The Current Scene and Something Rotten in Denmark Now Rotten In America.. Manicured Nails and Swamp Creatures Winning. Take A Knee.

Learning to manage your money is like learning a foreign language: the younger you learn, the better. In this week’s video, Rachel Cruze, best-selling author and financial literacy expert, outlines how parents can raise financially-savvy kids, and why they should start doing so at an early age.
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The  'secret' Harvey Weinstein sex bacchanal was no secret. Many of Hollywood's elite/cognoscenti, who professed they are for women's rights, knew..   Harvey's  money tentacles engulfed virtually all the muck a mucks in the Democrat party. 

Meanwhile, the IRS covered up their efforts to slow walk giving tax free status sought by conservative groups but it became known despite obfuscation on the part of public servants involved who invoked their 5th Amendment Constitutional Rights.

President Clinton met with Atty.General Lynch while Hillary was being investigated by The FBI and Director Comey was engaged in drafting and dropping any charges of culpability prior to the investigation's conclusion. Hillary also was subsequently questioned but not under oath. Bill Clinton claims he met with Lynch to discuss their respective grandchildren.  Lynch also advised Comey to use the word matter instead of investigation.

It has now been revealed a former FBI agent seeks to be unshackled and allowed to testify about Russian collusion involving the Clinton's, their Foundation regarding the sale of 20% of our nation's uranium.  Will this informant be released from his gag order?  There is no constitutional precedent that precludes Congress from receiving information and investigatory prohibition 

Apparently former Atty. General's Holder and Lynch and former FBI Director's Comey and Mueller were aware off the FBI's investigation along with current Deputy Atty General Rosenstein and the chain appears to go all the way up the elevator in The Obama White House.

If there is collusion it might also include bribes. Stay tuned.

Documents pertaining to President Kennedy's assassination are soon to be released on orders from Trump and, I hear, they could be embarrassing to former Director Hoover's FBI.  Why?  Because the organization allegedly could have legally restrained Oswald.  

In citing the above, there are those who argue the aforementioned simply involve political witch hunts, nothing but partisan politics run amok. On the other hand, one could conclude, since national security and wrong doing, at the highest levels of government,  could be involved, there should be investigations in order to validate no one is above the law and justice for all should be enforced.

I  have not even brought up Obama's Iran Deal which should have been deemed a treaty and brought before The Senate.  Knowing it would not pass, he named it an agreement/contract and sought concurrence from The U.N.  Both actions are arguably illegal and against the dictates of our constitution but Republicans have no stomach for much of anything controversial and which might get their manicured nails dirty.

 It is little wonder why many Americans have lost faith in their vast and secretive government, and the mass
media 's ratings are so abysmal.

Will Congress be allowed to perform its Constitutional duty of oversight?  It seems whenever there is evidence of nefarious practices efforts to obstruct becomes insurmountable.  Sen. Grassley is a bull dog but will he be able to get to the bottom of many of these allegations?  Is the Russian  collusion boomerang launched against Trump about to hit the Democrats ?

More recently the public, including members of Congress, are asking,what were we doing in NIger and why did four American Special Forces die?

Trump was attacked for his "insensitivity," by a member of Congress, for comments made to a family member of one of the murdered men during a condolence call. When Trump's Chief of Staff, Gen. Kelly, explained why Trump said what he did, this same member of Congress accused Kelly of being a racist.  When all else fails play the race card.

During these increasingly dangerous times one would hope more relevant issues would be up for discussion but nothing Trump does will be allowed to pass without negative comment, scrutiny and parsing.  Even Jimmy Carter noted Trump seems to be receiving an over abundance of untoward criticism.

Shakespeare once wrote there was something rotten in Denmark. One might conclude it has jumped the pond and now might engulf America, certain high placed Democrats and members of the former administration.

So far the swamp creatures are winning.(See 1 below.)

Worth re-posting and I urge you read if you failed to do so when I attached in previous memo.. (See 2 below.)

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Take a knee. (See 3 below.)
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Dick

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1) Mueller’s top gun in Russia probe known for hardball tactics, overturned rulings

Has history of intimidating low-level Mafiosos and corporate figures to force them to snitch

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray was an assistant attorney general in 2004 when he heaped praise on an ambitious Mafia-tested prosecutor while promoting him to the top of the Justice Department’s high-profile Enron task force.

Mr. Wray specifically lauded Andrew Weissmann for obtaining convictions against two Enron clients: accounting giant Arthur Andersen and executives at banking dynamo Merrill Lynch.

