The Collusion Fable
‘The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”
Thus spoke President Barack Obama just a couple of weeks before Election Day 2012. With the race still thought to be tight, he had come to the candidates’ final debate loaded for bear. Earlier in the campaign, his Republican rival, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, had had the temerity to pronounce that Russia was, “without question, our number-one geopolitical foe.” The incumbent president regarded this as an absurd anachronism. So that night, he brought the snark. Hadn’t anyone informed Romney that “the Cold War’s been over for twenty years”? Obama tut-tutted that this Republican nostalgia for the foreign policy of the 1980s was of a piece with the GOP’s desire to revive the “social policy of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.”
Yes, that was your Democratic Party standard-bearer, what seems like only yesterday. No longer was this the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. To Obama-era Democrats, arguing that Russia was a real threat, that it longed for a return to Soviet hegemony, was akin to calling for the return of Jim Crow and the adoption of protectionist practices that helped ignite the Great Depression.
But then Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, and Democrats decided they’d best return that call from the 1980s, after all. Turns out Russia—the Russia against whose serial aggressions Obama took little meaningful action throughout his eight years in office—really is our Numero Uno geopolitical foe. Turns out the Cold War isn’t “so last century.” Since November 8, 2016, in ever-evolving Democratic dogma, Russia has gone from a quaint obsession of neo-con warmongers to an existential threat on the order of Climate Change!
As is generally the case, neither extreme of political posturing has been accurate. Romney was right that Putin’s Russia is a significant rival on the world stage. Whether it is “number one” on the tally sheet is debatable. To figure that out, we’d have to make judgment calls about all the threats we face—immediate versus long-term, forcible versus other forms of aggression, ideological versus transactional, and so on. No need to dawdle over that. It suffices to say that the Russian regime is a serious adversary. It has a formidable nuclear arsenal, as well as highly capable military and intelligence forces. Its default posture is anti-American (though it is biddable). It cooperates effectively with other anti-American regimes and factions. Its veto power in the United Nations Security Council complicates our government’s capacity to act in American interests. It has a Soviet iciness about the use of terrorism and forges alliances with terrorists in the pursuit of its interests. The regime is ruthless in its determination to remain in power, it has revanchist ambitions, and it is shrewd in testing the West’s resolve—or lack of same—to respond to incremental aggressions that implicate NATO and other commitments.
At the same time, Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. The Cold War really is over. We are not in a bipolar global order, rivaled by a tyrannical Soviet empire. Modern Russia is a fading country. Its firstrate weaponry, armed forces, and intelligence agencies scarcely obscure its third-rate economy, declining population, pervasive societal dysfunction (high levels of drunkenness, disease, and unemployment), and lowering life expectancy.1 Behind the façade of democratic elections and constitutional restraints, Russia has less a principled system of government than a marriage of rulers, oligarchs, and organized crime. To endure, Vladimir Putin’s regime must terrorize the Russian people. Nevertheless, it is a pale imitation of the brutal Soviet behemoth that imploded nearly thirty years ago when the Berlin Wall fell, the Iron Curtain lifted, and tens of millions of enslaved subjects broke free.
Does Russia have the wherewithal to “interfere in our elections,” as the media–Democrat trope puts it? If by “interference”—or its frequently invoked synonym, “meddling”—we refer to the ability to inject propaganda and attempt to influence the campaign debate, then of course it can interfere. And it does. That is what capable governments do to other countries. It is not only what the Soviet Union always did, and what Putin’s Russia does throughout the West and in other parts of the world of consequence to Russian interests; it is what our own government does.
This calls for a bit of international-law throat-clearing. The United Nations has long proclaimed, “No State has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any State.2 Yet, interference is not deemed to rise to a prohibited intervention unless it not only involves a matter committed exclusively to another state’s prerogative, but is also coercive. That is, as Creighton Law School Professor Sean Watts observes, “the operation must force the target State into a course of action it would not otherwise undertake.”3 Russia, of course, is alleged to have interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign by such “cyberespionage” operations as hacking email accounts and social-media messaging. Hacking is clearly a crime, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff theorizes that internet electioneering and propaganda by foreign actors may also rise to the level of criminal conspiracy.4 As an international law matter, however, Russia’s election interference, provocative and obnoxious as it was, cannot conceivably be said to have “coerced” the United States.
We must concede, moreover, that the United States is among the most active participants in the election-interference game. “We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947,” Loch K. Johnson, an acclaimed scholar of U.S. intelligence, told The New York Times in 2018. “We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners—you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”5
Democrats, moreover, conveniently forget that they’ve historically welcomed such mischief-making. As historian Steven F. Hayward recounts, President Jimmy Carter used such emissaries as billionaire industrialist Armand Hammer and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski to seek Soviet accommodations that could help in the 1980 campaign against Ronald Reagan. This mirrored the tactics of the 1976 campaign, during which Democratic eminence Averell Harriman conveyed to the Soviet foreign ministry that Carter was anxious to negotiate and would be more agreeable to deal with than then-President Gerald Ford.6
By the 1984 campaign, it was the renowned “Lion of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy, pleading with Soviet leader Yuri Andropov for help in the Democrats’ futile effort to stop the Reagan landslide. The Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter, provided details of the unabashed quid pro quo, outlined in a 1983 KGB memorandum. Through his confidant, former Democratic Senator John Tunney, Kennedy told Andropov, “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations.… These issues … will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.” Kennedy offered to visit Andropov in Moscow to provide Soviet officials with pointers on the challenges of nuclear disarmament “so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Having thus offered to update their propaganda, Kennedy further proposed arranging to have television networks give Andropov air time for “a direct appeal … to the American people.” Tunney went on to advise the Russians that, while his friend wanted to run for president in 1988, “Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against Republicans and elect their candidate president.”7
Now that’s some collusion right there.
There is nothing unusual about it, though. President Bill Clinton labored to ensure that Russia’s reformer President (and Putin patron) Boris Yeltsin would not be defeated by a Soviet-style Communist in 1996.8 President Obama sedulously worked against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, first attempting to force progressives into his right-leaning governing coalition, then dedicating U.S. taxpayer funds to a failed effort to defeat Netanyahu in 2015. Nothing new there: Clinton had unsuccessfully tried to defeat Netanyahu nearly twenty years earlier, later telling Israeli television, “I tried to do it in a way that didn’t overtly involve me.”9
As these things go, it would have been shocking if Moscow had not attempted to meddle in our 2016 election. Putting aside the Russians’ general penchant for anti-American mischief-making, in 2011 Putin had publicly blamed then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for inciting unrest following Russia’s typically rigged Parliamentary elections.10 So, the 2016 campaign was not just business as usual. There was an element of score-settling. And Putin being a canny strongman, the point was to sow discord and make life difficult for what he fully expected would be the new Clinton administration. There are good reasons to doubt the sincerity of assurances by Kremlin-tied operatives that Putin wanted Trump to win. Russia’s modus operandi in the West is to agitate minority factions it believes are going to lose—whether it would prefer to see them to win or not. That is how Moscow sows discord in the society and makes it more difficult for the incumbent government to pursue its interests. But even if we accept at face value Russian assertions that Putin wanted Trump to win, there is no reason to think Putin believed Trump would win.
Nobody did. Not even Donald Trump himself.11
Collusion with Russia: A Bipartisan Affair
Let’s put aside the time-honored international sport of meddling in other countries’ elections. Let’s stick with collusion with Russia: a quarter-century long, Bipartisan Beltway melody, right up until on November 8, 2016.
Cro-Magnon blowhards like myself have never warmed up to Moscow. So we’ve complained about the New Thinking, regardless of whether it was incumbent Republicans or Democrats delusionally portraying Russia as a perfectly normal country with which to do business, make lots of money, and even ally ourselves.12
Washington, however, has preferred to stay delusional.
The unsustainability of the Communist system, under the pressure of Reagan’s military build-up and support of anti-Communist movements, made the Evil Empire’s disintegration inevitable. Yet, gifted a historic opportunity to dance on the grave of Soviet tyranny, our government’s bipartisan foreign-policy establishment punted. Rather than call the culprits to account and make an enduring record of the hundreds of millions killed and enslaved, successive administrations embraced and propped up Moscow as a force for global stability. The Soviet Union hadn’t quite finished crumbling when President George H. W. Bush gave his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, trying to persuade Ukraine not to break away from Moscow.13 It was a harbinger of things to come: Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all enticed Ukraine to give up its means of self-defense on the false assurance that we would—with Russia’s help!—protect it from aggression—an assurance premised on the pie-in-the-sky theory that there would, of course, be no Russian aggression.14
Given Ukraine’s prominence in the Trump–Russia collusion narrative developed by the Hillary Clinton campaign, it is worth recalling Bill Clinton’s collusion with Russia in the “Trilateral Statement”: a joint declaration between Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, along with Britain, purporting to guarantee Ukraine’s security. Why would Kiev need to keep its nuclear arsenal when its neighbor, Moscow, had reformed? The Iron Curtain was history, history itself was supposedly at its happy democratic ending, and it was now all about paying out the “peace dividend.”15 Throughout his eight-year tenure, Clinton flaunted his warm relationship with Yeltsin, committing to support Moscow with financial assistance, including subsidies to adjust decommissioned military officers and nuclear scientists to the new order. In 1997, the U.S. president prevailed upon our G-7 allies to make it the G-8 by admitting Russia, giving it greater influence over global trend-setting by the world’s leading economies, despite the fact that Russia was not one of them.16
Then there was President George W. Bush peering into Vladimir Putin’s soul and finding a “trustworthy” ally. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined our new “strategic partner” in an agreement to help Russia amass the technology, material, and equipment needed to improve its nuclear research and power production—for “civilian” purposes only, of course. Bush enthusiastically seconded Clinton’s proposal that Russia be admitted to the World Trade Organization, even though its corrupt economic policies and practices undermine the market-based norms the WTO is meant to fortify.17
Meanwhile, up-and-coming Democratic Senator Barack Obama was working bipartisan magic with Senate Republicans, pushing Kiev to think bolder than just giving up its nukes; Ukraine needed to surrender its conventional arsenals, too. But wait, what about protection from possible Russian invasions? Please … that was foreign-policy thinking for a bygone time.18
Naturally, Putin humiliated the Bush administration and Congress’s bipartisan Russia accommodationists by invading Georgia, annexing swaths of its territory in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The White House quietly withdrew the ballyhooed U.S.–Russia Civilian Nuclear Power Agreement from congressional consideration.19
Collusion with Russia: The Obama Reset
That brings us to the Obama years, the era of the “Russia Reset”—announced with great ceremony by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, brandishing a red plastic “Reset” push-button that she presented to her counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Oops: the button was mislabeled Peregruzka (the Russian word for “overcharge”) rather than Perezagruzka (reset). As investigative journalist Claudia Rosett observes, the Kremlin still keeps the button on display in a museum at the Foreign Ministry, “less a souvenir of U.S.–Russia camaraderie than a symbol of American folly.”20
Even as Putin continued his Georgian occupation Obama kicked off the Reset by shelving Bush’s plans for missile-defense installations in Eastern Europe.21 Further courting the Russian dictator, the president revived the civilian nuclear power agreement in 2010, insisting that the pact advanced U.S. national security. It was just the beginning of the administration’s promotion of Russia’s key industrial sectors, improving our declining but dangerous rival’s military and cyber capabilities and fortifying its capacity to extort the European nations and former Soviet republics that rely on Russia for their power needs.
Why? Because “Trade with Russia Is a Win-Win.” That was the headline of Secretary Clinton’s June 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed, applauding Russia’s formal entry into the WTO.22 It was crucial, she explained, because Russia was just a great place for Americans to do business, and our commerce could now blossom since the Obama administration had made Moscow “a normal trading partner.” Sure, the Putin regime posed many challenges, but Clinton maintained that “it is in our long-term strategic interest to collaborate with Russia in areas where our interests overlap.”
Collaborate? That sounds almost like collu—well, never mind.
Obama and Clinton somehow decided that one of these collaborative areas should be technology. Under the secretary’s guidance as point person of the Obama administration’s “U.S.–Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission,” the State Department teamed up with Russia’s Foreign Ministry to help erect Moscow’s version of Silicon Valley—Skolkovo. It’s unlikely Putin could believe his good fortune: The project was like an espionage operation in broad daylight, openly enhancing Russia’s military and cyber capabilities.
