This is really the most pathetic case of “I know you are, but what am I?” in recent memory, as Sarah Huckabee-Sanders made this ridiculous claim.
During a press briefing, Fox News’ John Roberts asked Sanders if the White House thought the Russia investigation was a waste of money.
“I think the president has been pretty clear what his position is,” she replied. “Congress has spent a great deal of time on this — a better part of a year. All of your news organizations have actually probably spent a lot of money on this as well, which we would probably consider a pretty big waste.”
“I think that our position hasn’t changed since day one, and I think we are seeing now that if there was any collusion with Russia, it was between the DNC and the Clintons, and certainly not our campaign,” she said.
She didn’t bother to explain exactly what she meant but if she was talking about the claim that Clinton and the DNC were responsible for the Steele memos it just so happens The Hill has reported that before DNC legal firm Perkins Coie contracted with Fusion GPS who subcontracted with Steele, they were being paid for research on Republicans by the conservative publication the Washington Free Beacon. This is besides the common sense point that Steele isn’t a Russian, he’s a former officer with Britain’s MI-6.
The New York Times cited the Free Beacon as having funded the project with Fusion GPS in the fall of 2015 as Trump was beginning his campaign. The funding of it lasted until Spring 2016, when it became obvious Trump was the GOP nominee. At that point, it was picked up by the Democratic National Committee.
The arrangement between the two companies went into researching many GOP candidates as part of news stories. Sources claimed that at the time Russia was not a focus of the dossier.
And the suggestion that Clinton had something to do with the sale of Canada’s Uranium One mining operation to Russia is even more dumb.
The first point here is that it wasn’t up to Hillary Clinton whether or not the Uranium One sale would go through or not. The sale had to be reviewed by a panel which included 9 different federal agencies, each of which assigned a representative including State who assigned Clinton deputy Jose Fernandez to handle the issue and he has long stated that Secretary Clinton didn’t interfere in this decision in any way.
“The secretary of state is one, and frankly not usually a very powerful, member of the committee,” said Steve Grundman, a fellow at the Atlantic Council who dealt with CFIUS reviews while serving in the Pentagon in the 1990s. “You have to remember with CFIUS, the first letter stands for the committee.”
Also, cabinet secretaries almost never deal with the committee themselves, instead delegating to underlings. For Clinton, that delegate was the assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, Jose Fernandez.
“Secretary Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter,” Fernandez told Time in 2015. Two former State Department officials who served under Clinton told Newsweek that Clinton would have been notified of a CFIUS decision only if there were disagreement among members of the committee, which would push a final decision to the president. The CFIUS decision on the Uranium One deal, however, was unanimous—all nine representatives agreed to approve it.
All nine members of the committee approved the deal, and Secretary Clinton didn’t put pressure on her own representative, not to mention the other eight who she didn't have any control over. Secondly the committee was only authorized to provide a recommendation to the President, and only he could veto the deal, so there’s really nothing to be gained by trying to bribe Clinton into not doing something — scuttling the deal — that she never had the power to do.
This of course hasn’t stopped people like Sebastian Gorka to claim that Clinton committed treason and espionage with this deal.
“If this had happened in the 1950s, there would be people up on treason charges right now,” Gorka told Sean Hannity of the so-called “Uranium One” scandal, named for the Canadian mining company whose sale to Russia’s state-run nuclear energy arm Clinton’s State Department approved in 2010. Eight other members of the Committee on Foreign Investments approved also approved the deal.
“The Rosenbergs, okay?” Gorka continued. “This is equivalent to what the Rosenbergs did and those people got the chair. Think about it. Giving away nuclear capability to our enemies, that’s what we’re talking about.”
That’s completely nutbaggers.
Uranium One was for starters a Canadian company from whom a 51% share was squired by the Russian state Uranium company Rosatom, but neither of these companies have a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to export uranium over seas, so all the product now being generated by the Rosatom mines, stays in the U.S.
The Russian-owned company does not have a license to export the uranium, and the actual mining process is not sensitive at all.
“It’s just a mine,” Lewis said. “There’s no technology that’s special. There’s no shortage of uranium around the world.”
The interesting thing to me is that according to one of the first reports on this documents that Rosatom didn’t really even care about Uranium One assets in Wyoming, because they only produce about 400,000 pounds of Uranium per year while our nuclear power plants imported 57 million pounds of Uranium annually mostly from Kazahkstan and what Rosatom really wanted was access to Uranium One’s Kazahk mines, not their U.S. resources.
