Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.com
Another one bites the dust.
Days after the GOP’s now-infamous gotcha memo attacking the FBI became a punchline, and a week after the implosion of the GOP’s claim that a rogue “secret society” operating inside the FBI was trying to take down Trump, the party’s other major planned distraction — a Hillary Clinton gotcha story revived from 2015 — has now also been debunked.
And this time, the Department of Justice did the honors.
Officials there have concluded that the much-touted informant presented by the GOP did not, as the GOP claimed, have damning information about Clinton. And specifically, the whistleblower did not offer up any telling information about the 2010 sale of a uranium company with extensive U.S. holdings to the Russian firm Uranium One.
That’s the already-debunked GOP gotcha crusade attacking Clinton over a seven-year-old transaction in which the Obama administration allowed the sale of U.S. uranium mining facilities to Russia’s state atomic energy company. Clinton was secretary of state at the time, with no direct oversight of the deal, and the State Department was one of nine agencies that agreed to approve the deal.
The soggy story was resurrected last fall by a dubious report claiming a whistleblower had all kinds of damning information on the deal and Clinton’s role.
The story was supposedly so explosive that Sean Hannity announced special counsel Robert Mueller should shut down his Trump investigation and instead immediately focus on the allegations against Clinton. Indeed, Hannity called it “the biggest scandal — or at least one of them — in American history.”
Over a three-week period, Fox News devoted 12 hours to the bogus “scandal,” according to Media Matters. Attorney General Jeff Sessions then pushed prosecutors last December to ask “FBI agents to explain the evidence they found in a now dormant criminal investigation into a controversial uranium deal that critics have linked to Bill and Hillary Clinton,” NBC News reported.
This week, as Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, a hotbed of GOP conspiracies, prepare to officially interview the informant, top Democrats revealed Department of Justice officials don’t trust the whistleblower because of previous inconsistencies in his stories, and said when they interviewed him he offered them zero information about Clinton.
“The Department of Justice has now provided us with a detailed briefing that directly contradicts these Republican allegations,” Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Adam Schiff of California wrote in a letterthis week to the chairs of the House Oversight and Intelligence committees.
“They also confirmed that there were ‘no allegations of impropriety or illegality’ regarding Secretary Clinton in any of the documents they reviewed,” the two lawmakers wrote.
Democrats on the committee have not been able to interview the whistleblower. They’re demanding when Republicans sit down with him this week that a transcript be made and shared with all members, something Republicans are currently refusing to do.
Republicans have proven tireless in their effort to create distractions in order to try to protect Trump from looming political and legal jeopardy.
The “secret society” and the FBI memo didn’t work. Neither does this failed Clinton gotcha.
