This week in the endless Trump Corruption Timeline it’s been revealed that another set of Trump harshest claims against “crooked” Hillary have yet again turned out to have been made of smoke and mirrors.
The investigation had been started by Jeff Sessions at the request of several hot-headed GOP Senator who wanted the allegations that Clinton had shown favoritism to donors to the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State and specifically whether she had given special favors to a former owner of the Canadian drilling company Uranium One by pushing through a purchase of that company by Russian mining company Rosatom.
Apparently, neither of these allegations has panned out.
We already knew from press reports that Clinton’s assistant Huma Abedin mostly blew off requests from the Clinton Foundation that they would receive including requests for meetings with donors and even denied a request by Doug Band to restore diplomatic passports for Bill Clinton’s staff when they planned to travel to North Korea to retrieve two imprisoned American journalists.
In the Uranium One case there was no direct or indirect involvement by Clinton as stated by the State Dept staffer who was part of the 9 agency task force which reviewed the sale. There was even a confidential informant interviewed by the Senate who failed to provide any “Quid Pro Quo” linked to Clinton. This would be because the Uranium One stockholder who had given $millions to the Clinton Foundation had already left the company years before the sale and had sold his stock, so he looked to gain nothing from the sale one way or another.
Now those investigations are ending and they have literally nothing to show for it.
Just like there was nothing to the Whitewater case. Just like Clinton was found to have no involvement in Vince Foster's suicide. The Travelgate and Filegate cases where big piles of nothing. 9 Committees and 11 Hours of hearings revealed that Clinton did nothing wrong involving Benghazi. The DOJ Inspector General found no FBI wrongdoing — essentially clearing Peter Strzok and Lisa Page of personal bias — in the investigation of Clinton’s private email system, and the State Dept. recently wrapped up their further investigation and found that although there were some personnel issues, no one willfully violated classified security protocols in that case.
WASHINGTON — A yearslong State Department investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server found that while the use of the system for official business increased the risk of compromising classified information, there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information.
The inquiry, started more than three years ago, found that 38 current or former State Department officials were “culpable” of violating security procedures in a review of about 33,000 individual emails sent to or from the server that Mrs. Clinton turned over to investigators.
The nine-page unclassified report, completed last month and shared with Congress this week, appears to bookend a controversy that dogged Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign against Donald J. Trump. Mrs. Clinton blamed the F.B.I.’s handling of the inquiry for crippling her campaign after James B. Comey, then the bureau’s director, reopened his investigation into the server days before the general election after initially declining to bring charges.
“While there were some instances of classified information being inappropriately introduced into an unclassified system in furtherance of expedience,” the report said, “by and large, the individuals interviewed were aware of security policies and did their best to implement them in their operations.”
Then, of course, the DOJ Inspector General issued a second report — again clearing Page and Strzok — in the analysis of the Russia investigation and found that there although there were some mistaken omissions in the FISA warrants for Carter Page, there was no widespread pro-Clinton or anti-Trump bias in that investigation either.
A Justice Department inspector general’s report examining the FBI investigation of President Trump’s 2016 campaign rebutted conservatives’ accusations that top FBI officials were driven by political bias to illegally spy on Trump advisers but also found broad and “serious performance failures” requiring major changes.
The 434-page report issued Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that the FBI had an “authorized purpose” when it initiated its investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, into the Trump campaign. In doing so, Horowitz implicitly rejected assertions by the president and fellow Republicans that the case was launched out of political animus or that the FBI broke its own rules on using informants.
The only case that remains open is the John Durham investigation which is examining whether there was bias in the reports by the CIA and NSA that our nation was attacked and hacked by Russia during the 2016 election. Considering that all 17 Intelligence agencies all concurred on that point, I’m not expecting he Durham will uncover much, although that particular issue doesn’t involve Clinton as she was the target of hackers not any kind of participant, so essentially Hillary Clinton has been cleared, sometimes more than once, on all cases.