There are charges that various members of Uranium One donated to the Clinton Foundation Charity prior to this deal going through, and that’s true — although most of those people left the company before the sale even happened — but since Hillary really couldn’t and didn’t personally intervene in the decision and wasn’t a member of the Bill Clinton Foundation until after she left her role as Secretary of State, and neither Bill nor Hillary has personally taken a dime from the Foundation — as their tax records show — that point is ugly but it’s effectively moot and doesn’t prove anything.
By comparison Trump’s Foundation was shut down because he used it to give political donations to the Texas and Florida Attorney General’s in order to — allegedly — keep them from investigating and suing “Trump Univesity” his fraudulent real estate school scam. He’s also used his son Eric’s Children’s Cancer charity to funnel money directly into his own pockets.
The Clinton Foundation is a world class charity that spends close to 90% of it’s donation on what they were intended, not overhead or into the pockets of it's namesakes.
Even the fact that Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 by a Russian bank for a public speech during this same time period, one that had recommended to their investors that they invest in Rosatom and Uranium One still doesn’t matter if Hillary Clinton didn’t personally hold the keys on the Uranium One deal, and she didn’t.
Let's compare all that to the fact that Rosatom happens to be the exact same Russian agency that Michael Flynn contracted with in 2015 to help them establish a deal to build Nuclear Reactors in Saudi Arabia.
Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn may have aided a Russian company the U.S. government opposed during a 2015 visit to Saudi Arabia in which he pushed to be part of an ambitious nuclear-power project, raising new questions about his previously undisclosed trip.
Flynn reportedly made the trip — which was not reported on a security clearance form as required — for what has been described as a joint American/Russian venture to Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2015. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee said he advocated for his company interests in a Saudi nuclear-power development plan.
Not long after Flynn met with Saudi nuclear officials, the Russian nuclear-power giant Rosatom announced a $100 billion deal to build 46 nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia. It is not known whether Flynn or the American companies he represented had any involvement in the Rosatom effort. Rosatom did not respond to emailed questions.
This was a trip that Flynn didn't disclose, for which he was paid $25,000. After he became National Security Advisor under Trump Flynn continued to pursue this deal in a meeting involving Kushner and Bannon in a plan that included a sanctioned Russian weapons company called Rosoboron.
In the days leading up to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, when his soon-to-be national security adviser Michael Flynn was reportedly pushing a multibillion-dollar deal to build nuclear reactors in Jordan and other Middle East nations, Flynn and two other top Trump advisers held a secret meeting with the king of Jordan.
..,
People close to the three Trump advisers say that the nuclear deal was not discussed. But a federal official with access to a document created by a law enforcement agency about the meeting said that the nuclear proposal, known as the Marshall Plan, was one of the topics the group talked about.
The plan, for which Flynn was reportedly paid as a consultant, initially envisioned that the reactors would be built by US companies and security would be provided by the Russian state-owned firm Rosoboron, an arms exporter currently facing US sanctions. As the plan evolved, Russian involvement reportedly lessened, and it is not known whether Russia or its companies featured in the meeting with the Jordanian king. This week, Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee said they would turn over documents about the nuclear plan to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, contending that Flynn may have violated federal law by not disclosing foreign trips and meetings.
So let’s quickly review, not being involved in a decision that didn’t violate national security by not giving America’s Uranium to Russia is not “Treason” — but taking a total of over $600,000 in foreign money without authorization, approval or disclosing it as Flynn did, or close to $100 Million as Manafort did as a unregistered agent of Putin, then brokering a deal that involved a sanctioned company — with full support and knowledge of the then POTUS-Elect — which is a conspiracy in violation of the Trading with Enemy Act is a bit illegal.
Trump’s legal jeopardy in potential collusion with Russia — particularly involving Flynn, Bannon and Kushner -— is much worse than Hillary Clinton not doing something that she didn’t personally get any money for.
Also as I type this: the Mueller Grand Jury has issued an indictment potentially against multiple targets. I’m betting they probably include Manafort and Flynn — although Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, Kushner, Bannon and Don Jr. are also possibilities which would be cataclysmic — but we probably won’t know that until the indictments are unsealed.