The Defense Department’s European Command put it this way:
Skolkovo is an ambitious enterprise, aiming to promote technology transfer generally, by inbound direct investment, and occasionally, through selected acquisitions. As such, Skolkovo is arguably an overt alternative to clandestine industrial espionage—with the additional distinction that it can achieve such a transfer on a much larger scale and more efficiently. Implicit in Russia’s development of Skolkovo is a critical question—a question that Russia may be asking itself—why bother spying on foreign companies and government laboratories if they will voluntarily hand over all the expertise Russia seeks?
Recognizing Russia’s “current pursuit of external aggression and internal repression,” which marked what it generously regarded as the Kremlin’s “previous course toward democracy and cooperation with the West,” EUCOM stressed caution against “the risks that Russia could leverage transferred scientific knowledge to modernize and strengthen its military.”23
Ya think? The U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Program at Fort Leavenworth concluded that Skolkovo was a “vehicle for world-wide technology transfer to Russia in the areas of information technology, biomedicine, energy, satellite and space technology, and nuclear technology.” Moscow has made it unabashedly clear, moreover, that “not all of the center’s efforts are civilian in nature”: the project was deeply involved in military activities, including the development of a hypersonic cruise missile engine.24 As investigative journalist John Solomon notes, the FBI ended up warning several American tech companies that entanglement with Skolkovo risked wide-ranging intellectual property theft. The agent in charge of the Bureau’s Boston field office even took the extraordinary step of publishing a business journal op-ed, depicting Skolkovo as “a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research development facilities and dual use technologies with military and commercial application.”25
Why would our government do such a thing? At the time this was all going on, Clinton’s State Department issued its annual country-by-country findings on the state of civil liberties. Russia was found to be using technology “to monitor and control the internet.” The State Department elaborated that official corruption was rampant, security services engaged in sweeping surveillance of communications, journalists were under siege, dissidents were arbitrarily detained—and some even tortured and killed.26
What was Secretary Clinton thinking?
As we’ve seen, most of the time, she was thinking about the Clinton Foundation, and money (I’d say not in that order, but it’s pretty much the same order). Putin’s regime dangled billions of dollars to invest in Skolkovo companies. Secretary Clinton immediately went to work attracting both corporate contributors and businesses deemed worthy of Russian investment.
The investigative journalist Peter Schweizer has done yeoman’s work exposing the grimy interplay between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department. By 2012, the last year of Secretary Clinton’s tenure, 60 percent of the “key partners” identified for the Skolkovo venture (seventeen out of twenty-eight) had “made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation, totaling tens of millions of dollars, or sponsored speeches by Bill Clinton.” Russians tied to Skolkovo also gave to the Clinton Foundation, including Viktor Vekselberg, a billionaire confidant of Putin’s who was chosen to run the Skolkovo Foundation.27
There is symmetry here. Again, no one would sensibly say that Secretary Clinton wanted to make Russia a more capable adversary—and as things turned out, I’d wager that strengthening the regime’s cyber proficiency would be something she’d regret (if she were given to that kind of introspection). But it is like the irresponsible mishandling of top-secret information, and the storing and transmission of any sensitive government information, classified or otherwise, on a non-secure server system: it’s not that Clinton didn’t know what she was doing or that she didn’t apprehend the risks; it is that she had other priorities and threw caution to the wind—pretty much the textbook definition of gross negligence. She wasn’t alone: this was not Secretary Clinton’s administration, but President Obama’s. He calculated that abetting and appeasing Russia was a price worth paying for “help” on the Iran deal and in Syria. And while there is some reason to believe Clinton was marginally harder on Russian aggression than Obama, it is a simple thing to rationalize doing the wrong thing when making waves is hard. So, you convince yourself that building Russia into a modern economy will somehow change the nature of the regime (instead of enriching and fortifying it). Plus, there was money to be made.