The same can not be said for Donald John Trump who remains Individual 1 in the Michael Cohen campaign finance matter which happened to send Mr. Cohen to prison for carrying out orders and instructions given to him by Trump.
More recently Trump has been Impeached in the case of this attempt to extort the president of Ukraine for his own personal and political benefit in violation of the Impoundment Control Act, as well as the Hatch Act by using the powers of his office for political reasons.
Trump’s personal free mob attorney Rudy Giuliani is under investigation for campaign finance and FARA violations while he continues to spin nutty conspiracy theories about Joe Biden and claims that the Supreme Court should declare Trump’s impeachment “Illegal.”
That's all on top of Trump former National Security advisor Michael Flynn who is now looking at jail time for lying to FBI about his discussions with Russians, his former Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort who is in prison because of his shady money deals with Russia-linked Ukrainians, his aide George Papadopoulos who served time for lying to the FBI about his links to Russia, and his best pal Roger Stone who's been convicted of lying to Congress about his communications and links to and between the Trump campaign, Russian Intelligence and Wikileaks.
The explanation for all this deference to Russia may have finally been revealed as it appears that the $2 billion loan that Trump has with Deutsche Bank is apparently underwritten by Russia state-owned bank VTB.
Deutsche Bank’s loans to Donald Trump were underwritten by Russian state-owned VTB Bank, according to the whistleblower whose collection of thousands of bank documents and internal communications have captured the recent attention of federal investigators.
Val Broeksmit acquired the emails and files of his late father, Deutsche Bank executive William S. Broeksmit, after Broeksmit tragically took his own life in 2014.
Val informed the FBI in late 2019 about his knowledge of VTB’s underwriting of Trump’s loans, information he attributed to a network of sources connected to the bank he cultivated over the past five-plus years.
Assuming this whistle-blower is correct, Trump is effectively on the hook to Russia for about $2 Billion — and let’s not forget that VTB is a now a sanctioned bank because of the invasion of Crimea so that’s yet another criminal violation by the Trumpster.
Now, with the start of his Impeachment trial apparently about to be set for next week, Trump has also embarked on this crazed tit-for-tat tip-toe to the brink of war with Iran, while he aides scramble to come up with excuses for his drone strike on Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
But of course, after everything, the real reasons turns out to be personal and self-aggrandizing as Trump has admitted to supporters that he initiated the strike as an appeasement to hardline GOP Senators who he feels he needs on his side in the upcoming Impeachment Trial.
“Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said (my italics).”
Pandering. It was all pandering. It wasn’t that an attack was “imminent”, or that the was “making plans” for some attack somewhere, somewhen, or that an Iraqi Contractor had died, or hundreds of US soldiers, or that the might soon “probably” have attacked four embassies.
It was because he wanted some GOP Senators to owe him a favor.
Quid pro quo.
Ain’t that just typical?
But If you hear Fox News and Devin Nunes, you’d think the “good guys” are now in hot pursuit of those Hillary-Loving criminals in the FBI, DOJ and CIA…
Nunes thinks that the Intel Inspector General did something “shady” with his handling of the Whistle-blower complaint because “the forms were back-dated.” Uh, yeah. The real scandal is that Bill Barr’s DOJ blew off a criminal referral from the CIA’s top lawyer and refused to investigate.
WASHINGTON — Weeks before the whistleblower's complaint became public, the CIA's top lawyer made what she considered to be a criminal referral to the Justice Department about the whistleblower's allegations that President Donald Trump abused his office in pressuring the Ukrainian president, U.S. officials familiar with the matter tell NBC News.
The move by the CIA's general counsel, Trump appointee Courtney Simmons Elwood, meant she and other senior officials had concluded a potential crime had been committed, raising more questions about why the Justice Department later declined to open an investigation.
Ain’t it interesting what they choose to investigate to death and what they don’t?
Here are the rest of this week’s detailed events.
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An audiotape of Trump official Justin Clark includes his bragging about plans for 2020 using voter suppression “as the GOP has traditionally done.”
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State Dept urges US Citizens to leave Iraq after the drone strike.
