What’s all this to-do about Donald Trump Jr. talking to a Russian attorney during the 2016 presidential campaign?
What it amounts to is this: the latest reach by Democrats and the media to bolster their case that Moscow colluded with the Trump campaign to help defeat Hillary Clinton.
While the evidence any such collusion between Trump and Vladimir Putin’s government is less than thin, the collusion case against Bill and Hillary Clinton becomes more startling every day.
Take the leaked email from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign sent by Jesse Lehrich, a Clinton campaign foreign-policy spokesman and member of the campaign’s rapid-response communications team. In the May 21, 2015, email, Lehrich writes that the campaign “killed a Bloomberg story” attempting to link Hillary Clinton’s opposition to the anti-Russia legislation known as the Magnitsky Act to a speech that Bill Clinton delivered in Moscow for $500,000.
First revealed in Peter Schweizer’s best-selling book “Clinton Cash,” the New York Times in April 2015 reported on Clinton’s $500,000 speech in Moscow and its possible ties to a deal in which the Russians gradually assumed ownership of the Uranium One mining company – a deal that gave Moscow control of one-fifth of all uranium production in the U.S. Clinton received the fee for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.
And, what was the Magnitsky Act, strongly opposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton? It was intended to sanction Russian officials accused of involvement in the 2009 death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, an anti-corruption whistleblower who died in prison, allegedly after being beaten. The Magnitsky Act was opposed by the former secretary of state because she was the architect of the famous “reset” of foreign policy between the U.S. and Russia.
Clinton helped lead the charge against the bill.
The bill was passed in 2012 when Congress demanded the Magnitsky Act be grouped with the administration’s legislative push to repeal the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a move that would ease U.S.-Russia trade relations because the law denied Moscow the ability to trade normally with the U.S.
On June 20, 2012, Clinton wrote an oped in the Wall Street Journal titled “Trade With Russia Is a Win-Win,” in which she sought to explain that retaining Jackson-Vanik “only fuels more anti-American sentiment in Russia.” She added: “Russia’s membership in the WTO (World Trade Organization) will soon be a fact of life. Failing to extend permanent normal trading relations will not penalize Russia, nor will it provide a lever with which to change Moscow’s behavior.”
In other words, who was working on promoting closer relations with Russia just five years ago? Hillary Clinton was. And not only were her efforts tied to big payoffs to her husband and her, they were also questionable in terms of America’s national security interests, given the transfer of control of the strategic asset uranium.
Meanwhile, the focus of news reports over the last few days has been on what?
Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian attorney. The New York Times published correspondence suggesting that meeting was an effort by Trump to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from a woman who reportedly “has connections to the Kremlin.”
Is this significant? Did Trump Jr. break any laws? Did he violate any ethics? Or, if it’s all true, was he doing just what all political campaigns and partisans do during election cycles – conduct opposition research?
By the way, who let Veselnitskaya into the country and allowed her to overstay her visa? The Obama Justice Department.
The press has all but ignored the smoking gun of the Uranium One deal the Clintons’ materially benefited from. The press not only ignored the story of Bill Clinton’s $500,000 payday in Russia, but they dropped the story under pressure from the Clinton campaign. Meanwhile, the press continues to pursue a story without any evidence to support it – the purported collusion between Donald Trump and Russia.
Where’s the real prima facie case of Russian collusion? It’s in the bank account of the Clinton Foundation, and it came at the expense of America’s strategic national interests and security.
Media wishing to interview Joseph Farah, please contact [email protected].
|
