{"id":31119,"date":"2019-02-13T14:42:37","date_gmt":"2019-02-13T18:42:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cosmicconvergence.org\/?p=31119"},"modified":"2019-02-13T14:42:37","modified_gmt":"2019-02-13T18:42:37","slug":"it-wasnt-trump-who-colluded-with-russia-it-was-the-clintons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cosmicconvergence.org\/?p=31119","title":{"rendered":"It wasn’t Trump who colluded with Russia, it was the Clintons!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The case for Russia collusion \u2026 against the Democrats<\/strong><\/h1>\n

BY JOHN SOLOMON
\nThe Hill<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With\u00a0Republicans on both House and Senate investigative committees\u00a0having\u00a0found no evidence<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0Donald Trump<\/a><\/span>\u00a0being guilty of Democrat-inspired allegations of Russian collusion, it is worth revisiting one anecdote that escaped significant attention during the hysteria but continues to have U.S. security implications.<\/p>\n

As secretary of State,\u00a0Hillary Clinton<\/a><\/span>\u00a0worked with Russian leaders, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-President Dmitri Medvedev, to create U.S. technology partnerships with Moscow\u2019s version of Silicon Valley, a sprawling high-tech campus known as Skolkovo.<\/p>\n

Clinton\u2019s handprint was everywhere on the 2009-2010 project, the tip of a diplomatic spear to reboot U.S.-Russian relations after years of hostility prompted by Vladimir Putin\u2019s military action against the former Soviet republic and now U.S. ally Georgia.<\/p>\n

A donor to the Clinton Foundation,\u00a0Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg<\/a>, led the Russian side of the effort, and several American donors to the Clinton charity got involved. Clinton\u2019s State Department facilitated U.S. companies working with the Russian project, and she personally invited Medvedev to visit Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

The collaboration occurred at the exact same time\u00a0Bill Clinton<\/a><\/span>\u00a0made his now infamous trip to Russia to pick up a jaw-dropping $500,000 check for a single speech.<\/p>\n

The former president\u2019s trip secretly raised eyebrows inside his wife\u2019s State Department,\u00a0internal emails show<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because he asked permission to meet Vekselberg, the head of Skolkovo, and Arkady Dvorkovich, a senior official of Rosatom, the Russian nuclear giant seeking State\u2019s permission to buy Uranium One, a\u00a0Canadian\u00a0company with massive U.S. uranium reserves.<\/p>\n

Years later, intelligence documents show, both the Skolkovo and Uranium One projects raised serious security concerns.<\/p>\n

In 2013, the U.S. military\u2019s leading intelligence think tank in Europe sounded alarm that the Skolkovo project might be a front for economic and military espionage.<\/p>\n

\u201cSkolkovo is an ambitious enterprise, aiming to promote technology transfer generally, by inbound direct investment, and occasionally, through selected acquisitions. As such, Skolkovo is arguably an overt alternative to clandestine industrial espionage \u2014 with the additional distinction that it can achieve such a transfer on a much larger scale and more efficiently,\u201d\u00a0EUCOM\u2019s intelligence bulletin wrote in 2013<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cImplicit in Russia\u2019s development of Skolkovo is a critical question \u2014 a question that Russia may be asking itself \u2014 why bother spying on foreign companies and government laboratories if they will voluntarily hand over all the expertise Russia seeks?\u201d<\/p>\n

A year later, the\u00a0FBI went further and sent letters warning<\/a>\u00a0several U.S. technology companies that had become entangled with Skolkovo that they risked possible espionage. And an agent in the bureau\u2019s Boston office wrote an extraordinary op-ed to publicize the alarm.<\/p>\n

Skolkovo \u201cmay be a means for the Russian government to access our nation\u2019s sensitive or classified research development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial application,\u201d Assistant Special Agent in Charge Lucia Ziobro\u00a0wrote in the Boston Business Journal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The FBI had equal concern about Rosatom\u2019s acquisition of Uranium One. An informer named William Douglas Campbell\u00a0had gotten inside the Russian nuclear giant<\/a>\u00a0in 2009 and gathered evidence that Rosatom\u2019s agents in the United States were engaged in a racketeering scheme involving kickbacks, extortion and bribery.<\/p>\n

Campbell also obtained written evidence that Putin wanted to buy Uranium One as part of a strategy to obtain monopolistic domination of the global uranium markets, including leverage over the U.S.<\/p>\n

Campbell also warned<\/a>\u00a0that a major in-kind donor to the Clinton Global Initiative was simultaneously working for Rosatom while the decision for U.S. approval was pending before Hillary Clinton\u2019s department. Ultimately, her department and the Obama administration approved the transaction.<\/p>\n

The evidence shows the Clintons financially benefited from Russia \u2014 personally and inside their charity \u2014 at the same time they were involved in U.S. government actions that rewarded Moscow and increased U.S. security risks.<\/p>\n

The intersections between the Clintons, the Democrats and Russia carried into 2016, when a major political opposition research project designed to portray GOP rival Donald Trump as compromised by Moscow was launched by Clinton\u2019s presidential campaign and brought to the FBI.<\/p>\n

Glenn Simpson\u2019s Fusion GPS research firm was secretly hired by the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party through their law firm, Perkins Coie.<\/p>\n

Simpson then hired retired British intelligence operative Christopher Steele \u2014 whom the FBI learned was \u201cdesperate\u201d to defeat Trump \u2014 to write an unverified dossier suggesting that Trump\u2019s campaign was colluding with Russia to hijack the election.<\/p>\n

Simpson, Steele and Perkins Coie\u00a0all walked Trump-Russia related allegations<\/a>\u00a0into the FBI the summer before the election, prompting agents who openly disliked Trump to launch a counterintelligence probe of the GOP nominee shortly before Election Day.<\/p>\n

Simpson and Steele also went to the news media to air the allegations in what senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr would later write was a\u00a0\u201cHail Mary\u201d effort<\/a>\u00a0to influence the election.<\/p>\n

Congressional investigators have painstakingly pieced together evidence that shows the Clinton research project had extensive contact with Russians.<\/p>\n

Ohr\u2019s notes show that\u00a0Steele\u2019s main source of uncorroborated allegations<\/a>against Trump came from an ex-Russian intelligence officer. \u201cMuch of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.,\u201d Ohr scribbled.<\/p>\n

Steele\u2019s dossier also relied on information from a Belarus-born Russian businessman,\u00a0according to numerous reports and a book on the Russia scandal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Steele and Simpson had Russian-tied business connections, too, while they formulated the dossier.<\/p>\n

Steele worked for the lawyers for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and\u00a0tried to leverage those connections<\/a>\u00a0to help the FBI get evidence from the Russian aluminum magnate against Trump campaign chairman\u00a0Paul Manafort<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

The effort resulted in FBI agents visiting Deripaska in fall 2016. Deripaska told the agents that no collusion existed.<\/p>\n

Likewise, Simpson worked in 2016 for the Russian company Prevezon \u2014 which was trying to escape U.S. government penalties \u2014 and one of its Russian lawyers, Natalia Veselnitskaya. In\u00a0sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee<\/a>, Simpson admitted he dined with Veselnitskaya both the night before and the night after her infamous meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June 2016.<\/p>\n

Simpson insists the two dinners sandwiching one of the seminal events in the Trump collusion narrative had nothing to do with the Trump Tower meeting, a claim many Republicans distrust.<\/p>\n

Whatever the case, there\u2019s little doubt the main instigators of the Clinton-inspired allegations against Trump got information from Russians and were consorting with them during the political opposition project.<\/p>\n

This past week, we learned from\u00a0Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr<\/a>\u00a0(R-N.C.) that his committee came to the same conclusion as the House: There is no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.<\/p>\n

But now there is growing evidence \u2014 of Democratic connections to Russia. It\u2019s enough that former House Intelligence Committee Chairman\u00a0Devin Nunes<\/a><\/span>\u00a0(R-Calif.) believes a probe should be opened.<\/p>\n

There is \u201cobvious collusion the Democrats had through Glenn Simpson and through Fusion GPS, that they were talking directly to Russia,\u201d Nunes told Hill.TV\u2019s “Rising” in an interview to be aired Monday.<\/p>\n

Collusion can be criminal if it involves conspiracy to break federal laws, or it can involve perfectly legal, unwitting actions that still jeopardize America\u2019s security against a \u201cfrenemy\u201d like Russia.<\/p>\n

There is clear evidence now that shows Hillary Clinton\u2019s family and charity profited from Moscow and simultaneously facilitated official government actions benefiting Russia that have raised security concerns.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s irrefutable evidence that her opposition research effort on Trump \u2014 one that inspired an FBI probe \u2014 was carried out by people who got information from Russia and were consorting with Russians.<\/p>\n

It would seem those questions deserve at least some of the scrutiny afforded the Trump-Russia collusion inquiry that is now two-plus years old.<\/p>\n

NOTE: This story has been updated from the original to correct that Uranium One is a Canadian company and to clarify that House and Senate investigating committees have cleared the president.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

___
\nhttps:\/\/thehill.com\/opinion\/white-house\/429292-the-case-for-russia-collusion-against-the-democrats<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The case for Russia collusion \u2026 against the Democrats BY JOHN SOLOMON The Hill With\u00a0Republicans on both House and Senate investigative committees\u00a0having\u00a0found no evidence\u00a0of\u00a0Donald Trump\u00a0being guilty of Democrat-inspired allegations of Russian collusion, it is worth revisiting one anecdote that escaped … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cosmicconvergence.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cosmicconvergence.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cosmicconvergence.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cosmicconvergence.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cosmicconvergence.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cosmicconvergence.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cosmicconvergence.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cosmicconvergence.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cosmicconvergence.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}