Andersen was finished as a company; four Merrill executives went to prison.

Today, Mr. Weissmann stands as special counsel Robert Mueller’s top gun in a squadron of nearly 20 prosecutors and scores of FBI agents delving into Trump-Russia. Mr. Weissmann is leading the probe into the biggest target to date, Paul Manafort, President Trump’s onetime campaign manager.

How Mr. Weissmann operated over a decade ago offers possible glimpses at how he carries out orders today from his longtime mentor, Mr. Mueller.

He rode into Texas from New York City in 2002 fresh from putting a number of Mafiosos in prison.

By the time he left in 2005, he had rung up some impressive numbers, such as 22 guilty pleas and millions of dollars in restitution. But he also suffered historic courtroom losses. And how he won and how he lost is still the subject of bitter comments from his adversaries in Houston.

“Do not misunderstand my disdain for him with ineffectiveness or something not to be concerned with,” said Dan Cogdell, who represented three Enron defendants. “He’s a formable prosecutor. If I’m Donald Trump and I know the backstory of Andrew Weissmann, it’s going to concern me. There is no question about it.”

The backstory: Defense attorneys say Mr. Weissmann bent or broke the rules. As proof, they point to appeals court decisions, exhibits and witness statements.

They say he intimidated witnesses by threatening indictments, created crimes that did not exist and, in one case, withheld evidence that could have aided the accused. At one hearing, an incredulous district court judge looked down at an Enron defendant and told him he was pleading guilty to a wire fraud crime that did not exist.

“Weissmann seemed more interested in obtaining convictions than in promoting justice,” said Tom Kirkendall, a Houston lawyer who represented an Enron executive.

Said Mr. Cogdell, a colorful courtroom performer dubbed a “gunslinger” by the local press, “He’s the most aggressive prosecutor I’ve ever been up against. He is, if not win at all cost, he’s win at almost any cost.”

Those convictions for which Mr. Wray offered praise in 2004?

Mr. Weissmann’s cases against Andersen and Merrill Lynch lay in shambles just a few years later.

The Supreme Court, in a 9-0 vote in 2005, overturned the Andersen conviction. A year later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals erased all the fraud convictions against four Merrill Lynch managers. The jury had acquitted another defendant.

“People went off to prison for a completely phantom of a case,” said Mr. Kirkendall.

Mr. Kirkendall became sort of an unofficial Enron historian. He observed goings-on at the Houston federal courthouse and blogged about what he considered a systematic miscarriage of justice.

The task force, which ultimately would catapult prosecutors to lucrative careers, wanted to win as many convictions as possible. They were prosecuting players in one of the nation’s biggest corporate scandals. Enron bosses falsified balance sheets, inflated earnings and traded stocks with insider knowledge. By 2001, the behemoth went bankrupt. Its stock was worthless.

The Justice Department task force mobilized in 2002 and quickly won convictions. But there were dark sides.

That’s where Sidney Powell enters the picture. The Dallas lawyer took the appeal of a Merrill Lynch figure. She obtained from Justice a batch of task force documents in 2010 that should have been disclosed to trial attorneys years earlier.

The documents began to flow in the aftermath of the Sen. Ted Stevens debacle. Justice prosecutors not connected to the Enron task force deliberately withheld evidence favorable to Stevens. A judge threw out his conviction.

Ms. Powell wrote a 2014 book about the scandals, “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.”

“All of the cases Weissmann pushed to trial were reversed in whole or in part due to some form of his overreaching and abuses,” Ms. Powell told The Washington Times. “The most polite thing the Houston bar said about Weissmannwas that he was a madman.”

The special counsel’s office declined to comment to The Times about Mr. Weissmann’s track record.

However, the Justice Department in 2012 and 2013 defended him against ethics complaints and concluded he did not violate the rules.

Given Mr. Weissmann’s long association with Mr. Mueller, who has given him a prominent management role in one of the most important investigations in U.S. history, The Times took a look back at Mr. Weissmann‘s’ 2002-05 Enron task force tenure.

His hardball tactics seem intact today. Within weeks of his arrival in June, the FBI executed a no-knock, predawn raid on Mr. Manafort’s condo. Agents stayed for hours after waking up the target and his wife.

Then a leak appeared in The New York Times. Mr. Mueller had informed Mr. Manafort that he would be indicted. It’s an old Enron tactic: Scare people into talking.

Arthur Anderson

With over 20,000 employees, Andersen stood as one of the country’s most prominent corporate auditors. The Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating Enron, an Andersen client. Auditors started destroying documents.

Mr. Weissmann took the lead in prosecuting Andersen for obstruction of justice in 2002. Andersen’s defense: It followed company policy on when to destroy confidential material.

Convicted at trial, a fatally damaged Andersen appealed. The Supreme Court eventually took the case.

In 2005, the nation's highest court overturned the conviction in a 9-0 opinion, a devastating judgment that shattered Mr. Weissmann’s showcase.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote the opinion, solo — a message of how seriously the high court took the breach.

In essence, Rehnquist said the prosecutor sold the presiding judge on jury instructions that assured conviction.

“Indeed, it is striking how little culpability the instructions required,” Mr. Rehnquist wrote. “For example, the jury was told that, even if [Andersen] honestly and sincerely believed that its conduct was lawful, you may find [Andersen] guilty. The instructions also diluted the meaning of ‘corruptly’ so that it covered innocent conduct.”

Mr. Rehnquist wrote that the government (Mr. Weissmann) insisted, over defense objections, that the word “dishonestly” be excluded from the instructions and that the word “impede” be added.

The chief justice went to the dictionary, read the meaning of “impede” and concluded it was “such innocent conduct” for someone to “impede” the government.

Said Ms. Powell, “Weissmann indicted them for conduct that was not criminal, and he took criminal intent out of the jury instructions that he then persuaded the judge to give.”

With a lack of sustaining clients, a mortally wounded Andersen put out a statement.

“We are very pleased with the Supreme Court’s decision, which acknowledges the fundamental injustice that has been done to Arthur Andersen and its former personnel and retirees,” it said.

In the end, the George W. Bush Justice Department put out of business a thriving accounting firm whose actions could have been handled in other ways short of felony charges.

Merrill Lynch

It became known as the Nigerian barge case. Mr. Weissmann induced indictments in 2003 against four Merrill Lynch executives, an Enron vice president and an Enron accountant. He contended that Merrill and Enron entered into a sham transaction in 1999. The banker would buy three Enron barge-mounted power generators for $7 million purely to boost the Houston company’s balance sheet — and then Enron would buy them back at a profit.

They were charged under a federal statute that normally requires proof that someone paid a bribe or received kickbacks that sullied the business practices of “honest services.” There were no bribes or kickbacks.

Five were convicted. The accountant — represented by Mr. Cogdell — heard the jury say, “Not guilty.”

Four of them appealed while serving time in prison. In 2006, the 5th Circuit reversed all the fraud charges, leaving just a perjury conviction against one executive, whom Ms. Powell came to represent on appeal.

Again, the problem for Mr. Weissmann was his definition of a crime that greatly relaxed the standard for convictions.

“We reverse the conspiracy and wire-fraud convictions of each of the defendants on the legal ground that the government’s [Weissmann task force] theory of fraud relating to the deprivation of honest services is flawed,” the appeals court said.

The opinion said the scheme may have been unethical but did not violate federal fraud laws. The court said that not all corporate fiduciary lapses are tantamount to crimes.

Attorney Kirkendall said the Enron trials in Houston were held “in a highly inflamed environment.”

“The task force took advantage of that and convicted these men,” he said. “What it caused them and their families, you can just imagine.”

The government did not retry the five on fraud charges.

Concealed evidence

What the Merrill defense attorneys did not know during trial was this: There were favorable witness statements that the prosecution withheld.

In 2010, Justice began releasing confidential Enron task force documents. They showed that Mr. Weissmann’s team provided misleading summaries at trial of raw witness statements to the FBI and to the grand jury.

The disconnect became an issue in the appeal of Ms. Powell’s client, Merrill executive James A. Brown, in the Nigerian barge case. Although his fraud conviction went away, his perjury guilt stuck.

Ms. Powell was particularly struck by this: The government’s summary said a witness, Enron’s Jeffrey McMahon, “does not recall” a barge buyback agreement. In in his actual interview, he said there was no deal. The prosecution badly distorted what he had said, depriving trial attorneys of information that could persuade a jury to acquit. Mr. McMahon was under threat of indictment and did not testify.

The 5th Circuit agreed — to a point.

“Favorable information was plainly suppressed from McMahon’s notes,” the court wrote.