Collusion with Russia: Uranium One
That, naturally, is where the Clinton Foundation came in. And while Skolkovo is not a pretty story, Uranium One is even worse, involving the surrender to Putin’s regime of fully one-fifth of the United States’ uranium-mining stock, an outrage concealed by the tanking of a criminal investigation into the American subsidiary of Russia’s state-controlled nuclear energy and uranium-mining conglomerate, Rosatom.
Once again, Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash has exposed much of this scandal, this time supplemented by excellent reporting from The New York Times.28 Significant background of the story predates the Obama years, involving more of Washington’s history of “collusion with Russia.”
The United States government has been conducting uranium commerce with Russia since the Soviet Union imploded. In 1992, the Bush administration agreed with the nascent 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). Uranium is a key component of nuclear power, from which the United States derives about 20 percent of our total electrical power, generated by approximately ninety-nine commercial reactors operating at sixty-one nuclear power plants in thirty states. Relatively speaking, our country does not have vast uranium resources. We currently produce only about 7 percent of the uranium we need and must import the rest; in 2017, for example, Russia accounted for 18 percent.29
In 2005, under the guise of the Clinton Foundation’s mobilization to address the incidence of HIV/AIDS in Kazakhstan (where the virus was nearly nonexistent), Bill Clinton helped his Canadian billionaire pal Frank Giustra convince the ruling despot, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to grant coveted uranium-mining rights to Giustra’s company, Ur-Asia Energy. Ur-Asia had no background in this highly competitive but potentially lucrative business. Nazarbayev, a former Communist party apparatchik, has ruled Kazakhstan for almost thirty years, and is notorious for human rights abuses and looting the treasury.30
In the months that followed, Giustra gave an astonishing $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation and pledged $100 million more. With the Kazakh rights secured, Ur-Asia was able to expand its holdings and attract new investors. One was Ian Telfer, who also donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. Ur-Asia merged with Uranium One, a South African company, in a $3.5 billion deal. Telfer became Uranium One’s chairman. The new company proceeded to buy up major uranium assets in the United States.
Meanwhile, as tends to happen in dictatorships, Nazarbayev turned on the head of Kazakhstan’s uranium agency (Kazatomprom), who was arrested for selling valuable mining rights to such foreign entities as Ur-Asia/Uranium One. This was likely done at the urging of Russia, the neighborhood bully. Rosatom, the Kremlin-controlled nuclear energy and uranium extraction conglomerate, was hoping to grab the Kazakh mines—whether by taking them outright or by taking over Uranium One.
The arrest, which happened a few months after Obama took office, had Uranium One’s Clinton Foundation investors deeply concerned that the Kazakh mining rights would be lost. Uranium One turned to Secretary Clinton’s State Department for help. As State Department cables disclosed by WikiLeaks show, Uranium One officials wanted more than a U.S. government statement to the media; they pressed for written confirmation that their mining licenses were valid. The State Department leapt into action: An energy officer from the U.S. embassy immediately held meetings with the Kazakh regime. A few days later, it was announced that Russia’s Rosatom had purchased 17 percent of Uranium One. Problem solved.
Well, not quite. Rosatom was only fleetingly satisfied. Russia wanted a controlling interest in Uranium One. That would mean a controlling interest not just in the Afghan mines but in the U.S. assets that Uranium One had acquired—amounting to 20 percent of total U.S. uranium stock.
On this point, much of the anti-Clinton (and pro-Trump) coverage in conservative media has misaimed its focus.31 The tendency is to hype the U.S. uranium assets and the fact that uranium can be used to make nuclear bombs. But Russia did not need our uranium for weapons purposes—no more than Newcastle needs our coal. Rather, to generate wealth, Putin’s regime has long sought to develop and exploit its capacity as a commercial energy producer. The Kremlin was no doubt delighted at the opportunity to grab American uranium stocks: as I’ve already noted, we do not produce enough uranium for our domestic electricity needs, so anytime Putin takes from us something we need, it potentially becomes a leverage point for him and thus a problem for us. But in the greater scheme of things, the U.S. assets were a comparatively small objective next to the Kremlin’s real target: the copious Kazakh stocks Uranium One owned.
