Tag: uranium one
Sorry, The Show Trial Of Hillary Clinton Has Been Cancelled

Sorry, The Show Trial Of Hillary Clinton Has Been Cancelled

So here’s the good news: for all their assiduous efforts, President Trump and Attorney General Barr have failed to fully weaponize the U.S. criminal justice system. There’s never going to be a Russian-style show trial of Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” scandal-obsessed pundits once lampooned her for describing has once again struck out.

According to the Washington Post, “A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton has effectively ended with no tangible results.” Regarding the ballyhooed “Uranium One” and Clinton Foundation probes “[c]urrent and former officials said that (prosecutor John) Huber has largely finished and found nothing worth pursuing.”

Same as it ever was. 

See, in a properly functioning legal system an ambitious prosecutor has far more to lose than to gain by bringing, pardon me, Trumped-up charges against a prominent figure with the wherewithal to defend herself. Even “Whitewater” special counsel Kenneth Starr understood that. Starr spent most of Bill Clinton’s presidency hinting at Hillary’s impending indictment before ultimately releasing a final report conceding that he had nothing either. 

(Much later, of course, the very holy Judge Starr was forced out as president of Baylor University after bungling a probe of sexual assaults by football players.)

But I digress. The headline to Washington Post MVP columnist Jennifer Rubin’s piece reads “Hillary Clinton is the most exonerated politician ever.” And Rubin references only this latest collapsed conspiracy theory and the FBI’s fruitless probe of her e-mail usage. Not Whitewater, her law firm billing records, Benghazi, etc. She even goes so far as to scold her own cohort.

“You would think legitimate media outlets at the very least,” Rubin writes “would self-reflect on their coverage that often treated long-ago disproved accusations as still unsettled.”

That would be the New York Times, although Rubin’s too polite to say so. Also, never mind that Rubin herself spent much of 2016 railing against both Clintons’ propensity to play “fast and loose with rules and norms that inhibit others, always winding up just a smidgen short of illegality.”

That is to say, falsely accused, each successive bogus accusation somehow enabling the next. I’m reminded of the time Pulitzer Prize-winning financial journalist James B. Stewart, flogging his error-filled book on the Clintons’ Arkansas real estate dealings on “Nightline” accused Hillary of submitting a fraudulent loan application. All because he, Stewart, had failed to examine page two of a two-page document.

Also of this immortal 1996 paragraph by Time magazine’s Michael Kramer summarizing the Washington press corps’ Whitewater suspicions with a string of “maybes” here highlighted for your reading convenience.

Whitewater, Kramer wrote “is different—OR COULD BE—because the wrongdoing (IF THERE WAS ANY) MAY HAVE INVOLVED abuses of power while Clinton was serving as Governor of Arkansas…SO EVEN IF the worst WERE PROVED—and NO ONE YET KNOWS what that is—the offense MIGHT NOT WARRANT impeachment.” He concluded by asking why two lawyers like the Clintons possessed no paper trail “proving their innocence.”

Their innocence, that is, of charges Kramer himself couldn’t define. 

Ultimately, of course, they did, if not to universal satisfaction. Back then, I called these kinds of ritualized demands the “Clinton rules.”

But here’s the thing: pretty much the same standards applied to the whole “Uranium One” fixation. Like Whitewater, it also originated in a piece of absurdist journalism published by the mighty New York Times back on April 24, 2016. Read today… Well, the thing is almost impossible to read, which ought to have been a tip off. 

When you can’t make heads or tails of a newspaper article, it’s usually because the authors have no idea what they’re talking about and hope you won’t notice. Here Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was murkily accused of taking a bribe from a Canadian philanthropist who’d long ago sold his interest in a Utah uranium mine of no great value. (U.S. ore production is a tiny fraction of the world market.) A Russian company bought it.

The Times produced no evidence that Hillary played any role in the transaction whatsoever—signed off on by nine separate U.S. government agencies unrelated to the State Department. But the newspaper had made a devil’s bargain with one Peter Schweizer, a Breitbart-affiliated Steve Bannon acolyte with a history of smearing Democrats.

It was one of those deals where all the “mistakes” ran in the selfsame direction. Correct the errors, fill in the blanks, and the presumptive scandal vanishes. Exactly as this latest, and presumably last, Clinton scandal has done. You’d think New York Times editors would learn, although you certainly wouldn’t expect them to admit it.

So is Hillary without fault? Not hardly. Despite her humane intentions, like all politicians she’s about personal ambition and power. And she views most journalists with thinly-veiled contempt that many are only too glad to reciprocate. 

How 2016 Failures Keep Haunting The Beltway Media

How 2016 Failures Keep Haunting The Beltway Media

The Hillary Clinton exoneration tour continues, and with it comes the deafening silence from news organization that gleefully bought into GOP attacks on her during the 2016 campaign. Determined to never acknowledge their sweeping failures during the last presidential cycle, the Beltway media show no signs of having learned anything over the last four years. Indeed, newsrooms refuse to be transparent about what kinds of changes, if any, have been put into place to make sure the epic failures of 2016 are not repeated this election cycle. 

