about any of these scandals, maybe that should tell you something the mainstream media’s bias against reality. All the news that fits their Democrat politics, they print.

News

What scared me the most during 8 years of the Obama administration

4 Comments
Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?
Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?

Progressives (especially liberal white women with non-STEM degrees) often ask me how I can be a conservative since I don’t fit their preconceived notion of a white male Republican. I could talk about how conservative policies are better for my life plans, but usually I just start with a story of something that the Obama administration did that scared me personally – namely, using the IRS to attack conservative groups right before the 2012 elections, so that Obama would win re-election.

Nothing was ever done to the IRS leaders who persecuted this conservative groups under the Obama administration, of course.

However, there might be a happy ending to this story under a Republican administration, as the Daily Signal reports:

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady and tax policy subcommittee Chairman Peter Roskam sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions Wednesday, noting the Obama administration refused to review the information the committee gathered in its extensive investigation into the matter.

According to the congressmen, there is clear evidence Lerner willfully partook in criminal activity during her tenure as the Exempt Organizations division director, yet former President Barak Obama insisted there was “not a smidgeon of corruption” at the agency.

“On April 9, 2014, the House Committee on Ways and Means voted to send a letter to the Department of Justice referring former IRS Exempt Organizations Division Director Lois G. Lerner for criminal prosecution,” Brady and Roskam wrote. “As indicated in the attached letter, the Committee’s nearly three-year investigation uncovered evidence of willful misconduct on the part of Ms. Lerner. Despite this fact, and for what many believe were purely partisan reasons, the prior administration refused to review Ms. Lerner’s misconduct.”

The lawmakers cited evidence showing Lerner provided misleading information to Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s questions and the use of her personal email, which put taxpayers’ confidential information at risk of exposure, as reasons for reopening the investigation.

The DOJ announced in October 2015 it would not pursue criminal charges against Lerner at the close of its two-year probe. The investigation faced challenges due to Lerner’s crashed hard drive, the absence of email archives, and the destruction of over 400 electronic backup tapes, and it was unable to prove the IRS official “intentionally discriminated against an applicant based upon viewpoint” and cited line-employees’ “ignorance, inertia” and “negligence” for delays in tea party applications for r 501(c )(3) status.

“It is clear that when the DOJ announced in October 2015 that it would not bring charges against Lois Lerner, the agency was following President Obama’s signal on how he wanted the investigation to be handled,” they continued. “Taxpayers deserve to know that the DOJ’s previous evaluation was not tainted by politics.”

For now, thought conservative lawmakers are at least trying to get some mony taken out of the IRS budget.

Jim Jordan, my favorite Congressman, explains in USA Today:

Part of my time in Washington has involved investigating the IRS targeting of conservative groups. For a sustained period, the IRS systematically targeted Americans based on their political beliefs.

Congressional efforts to investigate the matter were thwarted. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was brought in to clean up the mess, but under his watch, 422 back-up tapes containing potentially 24,000 emails relevant to the scandal were destroyed. Such actions leave the American people with little trust in the IRS.

Not only did the IRS violate the First Amendment with its targeting, the agency may have violated the Fourth with the use of “Stingray” surveillance technology. Last year, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing about the technology, which tricks cellphones into pinging off a Stingray device to reveal the phone’s location. Such technology might have a place at the FBI, but why does a tax collecting agency need a device that can track citizens’ whereabouts?

These issues, along with other egregious examples of wasteful spending (one IRS employee spent $43,726 at a Ritz Carlton near Washington, D.C.) warrant the Congress to use its power of the purse to demand accountability.

Likewise, it’s up to leaders at the IRS to prioritize their budget on the agency’s core mission: collecting tax revenue and serving its customers, the American taxpayers. Instead of using taxpayer dollars to violate constitutional rights, the agency should refocus on its priorities. Applying budget cuts in a way that hurts its core mission is just another in a long line of poor decisions by IRS leadership.

Given the history of waste, disregard for civil liberties and lack of internal controls at the IRS, it is no surprise that the Trump administration would like to cut the budget. Doing so sends a signal that this Congress and administration will not reward unlawful behavior.

It seems pretty to me at least that the previous administration repeatedly used government power to target and attack those who disagreed with their communist – pacificist policies. I’d like to see Jeff Sessions punish the progressives from the last administration so that they learn the hard way to obey the law, even if they have no sense of morality. If we had electe Ted Cruz, then he would have just abolished the IRS outright, and that would be a wonderful thing.