Still, because Russia’s move on Uranium One implicated significant U.S. uranium assets, federal law required approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. CFIUS is a powerful tribunal, composed of the leaders of 14 U.S. government agencies involved in national security and commerce. In 2010, these included not only Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had cultivated a reputation as a hawk opposed to such foreign purchases, but Attorney General Eric Holder. This is important because, at the very time the Uranium One transaction was under consideration, the Justice Department and the FBI were conducting an investigation of Rosatom’s ongoing U.S. racketeering, extortion, and money-laundering scheme.
The Russian commercial agent responsible for the sale and transportation of uranium to the United States is a subsidiary of Rosatom known as “Tenex” (formally, JSC Techsnabexport). Tenex (and by extension, Rosatom) has an American arm called “Tenam USA,” based in Bethesda, Maryland. Around the time President Obama came to power, the Russian official in charge of Tenam was Vadim Mikerin. The Obama administration reportedly issued a visa for Mikerin in 2010, but a racketeering investigation led by the FBI determined that he was already operating here in 2009.
As Tenam’s general director, Mikerin was responsible for arranging and managing Rosatom/Tenex’s contracts with American uranium purchasers. This gave him tremendous leverage over the U.S. companies. With the assistance of several confederates, Mikerin used this leverage to extort and defraud the U.S. contractors into paying inflated prices for uranium. The proceeds were then laundered through shell companies and secret bank accounts in Latvia, Cyprus, Switzerland, and the Seychelles Islands—though sometimes transactions were handled in cash, with the skim divided into envelopes stuffed with thousands of dollars. The inflated payments served two purposes: they enriched Kremlin-connected energy officials in the United States and in Russia to the tune of millions of dollars; and they compromised the American companies that paid the bribes, rendering players in U.S. nuclear energy—a sector critical to national security—vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.
To further the Kremlin’s push for nuclear-energy expansion, Mikerin sought to retain a lobbyist. Naturally, he planned not only to use the lobbyist’s services but to extort kickbacks, just as he did with U.S. energy companies with which he dealt. Aided by an associate connected to Russian organized-crime groups, Mikerin found his lobbyist—a man named William Douglas Campbell. Mikerin’s solicitation in 2009 made Campbell uncomfortable, worried that he’d end up on the wrong side of the law. He contacted the FBI and revealed what he knew. From then on, he became the Bureau’s informant, and the Justice Department ultimately relied on his information to arrest and prosecute Mikerin and his conspirators.
Interestingly, at the time Campbell started cooperating, the FBI was led by director Robert Mueller, the special counsel who investigated whether Trump had colluded with Russia. The case against Russia’s subsidiary, Tenam, was centered in Maryland, where the U.S. attorney was Rod Rosenstein—President Trump’s deputy attorney general through most of Mueller’s Trump–Russia investigation.
Thanks to Campbell’s work, the FBI was able to understand and monitor the racketeering enterprise almost from the start. By mid-May 2010, it could already prove the scheme and three separate extortionate payments Mikerin had squeezed out of the informant.
Keeping Congress in the Dark
Meanwhile, congressional opposition to Russia’s potential acquisition of American uranium resources began to stir. As Peter Schweizer noted in Clinton Cash,32 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.
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. Nothing, however, would be allowed to disturb the reset. 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. Why then? Months earlier, in March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. Putin also began massing forces on the Ukrainian border, coordinating and conducting attacks, ultimately taking control of territory. Clearly, the pie-in-the-sky Obama reset was dead. Furthermore, the prosecution of Mikerin’s racketeering scheme had been so delayed that the Justice Department risked losing the ability to charge the 2009 felonies because of the five-year statute of limitations on most federal crimes.
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 … in a transaction that had significant ramifications for Clinton Foundation investors.
And lo and behold: The case disappeared without fanfare, much less a public trial. Think about that: The investigation of Russian racketeering in the American energy sector was the kind of spectacular success over which the FBI and Justice Department typically do a bells-’n’-whistles victory lap: the big self-congratulatory press conference followed by the media-intensive prosecutions—and, of course, more press conferences.
Here … crickets.
The Justice Department and FBI had little to say when Mikerin and his co-conspirators were arrested. They quietly negotiated guilty pleas that were announced just before Labor Day. It was arranged that Mikerin would be sentenced just before Christmas. All under the radar.
