The real Russia collusion scandal

Graham: Hillary implicated in Russia probe

Clinton Foundation benefited amid shady uranium deal

Michael Graham Thursday, October 19, 2017

Credit: Paul Szep

Hey, mainstream media! We finally found it — a real Russia scandal involving the 2016 election. With actual evidence of criminal wrongdoing and everything! So come on, New York Times, CNN and MSNBC, let’s ...

Hey, where’d everybody go?

For months I’ve been doing TV hits as the token conservative and getting grilled over “Russiagate.” Did Donald Trump and the Russians collude to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.

And for months I’ve been asking the same questions: Where is the evidence of an actual crime? And since “collusion” isn’t necessarily against the law, what actual crime are Democrats and their media allies talking about?

Well, the wait is over. The Hill and Circa media have broken a story the FBI spent years investigating — and actually sent someone to jail over — involving bribery, blackmail and corruption by Russians who wanted to buy up a big chunk of the world’s uranium, located here in North America.

We’ve known for a while that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both approved the deal and her family foundation received millions of dollars from Russians backing the deal. That’s one reason the nickname “Crooked Hillary” stuck.

What we didn’t know until now is that “the FBI had evidence as early as 2009 that Russian operatives used bribes, kickbacks and other dirty tactics to expand Moscow’s atomic energy footprint in the U.S.,” according to Fox News.

Not only did Hillary’s State Department approve Russia’s purchase of Uranium One — handing 20 percent of the U.S. uranium supply over to allies of Vladimir Putin — but the Obama FBI and Department of Justice let it happen unchallenged. All while the Clinton Foundation collected millions in “donations” from these Russians, and Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 by a Russian investment bank to give a speech in Moscow.

Then there’s the story of the Donald Trump dossier.

You may have heard about a dossier of Donald Trump dirt gathered from Russian sources by a former British intelligence agent. The content is extremely inappropriate for a family newspaper (yes, even in my column — so you know it’s bad) and almost nothing in it has ever been verified.

That dossier was ordered by an opposition research outfit called Fusion GPS, which got its money from various opponents of Donald Trump. What does that have to do with Russia? From The Wall Street Journal:

“Fusion by its own admission has worked in the past on a lobby campaign for a Russian company with ties to the Kremlin. Investigators want to know if ... foreign actors had anything to do with the commissioning or production of the Steele dossier.”

Good question, particularly since it appears this now-debunked dossier was used as evidence by the FBI to get the wiretaps on the Trump campaign that started this entire mess in the first place. In other words, it’s possible that the entire #RussiaGate story started with “evidence” planted by the Russians themselves.

Now that’s a scandal! It’s just not the one the media or Democrats wanted. So the media mostly shrug as Russia-friendly Fusion GPS ignores congressional subpoenas. Even the FBI’s shocking decision to refuse to cooperate is largely ignored by the media.

Why would the FBI try to shut down this probe? It could be related to the fact that the Obama Justice Department had actually considered putting the British spook on the taxpayers’ dime to continue his work digging up dirt on The Donald. Apparently someone remembered at the last minute that America is not, in fact, a banana republic and we don’t sic government agents on our political enemies.

Do we?

If the media really cared about Russia’s role in the 2016 election, they would be all over this story. It has everything they need: Paper trail, facts, actual criminal behavior. All the “collusion” story has is politics and partisan speculation.

Care to guess which one will be leading the evening news?

Michael Graham is a regular contributor to the Boston Herald. Follow him on Twitter @IAMMGraham.