The Morning Briefing: Dirty Dossier, RUSSIANS, Manafort, and Much, Much More

Good Wednesday morning.

Here is what’s on the President’s agenda today:

In the afternoon, President Donald J. Trump will depart the White House for Joint Base Andrews, en route to Dallas, Texas.
After the President arrives in Dallas, Texas, he will receive a briefing on hurricane recovery efforts.
The President will then participate in a roundtable with Republican National Committee (RNC) supporters.
In the evening, the President will give remarks at a Dallas Trump victory reception.
The President will then depart Dallas, Texas, for Washington D.C., en route to the White House.

Clinton/DNC paid for pee-pee dossier

The Washington Post reports that the Clinton attorney who retained Fusion GPS has released the research firm from client confidentiality and we now know that the DNC and the Clinton campaign paid for the infamous and discredited Trump pee dossier. And this means that the Democrats paid for a discredited dossier that was used as the basis of the intelligence community’s snooping on Hillary’s political adversary during the 2016 presidential election. Just let that sink in: the intelligence community was weaponized against one of the candidates in a presidential political campaign.

There’s one little outstanding matter: “[Mark] Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.”

Who could this be? Leave your three letter guess in the comments below.

Things heating up on Clinton/RUSSIA/Uranium deal

The House Intelligence Committee is launching an investigation into a Clinton-Obama deal that approved the sale of a Canadian mining company to the RUSSIANS, giving the RUSSIANS partial control of the U.S. uranium supply. At the same time the Obama administration and Clinton State Department were considering the deal, the FBI had an investigation going into RUSSIAN bribery and kickbacks within the energy industry. And yet the deal it was approved. Somewhere in that messy sequence of events, the RUSSIANS were also giving money to the Clinton Foundation.

Now Senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has called on “someone” to appoint a special counsel.

Whoever in DOJ is capable w authority to appoint a special counsel shld do so to investigate Uranium One "whoever" means if u aren't recused

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) October 25, 2017

But I’m not done yet because…

Manafort worked with Hillary-friendly Podesta Group for RUSSIA

Wow, crazy right? Last night on Tucker Carlson’s show we learned not only that Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was head of the FBI during the RUSSIAN kickback investigation referenced above, is looking into the Clinton-friendly Podesta Group but that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was working with the Clinton-friendly Podesta Group to facilitate RUSSIAN influence in the U.S.

“According to our source, Manafort was clear that Russia wanted to cultivate ties to Hillary Clinton, in the belief she was likely to become president,” he said during the segment. “These links to Hillary were apparently valuable; our source believes that the Russian money Manafort funneled to the Podesta Group greatly exceeds the roughly $1 million they were officially paid. Some of these payments, he said, could be hidden kickbacks that would be hard to trace. He described the Podesta Group’s books as a ‘treasure trove’ and highly secret. He told us the Podesta Group had no board, and all financial decisions were personally made by Tony Podesta. The Group’s employees, he said, included a person whose only official job was managing Tony Podesta’s art collection. It would be easy for such an organization to conceal financial transactions.”

“The source we spoke to has been interviewed extensively by Robert Mueller’s independent investigation. In press accounts, Mueller’s investigation is still framed as a hunt for collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia,” the Fox host said.

Read the entire summary of Tucker’s opening segment.

Slush fund city: Obama DOJ directed settlement money to progressive groups

Here’s another fun Democrat story. Emails obtained by the House Judiciary reveal that Obama’s DOJ was directing settlement money won in Justice Department suits against corporations into progressive causes.

The investigation has thus far yielded evidence implicating the Obama DOJ in using mandatory donations to funnel roughly $1 billion in settlement money to activist groups, including The National Council of La Raza, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and the National Urban League. The list of third party organizations were unrelated to the legal settlements, except through general claims that they would use the funds to aid the low income Americans most severely harmed by predatory lending practices.

One.billion.dollars. By the way, the losing parties who were paying out this money were giving it to third parties that had nothing to do with the suit.

Associate Attorney General Tony West’s deputy, Elizabeth Taylor, asked her colleagues in a November 2013 email, “Can you explain to Tony the best way to allocate some money to an organization of our choosing?”

Another internal email exchange reveals that DOJ officials made a concerted effort to prevent the allocation of settlement funds to a conservative legal group.

“Concerns include: a) not allowing Citi to pick a statewide intermediary like the Pacific Legal Foundation (does conservative property rights free legal services).”

Ridiculous.

Historical picture of the day: