@OldBathos has written a very fine, tightly reasoned, short post about the ongoing scandal involving the Obama-Clinton-Holder-Rosenstein-Mueller-Comey cover up of, as his post refers to it, the “real Russian collusion story.” This is in no way meant to “step on” that post, but to add an exclamation point to it by highlighting an article I consider to be the finest single piece of analysis written on the entire tawdry (of course! It involves the Clintons. What other adjective could one possibly use?) story.

This is the piece which appeared Saturday morning in National Review Online by Andrew C. McCarthy, a former Federal prosecutor, assistant US Attorney in New York, titled “The Obama Administration’s Uranium One Scandal.” In addition to being the product of one who has actual prosecutorial experience “in the trenches”– he worked for years building the successful prosecution of “the Blind Sheik” who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing — he offers a good bit of context of which I was unaware, and I have made an attempt to read everything on this affair I could get my hands on.

In doing so, he places many of the major steps in the various episodes as they were developing in the context of how they matched up with political events of the day. When these puzzle pieces are placed side by side with those developments, one sees there can be little doubt that this was a deliberate cover-up in which many of the principals in the current Mueller debacle are directly, and very possibly criminally, implicated. In setting the stage for this discussion, he makes it clear that this is not “just” a Clinton scandal (How many have there been? It’s easy to lose track, isn’t it?) but reaching far beyond that:

Here’s the kicker: The Uranium One scandal is not only, or even principally, a Clinton scandal. It is an Obama-administration scandal.

The Clintons were just doing what the Clintons do: cashing in on their “public service.” The Obama administration, with Secretary Clinton at the forefront but hardly alone, was knowingly compromising American national-security interests. The administration green-lighted the transfer of control over one-fifth of American uranium-mining capacity to Russia, a hostile regime — and specifically to Russia’s state-controlled nuclear-energy conglomerate, Rosatom. Worse, at the time the administration approved the transfer, it knew that Rosatom’s American subsidiary was engaged in a lucrative racketeering enterprise that had already committed felony extortion, fraud, and money-laundering offenses.

The Obama administration also knew that congressional Republicans were trying to stop the transfer. Consequently, the Justice Department concealed what it knew. DOJ allowed the racketeering enterprise to continue compromising the American uranium industry rather than commencing a prosecution that would have scotched the transfer. Prosecutors waited four years before quietly pleading the case out for a song, in violation of Justice Department charging guidelines. Meanwhile, the administration stonewalled Congress, reportedly threatening an informant who wanted to go public.

Reading this analysis, one is reminded of the history going all the way back to the administration of George H.W. Bush who agreed with the new Russian federation “that U.S. nuclear providers would be permitted to purchase uranium from Russia’s disassembled nuclear warheads (after it had been down-blended from its highly enriched weapons-grade level). The Russian commercial agent responsible for the sale and transportation of this uranium to the U.S. is the Kremlin-controlled company “Tenex” (formally, JSC Techsnabexport). Tenex is a subsidiary of Rosatom.”

These efforts continued under the George W. Bush administration:

Naïvely viewing Russia as a “strategic partner” rather than a malevolent competitor, the Bush administration made a nuclear-cooperation agreement with the Kremlin in May 2008. That blunder, however, was tabled before Congress could consider it. That is because Russia, being Russia, invaded Georgia.

Then came the Obama-Clinton regime with its embarrassingly juvenile red plastic “reset button,” and it was early in that administration that events were set in motion which resulted in what I have to term an unspeakable and dangerous act of working against the very national security interests these “leaders” took an oath to protect — the sale of close to 20 percent of our own uranium reserves to Russian interests close to and controlled by Putin.

Around this time, as outlined in the essential reading on this whole criminal enterprise, Clinton Cash, by Peter Schweitzer,

…four senior House members steeped in national-security issues — Peter King (R., N.Y.), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla.), Spencer Bachus (R., Ala.), and Howard McKeon (R. Calif.) — voiced grave concerns, pointing out that Rosatom had helped Iran, America’s sworn enemy, build its Bushehr nuclear reactor. The members concluded that “the take-over of essential US nuclear resources by a government-owned Russian agency . . . would not advance the national security interests of the United States.” Republican senator John Barrasso objected to Kremlin control of uranium assets in his state of Wyoming, warning of Russia’s “disturbing record of supporting nuclear programs in countries that are openly hostile to the United States, specifically Iran and Venezuela.” The House began moving a bill “expressing disfavor of the Congress” regarding Obama’s revival of the nuclear-cooperation agreement Bush had abandoned.

And, then, the cover up:

Clearly, in this atmosphere, disclosure of the racketeering enterprise that Rosatom’s American subsidiary was, at that very moment, carrying out would have been the death knell of the asset transfer to Russia. It would also likely have ended the “reset” initiative in which Obama and Clinton were deeply invested — an agenda that contemplated Kremlin-friendly deals on nuclear-arms control and accommodation of the nuclear program of Russia’s ally, Iran. That was not going to be allowed to happen. It appears that no disclosure of Russia’s racketeering and strong-arming was made to CFIUS or to Congress — not by Secretary Clinton, not by Attorney General Holder, and certainly not by President Obama. In October 2010, CFIUS gave its blessing to Rosatom’s acquisition of Uranium One.

A Sweetheart Plea Helps the Case Disappear

Even though the FBI had an informant collecting damning information, and had a prosecutable case against Mikerin by early 2010, the extortion racket against American energy companies was permitted to continue into the summer of 2014. It was only then that, finally, Mikerin and his confederates were arrested.

As the McCarthy piece asks, why then? Very simple, the statue of limitations was about to run out on them and they had to do something, anything, so they did — very, very quietly:

Still, a lid needed to be kept on the case. It would have made for an epic Obama administration scandal, and a body blow to Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes, if in the midst of Russia’s 2014 aggression, public attention had been drawn to the failure, four years earlier, to prosecute a national-security case in order to protect Russia’s takeover of U.S. nuclear assets.