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Pompeo admits on live TV that there was no specific pending threat from Soleimani although he does claim that Soleimani was “planning big action” against the US, he has no specifics.
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US deploys 3,000 additional soldiers to Iraq.
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Pelosi declares the drone strike to be a “dangerous escalation” as there is no AUMF for Iran, and there was no briefing with the Gang of Eight prior to the attack. [This may have been an illegal assassination of the head of the Iranian forces.]
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Lindsay Graham says he was briefed on the Soleiman strike while golfing with Trump in Florida. Chuck Schumer wasn’t briefed. He also told Matt Gaetz.
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Years ago Trump tweeted that Obama would attack Iran before his re-election. [There’s a tweet for everything.] There’s also a video of him ranting the same thing claiming Obama has “no ability to negotiate.” [Yeah, that why he negotiated the Nuclear Deal with Iran that you broke.]
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Christianity Today editor says evangelicals have widespread ignorance of Trump’s moral failings. [Ya think?]
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Trump is reportedly considering a pardon for the Blackwater contractor who was convicted of murder in the 2007 Nisour Square Massacre in Iraq. “There are more warriors out there who he believes have been treated unfairly and whose [cases] need another look.” [What the fuck is his malfunction with murderous scum?] He also says that Iraq is ungrateful for “all we’ve done for them.” [We invaded and destroyed their country, then didn’t rebuild it. Grateful for what?] and claims that his airstrike against Soleimani was an attempt to “Stop a War” and “De-escalate” and that he has no intention of “regime change.” He apparently briefed Israel about the Soleimani attack ahead of time, he told his Mar-a-Lago crowd to expect “Big action in Iran”, and he told Putin, but he didn’t tell Congress.
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Fox Business Host Stuart Varney says we can’t Impeach Trump now that he’s killed Soleiman. [The fuck we can’t.]
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McConnell defends the Soleiman drone strike. He then complains about how Democrats “plowed ahead with a historically weak impeachment” fed by “Trump derangement syndrome” then they "Flinched” and got cold feet by holding the articles until he specifies the structure of the trials. He says he will follow the model of the Clinton Impeachment Trial, which passed 100-0. He claims Clinton committed a “felony” and should have been removed except for “partisan concerns.” [It was not a material falsehood in relation to the case and didn’t meet the requirements for perjury.] He argues being partisan is “normal” not that a Senator should be blind to what the House has done, but they should “cooly consider the facts.” “We’re content to continue the ordinary business of the Senate, while the House flounders.”
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Schumer complains that there wasn’t advance consultation and transparency over the Soliemani drone strike. He argues that there has never been an Impeachment trial without witnesses and that McConnell has no intention of being impartial. He goes on to point out that emails released from one of his requested witnesses Michael Duffey indicate that POTUS directed the hold of Ukrainian funds and that the Senate needs "the whole truth.” He also points out that the redactions of the FOIA documents are suspicious and questionable, and that there were indeed witnesses in the Clinton Impeachment trial who had already testified. "If we don't have witnesses this will be a meeting of the 'mock trial club.'” He says McConnell's promise to hear the arguments and vote on witnesses later is a "trap."
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Geraldo and Kilmeade get into a heated argument over the Soleimani strike. “Don’t start cheerleading on this...”
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Judge allows Indicted Lev Parnas to give House Intel his iPhone data and documents.
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DOJ argues that the courts have “no role” in between a fight between the WH and Congress on the McGahn case. [Uh, then who resolves the fight?]
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Trump's DC hotel has a potential buyer.
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Pentagon officials say that attacks by Soleimani did not appear to be imminent.
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Mike Pence blames Iran for the 9/11 attacks which is clearly bullshit.
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Iranian ambassador to the UN says the Soleimani attack was an “act of war.”
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NYTimes reports that Trump’s admin is withholding 20 emails between Mulvaney and OMB about the holding of Ukraine funds from congress despite an FOIA court order.
- WaPo reports that White House Officials including the National Security Council were left out of the loop on Soleimani.