“The McMahon notes contain numerous passages that unequivocally state that it was McMahon’s understanding that there was only a ‘best efforts’ agreement and no ‘promise,’ whereas the government’s disclosure letter says only that McMahon ‘does not recall’ a guaranteed buyback.”

Even worse, Ms. Powell said, the documents showed that Weissmann’s team yellow-highlighted favorable information that it deliberately withheld from its proffered summaries.

Yet, to Ms. Powell’s great disappointment, the appeals court did not throw out the perjury conviction. It said the prosecution “flaw” was not material.

William Hodes, an analyst on legal ethics who assisted in the appeal, found the ruling “crazy.” The judges acknowledged that the prosecutors misled the defense, yet they somehow could predict it would have made no difference at trial.

“The summaries were false,” Mr. Hodes told The Times. “They said things that the witnesses did not say. They themselves yellow-highlighted what they left out of the summaries. It’s astonishing. We should have gotten a new trial.”

Chilling witnesses

When the task force brought indictments in July 2004 against the big cheese in the Enron saga — Kenneth L. Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Richard Cause — defense attorneys ultimately learned that Mr. Weissmann had done something even more far-reaching. In a sealed court document, he named 114 unindicted co-conspirators, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Defense attorney Kirkendall did some research. He found that it was by far the largest number of such targeted people in the history of federally prosecuted white-collar crime.

The significants: Defendants at trial hoped that some Enron executives would testify on their behalf. But those hopes collapsed on the list of 114.

“Chilling effect, my ass,” said attorney Cogdell. “It was Ice Station Zebra. No one in their right mind would do anything that would upset the task force, specifically Weissmann.”

Mr. Kirkendall believes Mr. Weissmann made the list for that exact reason.

“It was common knowledge in the Houston community,” he told The Times. “If you had a client who was cooperating with defendants in an Enron criminal prosecution, you’d better be careful because they would become a target.”

Mr. Kirkendall knows firsthand. In civil matters, he represented Mr. McMahon, the follow-on chief financial officer at Enron who ended up as one of the 114.

The Merrill Lynch defendants wanted Mr. McMahon to testify. But he planned to take the Fifth Amendment if called because Mr. Weissmann had made it clear on three occasions that he could be indicted.

“We had him ready to post bail and go through the arraignment process because of pressure being applied by the government not to testify for any of the defendants,” he said.

Mr. McMahon never testified. He was never indicted.

The incredulous judge

As he was leaving the task force in July 2005 to accept his first of three stints as an aide to FBI Director Robert Mueller, Mr. Weissmann announced a new guilty plea.

Christopher Calger, then a 39-year-old former Enron vice president, pleaded guilty in a Houston courtroom to fraud. The FBI issued a national press release saying Mr. Calger admitted to making a deal with two businesses that inflated Enron’s earnings. Mr. Calger agreed to become a prosecution witness.

But the announcement did not tell the full story of the hearing that day.

District Court Judge Lynn N. Hughes read the evidence and expressed incredulity that Mr. Calger was pleading guilty.

According to a court transcript, Judge Hughes grilled Linda Lacewell, one of Mr. Weissmann’s prosecutors. He asked her repeatedly to explain what the actual crime was. He said Enron lost no money, there were no bribes and the basic mechanism for the sale of some electric turbines was legal.

Ms. Lacewell said Enron should never have put proceeds on its balance sheets, echoing the 2003 prosecution of Merrill Lynch people in the Nigerian barge transaction.

The judge: “You don’t know the difference between their capital and their current income transaction?”

And he said, “But we do know that this transaction could not have been a tax avoidance scheme, right?”

Ms. Lacewell: “That’s right.”

She then said the plea was to wire fraud, not taxes. To that, Judge Hughes said the task force was trying to criminalize a private transaction to which all parties agreed.

“So you want to convert every default by a corporate officer into a wire fraud case,” he said.

When she explained the deal, the judge replied bluntly, “That’s not wire fraud.”

When she asserted that it was, Judge Hughes lashed out at the task force.

“According to your employer, everything is wire fraud,” he said. “It’s a far cry from what the statute was intended to do when it was adopted.”

But Mr. Calger persisted. He wanted to plead guilty, to which the judge said, “There’s no factual basis for your plea.”

The judge did not know then, but his spot courtroom lecture proved prescient. A year later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came to the same conclusion and ruled in the Merrill case that there was no wire fraud.

In 2007, a Houston judge erased Mr. Calger’s conviction. He never testified in an Enron trial.