After Trump’s partisan Justice Department launched an investigation of the Clinton Foundation, in an obvious effort to “mollify conservatives” still obsessed with Clinton bashing, the inquiry has produced no proof of any wrongdoing, the Washington Post recently reported. The Clinton Foundation’s “corruption” was a GOP manufactured gotcha story that the press gleefully amplified for 18 months between 2015 and 2016. 

During that time, the New York Times and the Washington Post published more than 200 articles about the Clinton Foundation, according to Nexis.

Yet even today, you often get a blank stare today when you ask journalists about the 2016 media fiasco. They simply don’t see the failures, or won’t admit to them. Note that the editor who oversaw the Times’ disastrous campaign coverage four years was recently elevated up the masthead, landing one of the newspaper’s most senior positions. Institutionally, there is certainly little evidence that the Times brass feels like anything went wrong in 2016. 

For lots of Democrats and liberals, the failures of the 2016 coverage are obvious for all to see, as the press treated Trump like a celebrity while holding Clinton, the first woman presidential nominee, to ridiculous double standards. Fact: Trump refused

to make personal donations to any charities, while Clinton helped bankroll a wildly successful one. But she was the one relentlessly x-rayed by the media for a year on the topic of charities.

And for the record, the Times, which essentially sponsored the Clinton Foundation smear by teaming up with a Breitbart writer, still has not assigned a reporter to cover the latest exoneration of the Clinton Foundation. To date, the paper has only published a Reuters wire story, buried where nobody would notice it.

We’ve seen this shoulder shrug before. Last year, when a lengthy State Department investigation concluded there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information in emails sent to and from Clinton’s private server while she was secretary of state, the Times covered the story on page 16 and devoted 649 words to that exoneration. Recall that during the final stretch before the 2016 campaign, the Times famously crammed three separate Clinton email stories onto its front page on the same day, signaling to readers that the story had reached epic, blockbuster proportions.

Reporting on the Justice Department’s exoneration of the Clinton Foundation, Vanity Fair presented the attacks on the charity as a baseless “conspiracy theory championed by conservatives.” CNN made the same point, stressing that “Trump” in 2016 was “making the case — with scant evidence — that Clinton was somehow using her official office to feather her own nest.”  The media in recent days have been clear, that the blame should lay with “conservatives” and “Trump,” who concocted the hollow Clinton Foundation gotcha story during the previous campaign. 

But that’s only half of the truth. The other half — the half that the press does not want to discuss in 2020 — is that the media willingly co-cosponsored that conspiracy theory and turned it into legitimate news. It was the Beltway press, dripping with contempt for Clinton, that breathlessly hyped the non-story for weeks and months in 2015 and 2016.  Today though, the mediawon’t come clean. Instead, editors and producers develop amnesia and insist it was only “conservatives” and “Trump” who peddled the Clinton Foundation smear. 

How did we get to such an absurd place, where the press depicted a wildly successful and transparent charity as some sort of ominous web of political deceit supposedly drenched in shadowy payments?

This paranoid fantasy was part of the all-consuming narrative depicting Clinton as a globally powerful villain who schemed around the world to line her pockets (while working 80 hours a week as Secretary of State). This preposterous theory suggested that not only did she serve in Obama’s cabinet but she was effectively president of the United States. It meant that Clinton must have dictated uranium policy and she who single-handedly signed off on the Uranium One deal — not in fact nearly a dozen federal U.S. agencies.

It was a deeply misogynistic tale that portrayed the first woman presidential nominee in American history as being deeply untrustworthy in a way that powerful men in Washington, D.C. are never shown. Rather than admiring Clinton’s decades worth of accomplishments, those achievements were held up to scorn as the press tried furiously to construct a storyline about her duplicitous ways, most famously surrounding her emails and the Clinton Foundation. 

The latter story was concocted in 2015 when Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins published Clinton Cash by longtime Republican partisan writer Peter Schweizer. A sloppy, book-length attack on Clinton Foundation donors, the book tried (and failed) to show how foundation donations corrupted Clinton’s decisions during her time as secretary of state; how the foundation acted as a side door for millionaires to buy influence inside the Clinton camp.  The New York Times and the Washington Post then teamed up with Schweizer and helped push his flawed Clinton opposition research. 

In many of those news accounts, the fact that the Clinton Foundation is a charity was often downplayed, including the organization’s pioneering mission to provide cheaper, better  medicine to millions of poor HIV/AIDS sufferers around the world. Or its innovative efforts on global healtheconomic inequalitychildhood obesity, and climate change

 “If Hillary Clinton wasn’t running for president, the Clinton Foundation would be seen as one of the great humanitarian charities of our generation,” nonprofit analyst Daniel Borochoff of Charity Watch  told CNN in 2016. 

Months later, after conceding that recent news reports hadn’t proven any actual wrongdoing or lawbreaking with the foundation or in its connection with the State Department when Clinton was secretary of state, editorials appearing in t Washington PostBoston Globe, and USA Today, among others, were nonetheless adamant: Shut it down. 

