Dave Neese: Fearless Fosdick and a trail of sleaze
Fearless Fosdick Bob Mueller’s one and only big catch so far — if you can count an indictment as a catch — is Paul Manafort. He was Trump campaign manager for a brief period in the summer of 2016.
Trump made an unwise choice in tapping Manafort to run his campaign, and Mueller a wise one in collaring Manafort as his trophy villain.
Manafort was a long-time, notorious inhabitant of the swamp Trump had pledged to drain. An insider’s insider.
As The Atlantic magazine details in a profile titled “American Hustler,” Manafort was a lobbyist well known around Washington for operating on the shady fringes of an often sleazy business.
He dared to go where other lobbyists — even ones not persnickety about their paying clients — feared to go. As far back as 1992, the Washington cognoscenti identified him as the voice of “the torturers’ lobby,” owing to his lucrative client list of nasty foreign authoritarians.
And this was long before Manafort hooked up with Victor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s corrupt strongman and Putin’s puppet.
Dates are important. The Manafort indictment is crammed with dates. Let’s pay attention to them.
The indictment seeks to nail Manafort on a grab-bag of counts ranging from money laundering to neglecting to register as an agent of foreign governments — all dating way back before Trump became involved in politics. As far back as 2006.
Mostly, Manafort’s alleged offenses span the years of Obama’s presidency. They also happen to span the years when — ahem — Fearless Fosdick Mueller himself was Director of the FBI, 20012013.
Focus in on the charge that Manafort failed to register as an agent of foreign governments, an offense ongoing, according to the indictment, from the years 2006 onward.
The unregistered Manafort and his lobbyist team in those years were swarming all over Capitol Hill. And yet Mueller notices this only now, at this late date?
In eight years, nobody in the Obama Justice Department ever happened to notice that Manafort had neglected to fill out paperwork required by federal law? Never noticed this even though — according to the indictment’s own words — Manafort during the Obama era “engaged in extensive lobbying” activities involving “multiple members of Congress and their staffs”?
The indictment would have you believe that, as far back as 2008, Manafort dodged millions of dollars in taxes through various flagrant schemes which were somehow undetectable then but are all at once conspicuous now.
In a similar vein, Fosdick Mueller now sees manifold bank and real estate malefactions on Manafort’s part that for some reason he couldn’t see in 20082012, during which period Mueller was FBI director.
He sees them suddenly only now? Only now that a great clamor has arisen among the Democratic National Committee and the Swamp Media over Trump’s supposed “collusion” with Russia’s manipulative nomenklatura?
Actually, the Manafort indictment utters not a peep about any Trump-Putin election connivance. It does, however, implicate another notable party in sleazy activity — namely, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign manager, swamp lobbyist extraordinaire John Podesta.
According to the indictment, Manafort hired a firm the indictment coyly identifies only as “B” to help him advocate for Ukrainian strongman and Putin puppet Yanukovych. Undisputed news accounts have widely identified “B” as John Podesta’s wellwired Podesta Group. (The Podesta firm has abruptly disbanded, like roaches scattering when the kitchen light comes on.)
The indictment states that for helping Manafort do dirty work for Yanukovych, “B” — i.e., Podesta — shared a $2 million fee with another firm, “A.”
“A” is reported to be a Republican-connected lobbying firm, Mercury Public Affairs. Who says there’s no bipartisanship in Washington these days? (A top dog in in the Mercury firm, a partner, is GOP kingpin Mike DuHaime. He was chief political strategist for Gov. Chris Christie’s two successful gubernatorial campaigns.)
The Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs, like Manafort, neglected to register as agents for foreign entities. But, unlike Manafort, they haven’t been indicted and frogmarched by Fearless Fosdick Mueller’s Special Counsel government goon squad.
According to the indictment, the two firms signed on with Manafort to be Yanukovych’s Washington “mouthpiece” without ever having bothered even to meet the client.