Attorney Kirkendall said the financial strain of legal bills for years while fighting a powerful government task force played a role in Mr. Calger’s decision to plea.

“The Enron task force’s public relations campaign was far better than its actual prosecutions,” he said.

The task force rattled other potential defense witnesses. But at least one bucked the juggernaut and took the stand as a defense witness in the so-called Enron Broadband Services case.

Mr. Weissmann in 2003 brought charges against executives for ballyhooing the development of internet products to drive up the share price and make an insider stock killing.

At a 2005 trial, engineer Lawrence Ciscon took the stand for the defense. Mr. Ciscon, who had been vice president for software at EBS, said he met with the FBI two times. They never informed him that he was a target. Then he obtained an attorney. The next thing he knew, the task force had labeled him as an unindicted co-conspirator.

As the trial approached and he worked with the defense, prosecutors reminded his attorney of that status.

“They’ve called my lawyer to remind me,” he testified, according to a transcript reviewed by The Times.

He viewed the calls, he said, “as a threat that I could be prosecuted.”

The threats, he said, “made me hesitant” to appear in court. Asked by the defense why he decided to show up in court, he answered, “I have nothing to hide.”

“Regardless of the outcome of this trial, the Enron task force’s ugly tactic of effectively suppressing important testimony of witnesses favorable to Enron defendants has now been fully exposed,” Mr. Kirkendall blogged at the time.

The task force never charged Mr. Ciscon, who went on to a successful technology career.

Today

Justice Department press releases in the 2000s would tout the number 30 as in over 30 people charged in the Enronsaga.

But final conviction count is short that number given that appeals courts eviscerated two major cases — Merrill Lynch and Arthur Andersen — while juries acquitted two people and partially acquitted others and two were allowed to withdraw guilty pleas.

In all, 22 pleaded guilty and four trial convictions stuck, according to a Houston Chronicle list.

Afterward, some task force prosecutors rose to significant government posts.

Mr. Weissmann joined Mr. Mueller at the FBI and then arrived at a powerhouse New York law firm as a white-collar-crime defense specialist. He returned to the FBI as Mr. Mueller’s general counsel and, later, was appointed by the Obama administration as chief of Justice’s fraud unit in Washington.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, the Justice Department assistant attorney general who named him task force chief a decade ago, is now supplying Mr. Weissmann with the FBI manpower he needs to pursue Trump-Russia.

Kathryn Ruemmler prosecuted both the Merrill defendants and Lay-Skilling. Years later, she emerged in the prestigious post of White House counsel to President Obama.

Lisa Monaco, another task force prosecutor, stayed at Justice, was Mr. Mueller’s chief of staff and then went to the Obama White House as the president’s top counterterrorism adviser. She joined CNN as an analyst this year.

Whether Mr. Weissmann’s brand — intimidating low-level Mafiosos and corporate figures to force them to snitch — will work in Washington against political operatives will be answered in the coming months.

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2)The Obama Administration’s Uranium One Scandal +

by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY 

Not only the Clintons are implicated in a uranium deal with the Russians that compromised national-security interests. 

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. 

The Obama administration reportedly issued a visa for Mikerin in 2010, but a racketeering investigation led by the FBI determined that he was already operating here in 2009. 

The Racketeering Scheme

As Tenam’s general director, Mikerin was responsible for arranging and managing Rosatom/Tenex’s contracts with American uranium purchasers. This gave him tremendous leverage over the U.S. companies. With the assistance of several confederates, Mikerin used this leverage to extort and defraud the U.S. contractors into paying inflated prices for uranium. They then laundered the proceeds through shell companies and secret bank accounts in Latvia, Cyprus, Switzerland, and the Seychelle Islands — though sometimes transactions were handled in cash, with the skim divided into envelopes stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash. 

The inflated payments served two purposes: They enriched Kremlin-connected energy officials in the U.S. and in Russia to the tune of millions of dollars; and they compromised the American companies that paid the bribes, rendering players in U.S. nuclear energy — a sector critical to national security — vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow. 

But Mikerin had a problem. To further the Kremlin’s push for nuclear-energy expansion, he had been seeking to retain a lobbyist — from whom he planned to extort kickbacks, just as he did with the U.S. energy companies. With the help of an associate connected to Russian organized-crime groups, Mikerin found his lobbyist. The man’s name has not been disclosed, but we know he is now represented by Victoria Toensing, a well-respected Washington lawyer, formerly a federal prosecutor and counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee. 