How desperate was the Obama Justice Department to plead the case out? 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 carries a penalty of up to twenty years’ imprisonment, not only for conspiracy but for each act of money laundering.33 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, which criminalizes agreements to commit any crime against the United States—an offense carrying a penalty of zero to five years’ imprisonment.34
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. That statute is for less serious conspiracy cases. To invoke it for money laundering caps the sentence way below Congress’s intent for that behavior. It 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—then run by Andrew Weissmann, later Mueller’s top deputy in the Trump–Russia investigation.35
As we’ll see at many junctures, it’s a small world.
Mikerin thus faced no RICO charges, no extortion or fraud charges. 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. Insulated from Congress’s prescribed money-laundering sentence, he got a term of just four years’ imprisonment. The deal was a steal for him. It also spared the Obama administration a full public airing of the facts.36
Democrats Never Bought the Rigged Election Nonsense
“Horrifying!” As we’ve seen, candidates can get chirpy at final presidential debates less than three weeks from Election Day, and Hillary Clinton was no exception. What “horror” had her inveighing so? The very thought that her Republican rival would question the legitimacy of the presidential election.37
Donald Trump being Donald Trump, he wouldn’t budge. He would not pledge to accept the election results a priori. Okay, no, Trump didn’t use the phase a priori. But he did speculate that the electoral process could be rigged. Until he saw how it played out, the Republican nominee said, he could not concede that the outcome would be on the up-and-up.
First, he reaffirmed an allegation for which he’d already been roundly condemned: foreigners could swing the election—specifically, “millions” of ineligible voters, an allusion to illegal immigration, the piñata of Trump’s campaign. Second, he complained about the gross one-sidedness of the media’s campaign coverage: scathing when it came to him; between inattentive and fawning when it came to his opponent, whose considerable sins were airbrushed away. Third, he claimed there was deep corruption: Clinton, he maintained, should not have been permitted to run given the evidence of felony misconduct uncovered in her email scandal. Instead of prosecuting her, law-enforcement agencies of the Democratic administration bent over backwards to give her a pass, and congressional Democrats closed ranks around her, conducting themselves in committee hearings more like her defense lawyers than investigators searching for the truth.
A flabbergasted Clinton responded that she was shocked—horrified—to hear Trump “talking down our democracy” this way. This was a top theme in her campaign’s closing days: The election was absolutely legitimate; Trump was traitorously condemnable for refusing to say so.
Of course, Clinton and the Democrats who parroted her would prefer that you forget that now. And given her strained relationship with the truth, they’re right to suspect that you’d never retain anything she said for very long. The media–Democrat caterwauling over Trump’s election-rigging spiel was not rooted in patriotic commitment to the American democratic tradition of accepting election outcomes. They said what they said because they fully expected to win. The polls all said they would. Mrs. Clinton and her backers, President Obama included, would not abide a taint of illegitimacy affixing itself to her inevitable presidency.
Except it wasn’t so inevitable. And when Clinton lost, they changed their tune about election-rigging. Suddenly, the inconceivable, the heresy-even-to-hint-at, was to be taken as gospel: The outcome was illegitimate! Russia hacked the election!
There was, however, a very inconvenient problem for this narrative: everything of significance that is known to the U.S. government about Russian meddling was already known in those pre-election weeks when Clinton and the Democrats were vouching for the integrity of the process and condemning Trump for even hesitating to endorse it.
By now, the story is well known.38 Russia’s cyberespionage operations began in 2014, long before Donald Trump’s entry into the race. By summer 2015, hackers believed to be connected to Russian intelligence agencies had access to DNC computer networks, and the FBI began warning DNC officials of this in the September of that year—albeit with a lack of urgency that now seems stunning. In March 2016 came the hacking of a private email account belonging to John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, who was sufficiently versed in cyber privacy issues to have authored a 2014 report on the subject while serving as a top Obama White House advisor.
