Over the weekend on Fox News Sunday, House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) talked about opposition research that was conducted on President Trump in the Russian dossier. Gowdy noted that he was interested to look if the Hillary Clinton campaign had tried to launder money through a law firm to get around transparency laws.
Gowdy noted that he is not an expert on election law but added that you do not need to be an expert to understand the possibility of laundering campaign money through a law firm. Gowdy said it would be possible to run for Congress and hire a law firm and have them do all of the opposition research, buy all the TV ads, purchase the marketing materials such as bumper stickers, hire all the experts, and all of those funds are then laundered through a law firm. Gowdy said this would be a very effective way to evade federal election transparency laws.
The congressman said that he also is interested in learning how it is that no one at the DNC can remember who paid $10 million to a law firm to conduct opposition research.
Gowdy found this stunning – $10 million and no one can recall who gave it the green light. There are two issues here, he said, the lack of memory about $10 million and the possibility of money being laundered through a law firm.
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Inquiries About Hillary Clinton Campaign Piling Up
The above questions about actions of the Hillary Clinton campaign is just one of a few story lines these days. Last week, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly called for a special, independent counsel to investigate her campaign and the Uranium One deal. He said that he believes it is very important that when these types of allegations are made against a campaign that they be fully investigated.
That deal was to approve the sale of the Uranium One Canadian company to Russia. Through the deal, American uranium deposits in Kazakhstan were sent to Russian. The State Department under Hillary Clinton was one of the board members overseeing the deal. The Clinton Foundation then got millions of dollars in donations from former and current investors in Uranium One.
Reporting on that story showed how the Russians, through their state nuclear company Rosatom, were involved in bribery, extortion and money laundering as well as racketeering to get control over US nuclear assets. With the help of an American informant, the FBI collected a large pile of evidence that indicated that Russia had corrupted a US uranium trucking firm through a series of bribes.
But that was only part of it. The Hill reported in mid-October that documents and eyewitness reports showed that the Russians were putting millions of dollars into Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation. When that was going on, Rosatom was trying to get a stake in the Uranium One company, which controlled as much as 20% of US uranium supplies.
The question many asked was, why would Russian nuclear officials send millions to the Clinton Foundation? Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State at that time. He was on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which decides whether deals such as Rostom’s will be approved.
Even though there was FBI evidence of extortion, bribery and racketeering, Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder and other people in the Obama administration approved of the Uranium One deal.
It seems that the biggest reason that this deal was okayed by Clinton and others was greed; The Clinton Foundation got as much as $145 million from investors related to the Uranium One deal.
Trump Ex-Campaign Official Indictments Divert Attention from Clintons
Meanwhile, indictments have come down on ex-Trump campaign officials that are allowing some of the Clinton likely misdeeds to slip into the shadows. Some in the media and in politics claimed that President Trump was attempting to divert attention from the fact that three people had been indicted, with the first charged in the investigation about whether people in the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians to stop Clinton from becoming president.
The White House has stressed that none of that has anything to do with Trump and has instead been pointing fingers at the Clinton campaign in 2016.
This week, indictments were first unsealed against ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates. Both men are facing at least a dozen federal charges of money laundering and conspiracy. Both men have pleaded not guilty. Their possibly illegal actions pre-date their work with the Trump campaign, so it is not clear how this could affect Trump, other than the media and political allies attempting to engage in guilt by association.
Manafort’s attorney stated this week that there is no evidence that he or the Trump campaign colluded in any way with the Russian government.
In another twist, it was shown this week that a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign had pleaded guilty for lying about what he was doing with the Russians.
The White House spend much of the early part of the week downplaying the Manafort indictment and insisted that it was the Clinton campaign that had colluded with Russian intelligence sources.
There are still some in the media and on Capitol Hill that insist that the real investigation should be started on possible violations of the law by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and the Obama administration, involving bribery, racketeering, money laundering, extortion and control of US nuclear assets.