When Mikerin solicited him in 2009, the lobbyist was uncomfortable, worried that the proposal would land him on the wrong side of the law. So he contacted the FBI and revealed what he knew. From then on, the Bureau and Justice Department permitted him to participate in the Russian racketeering scheme as a “confidential source” — and he is thus known as “CS-1” in affidavits the government, years later, presented to federal court in order to obtain search and arrest warrants. 

At the time this unidentified man became an informant, the FBI was led by director Robert Mueller, who is now the special counsel investigating whether Trump colluded with Russia. The investigation was centered in Maryland (Tenam’s home base). There, the U.S. attorney was Obama appointee Rod Rosenstein — now President Trump’s deputy attorney general, and the man who appointed Mueller as special counsel to investigate Trump. 

Because of CS-1, the FBI was able to understand and monitor the racketeering enterprise almost from the start. By mid-May 2010, it could already prove the scheme and three separate extortionate payments Mikerin had squeezed out of the informant. Equally important: According to reporting by John Solomon and Alison Spann in the Hill, the informant learned through conversations with Mikerin and others that Russian nuclear officials were trying to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons. 

Uranium One, Russia, and the Clintons

There is no doubt that this extraordinarily gainful ingratiation took place. I outlined some of it a year ago in suggesting that the Justice Department should be investigating the Clinton Foundation, and its exploitation of Hillary Clinton’s influence as secretary of state, as a potential racketeering case. 

In 2005, former President Clinton helped his Canadian billionaire friend and benefactor, Frank Giustra, obtain coveted uranium-mining rights from Kazakhstan’s dictator. The Kazakh deal enabled Giustra’s company (Ur-Asia Energy) to merge into Uranium One (a South African company), a $3.5 billion windfall. Giustra and his partners thereafter contributed tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. Besides the valuable Kazakh reserves, Uranium One also controlled about a fifth of the uranium stock in the United States. 

Alas, Putin, the neighborhood bully, also wanted the Kazakh uranium. He leaned on Kazakhstan’s dictator, who promptly arrested the official responsible for selling the uranium-mining rights to Giustra’s company. This put Uranium One’s stake in jeopardy of being seized by the Kazakh government. 

As Uranium One’s stock plunged, its panicked executives turned to the State Department, where their friend Hillary Clinton was now in charge. State sprung into action, convening emergency meetings with the Kazakh regime. A few days later, it was announced that the crisis was resolved (translation: the shakedown was complete). Russia’s energy giant, Rosatom, would purchase 17 percent of Uranium One, and the Kazakh threat would disappear — and with it, the threat to the value of the Clinton donors’ holdings. 

For Putin, though, that was just a start. He didn’t want a minority stake in Uranium One, he wanted control of the uranium. For that, Rosatom would need a controlling interest in Uranium One. That would be a tall order — not because of the Kazakh mining rights but because acquisition of Uranium One’s American reserves required U.S. government approval. 

Uranium is foundational to nuclear power and thus to American national security. As the New York Times explained in a report on the disturbing interplay between the Clinton Foundation and the transfer of American uranium assets to Russia, the United States gets a fifth of its electrical power from nuclear energy, but only produces a fifth of the uranium it needs. Consequently, a foreign entity would not be able to acquire rights to American uranium without the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. 

CFIUS is composed of the leaders of 14 U.S. government agencies involved in national security and commerce. In 2010, these included not only Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had cultivated a reputation as a hawk opposed to such foreign purchases, but Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department (and its lead agency, the FBI) were conducting the investigation of Rosatom’s ongoing U.S. racketeering, extortion, and money-laundering scheme. 

In March 2010, to push the Obama “reset” agenda, Secretary Clinton traveled to Russia, where she met with Putin and Dimitri Medvedev, who was then keeping the president’s chair warm for Putin. Soon after, it emerged that Renaissance Capital, a regime-tied Russian bank, had offered Bill Clinton $500,000 to make a single speech — far more than the former president’s usual haul in what would become one of his biggest paydays ever. Renaissance was an aggressive promoter of Rosatom. The Clinton speech took place in Moscow in June. The exorbitant speech fee, it is worth noting, is a pittance compared with the $145 million Newsweek reports was donated to the Clinton Foundation by sources linked to the Uranium One deal. 