The Obama administration needed to make this case go away — without a public trial if at all possible.

The next part of McCarthy’s analysis is what I regard as the most invaluable part, although it does, as they say on all the talk shows, “get in the weeds.” But these are the weeds one needs to understand to fully appreciate the depth of the corruption of some of the people now in charge of investigating President Trump and all of his associates and all of his friends and all of his business associates and all of his family with not a shred of evidence to date:

Mikerin was arrested on a complaint describing a racketeering scheme that stretched back to 2004 and included extortion, fraud, and money laundering. Yet he was permitted to plead guilty to a single count of money-laundering conspiracy.

Except it was not really money-laundering conspiracy.

Under federal law, that crime (at section 1956 of the penal code) carries a penalty of up to 20 years’ imprisonment — not only for conspiracy but for each act of money laundering. But Mikerin was not made to plead guilty to this charge. He was permitted to plead guilty to an offense charged under the catch-all federal conspiracy provision (section 371) that criminalizes agreements to commit any crime against the United States. Section 371 prescribes a sentence of zero to five years’ imprisonment.

The Justice Department instructs prosecutors that when Congress has given a federal offense its own conspiracy provision with a heightened punishment (as it has for money laundering, racketeering, narcotics trafficking, and other serious crimes), they may not charge a section 371 conspiracy. Section 371 is for less serious conspiracy cases. Using it for money laundering — which caps the sentence way below Congress’s intent for that behavior — subverts federal law and signals to the court that the prosecutor does not regard the offense as major.

Yet, that is exactly what Rosenstein’s office did, in a plea agreement his prosecutors co-signed with attorneys from the Justice Department’s Fraud Section. (See in the Hill’s report, the third document embedded at the bottom, titled “Mikerin Plea Deal.”) No RICO, no extortion, no fraud — and the plea agreement is careful not to mention any of the extortions in 2009 and 2010, before CFIUS approved Rosatom’s acquisition of U.S. uranium stock. Mikerin just had to plead guilty to a nominal “money laundering” conspiracy charge. This insulated him from a real money-laundering sentence. Thus, he got a term of just four years’ incarceration for a major national-security crime — which, of course, is why he took the plea deal and waived his right to appeal, sparing the Obama administration a full public airing of the facts.

Interestingly, as the plea agreement shows, the Obama DOJ’s Fraud Section was then run by Andrew Weissmann, who is now one of the top prosecutors in Robert Mueller’s ongoing special-counsel investigation of suspected Trump collusion with Russia.

After all these years, after all this intricate structure of cover up so carefully put together to protect the almost-certain election of Hillary Clinton to the Presidency, there was still just this one little loose thread, as the old Columbo character would have put it– just one more little question I need to have answered and then I’ll be on my way…. the problem of the confidential informant, who was more than ready to tell all:

There was still one other problem to tamp down. That was the informant — the lobbyist who alerted the FBI to the Russian racketeering enterprise back in 2009. He wanted to talk.

Specifically, as his attorney, Ms. Toensing, explains, the informant wanted to tell Congress what he knows — about what the FBI and the Justice Department could already have proved in 2010 when CFIUS signed off on Russia’s acquisition of American nuclear material, and about what he’d learned of Russian efforts to curry favor with Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he was not allowed to talk.

It turns out, the lawyer explains, that the FBI had induced him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The Justice Department warned him that it was enforceable — even against disclosures to Congress. (Because, you know, the FBI is opposed to all leaks and disclosures of confidential investigative information . . . except those initiated by the FBI, of course.) In addition, when the informant was primed to file a federal civil lawsuit to recover his own losses from the scheme, he claims that the Justice Department threatened him with prosecution, warning that a lawsuit would violate the non-disclosure agreement. The Hill reports that it has obtained emails from a civil lawyer retained by the witness, which describe pressure exerted by the Justice Department to silence the informant.

I learned tonight from a Fox News report, the sole remaining outlet with a shred of integrity left in television, that the person who made that call was none other than the Obama Attorney General herself, Loretta Lynch, the one and the same person who met with the titular head of the Clinton Criminal Family Foundation a few days before she was “exonerated” by her own FBI Head. Does anyone believe the Attorney General herself would have made such a phone call, personally, absent a call from above? I don’t.

The McCarthy piece ends with the observation that those pressures from the Obama-Lynch “Justice” Department came in 2016, the final run of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. And, he observes, pungently: “This stinks.”

Indeed it does, and I must note a little note I sent my personal list just yesterday, we call ourselves The Patriot Friends, which seems to be a nice fit with Mr. McCarthy’s final observation:

In his closing argument in the Impeachment Trial of our esteemed former President BJ Clinton, Congressman Henry Hyde made these remarks about the arguments his attorneys set forth; for some reason this came back to me this morning in thinking about the aroma Felonia vonPantsuit carries around with her and I looked it up in the Congressional Record of February 12, 1999, to be sure I got it right— here it is:

“Secondly, I want to compliment the president’s counsel. They have conducted themselves in the most professional way. They have made the most of a poor case, in my opinion. Excuse me. There’s an old Italian saying, that has nothing to do with the lawyers, but to your case, and it says: ‘‘You may dress the shepherd in silk, but he will still smell of the goat.’’

No matter how many bags of gold she stacks up, no matter how many new pantsuits she buys with her ill-gotten gains, she will still “smell of the goat”!

It is way past time for the Trump Justice Department to start issuing indictments against all of these treacherous, and I use that term advisedly, “leaders” of our Government, every one of whom took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and have them brought before the Bar of Justice to account for their crimes.