The indictment also says that the two firms were paid out of Manafort’s illicitly laundered foreign accounts including an account linked to an all-but-fictitious front group. Yet the two firms remain, so far, unmolested by the Fosdick operation.
The Podesta firm’s client list is highly revealing for reasons other than its work for Putin pal Yanukovych. Here was a firm owned by the manager of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, a campaign claiming to be the voice of the little guy and gal. Yet, take a gander at Podesta’s $18-million-a-year client list: the Business Roundtable, GE, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo and the like. Not exactly mom-and-pop shops.
The Podesta client that stands out, however, is Uranium One.
Uranium One is a Canadian mining firm with mines in the American West. The firm was acquired by the giant Kremlin agency, Rosatom in 2010, thereby giving Russia ownership of a significant share of America’s limited uranium supplies.
The takeover of Uranium One by the Russia’s Rosatom,
drew little attention in the United States. But the Russian newspaper Pravda heralded it as a Kremlin coup. (Pravda headline: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”)
The New York Times in 2015 noted that the uranium deal moved Russia “closer to its goal of controlling the global uranium supply chain.”
The Russia uranium deal couldn’t have gone forward without the nod of a multi-agency panel, then chaired by an underling of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The panel’s signoff was required because the federal government lists uranium as
a critical national security asset in short supply.
The panel approved the deal even though there was an ongoing corruption probe linked to it. And even though the deal handed Rosatom control of 20 percent of U.S. uranium production capacity.
As the New York Times would later report under a front-page headline: “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal.” The cash flow — tens of millions of dollars — came from parties with a financial stake in U.S. approval of the deal. Also, Bill Clinton was paid a $500,000 fee, ostensibly for a single speech, by Moscow-based Renaissance Capital, a Putinlinked investment bank with ties to the uranium deal.
While the uranium deal was still percolating through the Washington bureaucracy, the FBI caught a whiff of malfeasance and tracked the odor to two shadowy figures involved in deal. One Vadim Mikerin and one Boris Rubizhensky were prosecuted on money-laundering and other charges.They drew prison terms of four years and one year, respectively.
The FBI director at that time? Fearless Fosdick Mueller. The lead law enforcement lawyer on the probe? Rod Rosenstein, then U.S. Attorney for Maryland, today the No. 2 guy in the Justice Department — and the fellow who tapped Fearless Fosdick as Special Counsel and sicced him on Trump for supposed election collusion with Putin.
During the time the Obama panel was weighing approval of the Russian takeover of U.S. uranium assets, did Fosdick or Rosenstein fail to alert the panel to the malodorous effusions wafting from the deal? Or did they in fact alert the panel and it signed off on the deal anyway? Yuuuge questions. Answers not yet known or revealed.
One of the members of the panel that signed off on the uranium deal was then the nation’s top law enforcement official, Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder — Fearless Fosdick’s boss at the time. (Mueller, remember, was FBI director then.)
The narrative continues to trend toward incestuous, in-grown swamp relationships. Under President
Clinton, Holder had been Deputy Attorney General. As such, he had served as legal Sherpa for an especially smelly pardon Clinton signed on his way out of office.
Holder had attended to the legal paperwork regarding Clinton’s pardon of fugitive commodities mogul Marc Rich,who had fled the country to dodge prosecution in a $48-million tax-evasion case. Peeeee-yewwww!
The stinky Rich pardon later came back to haunt Holder when he was nominated by President Obama to be Attorney General. And guess who stepped forward at the time to publicly defend Holder? Why, none other than James Comey, later appointed FBI Director by Obama, recently fired by
Trump . . . . on the recommendation of the aforementioned Rod Rosenstein.
Also, Comey had been the federal lawman assigned to the Marc Rich tax-evasion case and to the investigation of the pardon Bill Clinton and Eric Holder had cooked up for the fugitive multi-millionaire.
Oh — and yes, of course, Comey was the G-man who controversially recommended not to pursue charges against Hillary Clinton in the email investigation after outlining a damning case against her.
The nuttiest conspiracy buff in a tinfoil hat couldn’t come up with stuff like this..