The month before the speech, the Hill reports, Bill Clinton told his wife’s State Department that he wanted to meet while in Russia with Arkady Dvorkovich, who, in addition to being a top Medvedev aide, was also a key Rosatom board member. It is not known whether the State Department gave clearance for the meeting; the question appears to have become moot since the former U.S. president met directly with Putin and Medvedev. You’ll be comforted, I’m sure, to learn that aides to the Clintons, those pillars of integrity, assure us that the topics of Rosatom and Uranium One never came up. [Ah, yes.  They talked about their grandchildren.]

Keeping Congress in the Dark

Meanwhile, congressional opposition to Russia’s potential acquisition of American uranium resources began to stir. As Peter Schweizer noted in his essential book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, four senior House members steeped in national-security issues — Peter King (R., N.Y.), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla.), Spencer Bachus (R., Ala.), and Howard McKeon (R. Calif.) — voiced grave concerns, pointing out that Rosatom had helped Iran, America’s sworn enemy, build its Bushehr nuclear reactor. The members concluded that “the take-over of essential US nuclear resources by a government-owned Russian agency . . . would not advance the national security interests of the United States.” Republican senator John Barrasso objected to Kremlin control of uranium assets in his state of Wyoming, warning of Russia’s “disturbing record of supporting nuclear programs in countries that are openly hostile to the United States, specifically Iran and Venezuela.” The House began moving a bill “expressing disfavor of the Congress” regarding Obama’s revival of the nuclear-cooperation agreement Bush had abandoned. 

Clearly, in this atmosphere, disclosure of the racketeering enterprise that Rosatom’s American subsidiary was, at that very moment, carrying out would have been the death knell of the asset transfer to Russia. It would also likely have ended the “reset” initiative in which Obama and Clinton were deeply invested — an agenda that contemplated Kremlin-friendly deals on nuclear-arms control and accommodation of the nuclear program of Russia’s ally, Iran. That was not going to be allowed to happen. It appears that no disclosure of Russia’s racketeering and strong-arming was made to CFIUS or to Congress — not by Secretary Clinton, not by Attorney General Holder, and certainly not by President Obama. In October 2010, CFIUS gave its blessing to Rosatom’s acquisition of Uranium One. 

A Sweetheart Plea Helps the Case Disappear

Even though the FBI had an informant collecting damning information, and had a prosecutable case against Mikerin by early 2010, the extortion racket against American energy companies was permitted to continue into the summer of 2014. It was only then that, finally, Mikerin and his confederates were arrested. 

Why then? This is not rocket science. In March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. Putin also began massing forces on the Ukrainian border, coordinating and conducting attacks, ultimately taking control of territory. Clearly, the pie-in-the-sky Obama reset was dead. Furthermore, the prosecution of Mikerin’s racketeering scheme had been so delayed that the Justice Department risked losing the ability to charge the 2009 felonies because of the five-year statute of limitations on most federal crimes. 

Still, a lid needed to be kept on the case. It would have made for an epic Obama administration scandal, and a body blow to Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes, if in the midst of Russia’s 2014 aggression, public attention had been drawn to the failure, four years earlier, to prosecute a national-security case in order to protect Russia’s takeover of U.S. nuclear assets. 

The Obama administration needed to make this case go away — without a public trial if at all possible. 

Think about this: The investigation of Russian racketeering in the American energy sector was the kind of spectacular success over which the FBI and Justice Department typically do a bells-n-whistles victory lap — the big self-congratulatory press conference followed by the media-intensive prosecutions . . . and, of course, more press conferences. 

Here . . . crickets. 

As the Hill reports, the Justice Department and FBI had little to say when Mikerin and his co-conspirators were arrested. They quietly negotiated guilty pleas that were announced with no fanfare just before Labor Day. It was arranged that Mikerin would be sentenced just before Christmas. All under the radar. 

How desperate was the Obama Justice Department to plead the case out? Here, Rosenstein and Holder will have some explaining to do. 

Mikerin was arrested on a complaint describing a racketeering scheme that stretched back to 2004 and included extortion, fraud, and money laundering. Yet he was permitted to plead guilty to a single count of money-laundering conspiracy. 

Except it was not really money-laundering conspiracy. 

Under federal law, that crime (at section 1956 of the penal code) carries a penalty of up to 20 years’ imprisonment — not only for conspiracy but for each act of money laundering. But Mikerin was not made to plead guilty to this charge. He was permitted to plead guilty to an offense charged under the catch-all federal conspiracy provision (section 371) that criminalizes agreements to commit any crime against the United States. Section 371 prescribes a sentence of zero to five years’ imprisonment. 