And now we know, via a handpicked Trump Justice Department prosecutor, that there was never any there there. The whole gotcha smear campaign was a joke, and the media played along. Sadly, there’s no indication any lessons have been learned for 2020.

IMAGE: Hillary Clinton attends a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, PA, October 22, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo

Racist Iowa Rep. King Suggests Executing Clintons Over Fake Scandal

Racist Iowa Rep. King Suggests Executing Clintons Over Fake Scandal

We regret to inform you that Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is at it again.

The noted racist Republican congressman posted an outrageous meme to his campaign Facebook page Monday afternoon that uses a debunked conspiracy theory to suggest that former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should be executed.

The meme depicts Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — American citizens who were convicted of treason and later executed for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union during the Cold War — and compares them to the Clintons, whom the meme’s authors accuse of not facing consequences for selling uranium to the Russians.

King reposted the meme from the right-wing Facebook page “The Patriot Post” and added the text “#LockHerUp.”

Of course, the “Uranium One” Clinton conspiracy theory the meme relies on is beyond false, and has been debunked over and over again. Even Fox News host Shepard Smith debunked the conspiracy theory that many of the Trump sycophants on the propaganda network he works for love to push.

It’s outrageous enough that King would repost a meme accusing the Clintons of a nonexistent crime. But on top of that, the meme suggests they should be executed for that nonexistent crime.

King is no stranger to controversy.

In March, he posted yet another vile meme to Facebook in which he fantasized about killing liberals in a new civil war.

Later that month, he refused to deny that he thinks an all-white society would be “superior” to other societies.

Republicans kicked King off of the House committees he once served on for openly questioning what was so bad about white supremacy. (It’s worth noting, however, that Republicans tolerated King’s racism for years, and only moved to punish King when King’s otherwise strong hold of his heavily Republican House seat in Iowa became jeopardized by the antics.)

King is still protesting his removal from those committees, claiming over the weekend that he was a casualty of “a political lynch mob.

He even claimed that his removal from House committees was similar to how Jesus was persecuted.

Sadly, King’s latest Facebook post is par for the course for the unhinged, racist Iowa Republican.

Published with permission of The American Independent. 

Former Clinton Aide Slams Times’ Stealth Correction On Uranium One

Former Clinton Aide Slams Times’ Stealth Correction On Uranium One

On Tuesday, tucked into a paragraph of an article on how President Donald Trump had battled investigations against him for the past two years, The New York Times made an astonishing, seemingly accidental confession about a massive failure in their coverage of the 2016 presidential election.

“Using Congress’s oversight powers, the Republican lawmakers succeeding in doing what Donald Trump could not realistically do on his own: forcing into the open some of the government’s most sensitive investigative files  including secret wiretaps and the existence of an F.B.I. informant  which were part of the Russia inquiry,” said the article. “House Republicans opened investigations into the F.B.I.’s handling of the Clinton email case and a debunked Obama-era uranium deal indirectly linked to Mrs. Clinton.”

It is remarkable that the Times casually mentioned the Uranium One deal as a “debunked” scandal, noted Nick Merrill, a former State Department official and adviser to Hillary Clinton, because it was the Times that promoted that story in the first place:

Nick Merrill@NickMerrill

For those who don’t recall or have appropriately suppressed all 2016 election memories, this story came in April of 2015, 12 days after HRC announced she was running for President.

271 people are talking about this

Nick Merrill@NickMerrill

Because the NYT ran it, it carried enormous weight despite it being the result of a deal struck between the NYT & a book project funded by Steve Bannon.

401 people are talking about this

Nick Merrill@NickMerrill

It was incredibly problematic for the campaign as the right pounced and we worked to debunk it. Only much later through a lot of hard work educating people on the facts was it more widely accepted that Uranium One was complete crap.

229 people are talking about this

One of the saddest parts of the story, notes Merrill, is that all of this drove donor funding away from the Clinton Foundation, as it tried to do life-saving work distributing medications and funding global development.

Nick Merrill@NickMerrill

Worst of all, it had lasting damage on the @ClintonFdn, diverting resources from programs that quite literally save lives across the globe.

232 people are talking about this

Nick Merrill@NickMerrill

As frustrating as all of this was, thankfully the Clinton Foundation & the incredible people there are committed & resilient, so they have continued to do remarkable work. Here’s a recent piece about CF’s comeback & it’s work in Puerto Rico.https://www.axios.com/clinton-foundation-bill-hillary-puerto-rico-hurricanes-2df82398-5a9e-4574-97e3-4a219257f112.html 

The Clintons’ “Comeback Foundation” aids hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico

It has expanded its work worldwide with fresh momentum and more support.

axios.com

339 people are talking about this
The New York Times has faced criticism for its coverage in the 2016 election. For example, a review of the paper’s coverage found that they “ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” The Clinton Cash saga is a major chapter in how the Times‘ editorial process fell short — and it arguably deserves more attention than a passing reference buried in an article on Trump.