U.S. intelligence agencies were intimately aware of the penetrations. Obama’s national intelligence director, James Clapper, publicly acknowledged that hackers appeared to have targeted presidential campaigns. By August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan interpreted streams of foreign intelligence to indicate that Putin had personally ordered the cyber thefts with the intention of at least damaging Clinton, if not flipping the election to Trump. In a phone call, Brennan is said to have admonished Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s security service (the FSB), to desist. The next month, in a face-to-face confrontation (through interpreters) at an international conference in China, Obama warned Putin that “we knew what he was doing and [he] better stop it or else.” Meanwhile, the administration conducted numerous high-level, close-hold meetings, weighing several options including retaliatory cyber attacks.
Ultimately, Obama decided to do nothing. The president’s political allies and media admirers are now embarrassed about his inaction—“It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend. I feel like we sort of choked,” one anonymous senior administration official told The Washington Post. As ever, though, they remain apologists for their man, portraying a pained POTUS, fearful that any action he took would make matters worse, or be perceived as political, or otherwise undermine confidence in the election.
What, then, is the collusion narrative? And what’s their story now? It is pretty much the same story they rebuked Trump for telling. They peddle a three-part rigged-election claim: (1) foreign interference, not by illegal aliens who may have voted but by Russians who did not affect the voting process; (2) one-sided press coverage—they mean the Russian propaganda press and the WikiLeaks release of DNC and John Podesta emails, which they’d now have you believe had more influence on Americans than did the media-Democrat complex and the grudging State Department release of Hillary Clinton’s own emails; and (3) the corruption that lifted a low-character candidate who should not have been allowed to run but who received extraordinary government assistance—not from the Obama Justice Department but from the Putin regime.
To assess the Democratic narrative as bunk is not to excuse Russian duplicity, which many of us were warning about while Bush was embracing Putin as a strategic partner and while Obama was “resetting” with all due “flexibility.”
By late October, the Russian “cyberespionage” effort to meddle in the election was well known. In the same debate in which Clinton rebuked Trump for refusing to concede the election’s legitimacy, she attacked her rival as “Putin’s puppet” and cited the finding of government agencies that Russia sought to interfere in the election. Clinton was not at all concerned that Putin’s shenanigans would have any actual impact on the election. She invoked them because she thought it was helpful to her campaign—an opportunity to portray Trump as ripe for rolling by the Russian regime.
And how could she have taken any other position? None other than President Obama himself observed that there was nothing unusual about Russian scheming to influence American elections, which he said “dates back to the Soviet Union.”39 Obama deftly avoided mentioning that past scheming had never gotten much media traction because the Soviets had been more favorably disposed towards Democrats. While he blamed the Putin regime for hacking emails during the 2016 campaign, Obama described this as “fairly routine.” He acknowledged, moreover, that it was publicly notorious well in advance of the election—which, of course, is why Clinton had been able to exploit it in a nationally televised debate three weeks prior to November 8.
What happened here is very simple: Russia was unimportant to Democrats, and was indeed avoided by Democrats, until they needed to rationalize a stunning defeat. Prior to the election, Democrats had little interest in mentioning “Russia” or “Putin.” Of course, they sputtered out the words when they had no choice—when, not wanting to address the substance of embarrassing emails, they had to shift attention to the nefarious theft of those emails.
Beyond that, attention to the Kremlin was bad news for Clinton. It invited scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation’s suspicious foreign dealings, Bill Clinton’s lucrative speech racket, Hillary’s biddable State Department, and Russia’s acquisition of major U.S. uranium supplies. It conjured embarrassing memories of the “Russia Reset,” during which the supine Obama administration watched Putin capture territory in Eastern Europe and muscle his way into the Middle East, all while arming and aligning with Iran. It called to mind the intriguing relationship between Podesta (the Clinton-campaign chairman and former Obama White House official) and Putin’s circle—specifically, a $35 million investment by a Putin-created venture capital firm, Rusnano, into a small Massachusetts energy company, Joule Energy, just two months after Podesta joined Joule’s board.40
So, while Donald Trump’s Russia rhetoric ranged from the unseemly (blowing kisses at an anti-American thug) to the delusional (the notion that Russia, Iran’s new friend, could be a reliable ally against jihadism) to the reprehensible (moral equivalence between the murderous Putin regime and American national-defense operations), Clinton’s own Russia baggage rendered her unable to exploit it.
It was only afterward, after she lost a contest she thought she had in the bag, that the election turned illegitimate.