The Justice Department instructs prosecutors that when Congress has given a federal offense its own conspiracy provision with a heightened punishment (as it has for money laundering, racketeering, narcotics trafficking, and other serious crimes), they may not charge a section 371 conspiracy. Section 371 is for less serious conspiracy cases. Using it for money laundering — which caps the sentence way below Congress’s intent for that behavior — subverts federal law and signals to the court that the prosecutor does not regard the offense as major. 

Yet, that is exactly what Rosenstein’s office did, in a plea agreement his prosecutors co-signed with attorneys from the Justice Department’s Fraud Section. (See in the Hill’s report, the third document embedded at the bottom, titled “Mikerin Plea Deal.”) No RICO, no extortion, no fraud — and the plea agreement is careful not to mention any of the extortions in 2009 and 2010, before CFIUS approved Rosatom’s acquisition of U.S. uranium stock. Mikerin just had to plead guilty to a nominal “money laundering” conspiracy charge. This insulated him from a real money-laundering sentence. Thus, he got a term of just four years’ incarceration for a major national-security crime — which, of course, is why he took the plea deal and waived his right to appeal, sparing the Obama administration a full public airing of the facts. 

Interestingly, as the plea agreement shows, the Obama DOJ’s Fraud Section was then run by Andrew Weissmann, who is now one of the top prosecutors in Robert Mueller’s ongoing special-counsel investigation of suspected Trump collusion with Russia. 

There was still one other problem to tamp down. That was the informant — the lobbyist who alerted the FBI to the Russian racketeering enterprise back in 2009. He wanted to talk. 

Specifically, as his attorney, Ms. Toensing, explains, the informant wanted to tell Congress what he knows — about what the FBI and the Justice Department could already have proved in 2010 when CFIUS signed off on Russia’s acquisition of American nuclear material, and about what he’d learned of Russian efforts to curry favor with Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he was not allowed to talk. 

It turns out, the lawyer explains, that the FBI had induced him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The Justice Department warned him that it was enforceable — even against disclosures to Congress. (Because, you know, the FBI is opposed to all leaks and disclosures of confidential investigative information . . . except those initiated by the FBI, of course.) In addition, when the informant was primed to file a federal civil lawsuit to recover his own losses from the scheme, he claims that the Justice Department threatened him with prosecution, warning that a lawsuit would violate the non-disclosure agreement. The Hill reports that it has obtained emails from a civil lawyer retained by the witness, which describe pressure exerted by the Justice Department to silence the informant. 

What a coincidence: That was in 2016, the stretch run of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. 

This stinks. 

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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3)Subject: TAKE A KNEE

When my president lied to me and claimed 4 of my comrades were murdered because of a video insulting Muslims…I didn’t take a knee.

When my president shipped pallets of cash to my sworn enemy…I didn’t take a knee.

When my president failed to identify Muslims as terrorists and Islam as an enemy of the state…I didn’t take a knee.

When my president claimed that a man who tried to kill another man who lawfully defended himself could be his son…I didn’t take a knee.

When my president defended a thug who bum rushed law enforcement…I didn’t take a knee.

When my president ordered businesses to spend unnecessary funds to appease a minority of people who need mental intervention far more than they need their own toilet…I didn’t take a knee.

When my president ordered that words ‘one nation under God’ be removed from the pledge of allegiance…I didn’t take a knee.

When my president lied to me and said I could keep my doctors and my premiums would go down…I didn’t take a knee

When my president spent my tax dollars in foreign lands to interfere in their elections…I didn’t take a knee.

While my president sat by passively and enabled ISIS to emerge as a stronger force dedicated to spreading Islamic ideals by committing murder, rape and torture…I didn’t take a knee.

When my president allowed dictators and murderers to violate his red lines and continue to murder women and children with chemical gas…I didn’t take a knee.

When my president chastised law enforcement for their actions but ignored the violence in our streets…I didn’t take a knee.

When my president identified the weather as the greatest threat to America’s safety while Muslims worldwide are murdering innocent people…I didn’t take a knee.

While my president’s insistence that pacifism and reform in numerous areas of the globe would bring peace but instead led to the strengthening of those that seek to destroy us…I didn’t take a knee.

When the election of my president broke barriers never thought possible in America ended up being the high point of his eight years in office…I didn’t take a knee.

In all that time I never disrespected our Country, our Armed Forces and Veterans, or our Nation. I remained vigilant.

I didn’t take a knee. I got a new President.

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