The list of predicate crimes is extensive and includes bribery, embezzlement, fraud, theft, money laundering, and obstruction of justice.
Secretary Hillary Clinton and the Deep State: A RICO Criminal Conspiracy
We who elected President Trump understood our elected officials and the Deep State were sandbagging Trump and self-dealing public funds. It was no secret that President Trump is no angel, unpresidential, blunt, and crude, and a disruptor. Trump was hired to drain the swamp.
I watched this kabuki theater unfold over the last several years. Through my eyes as a shopworn gumshoe, I will explain what is happening. My investigative curiosity was first piqued by the ATF Fast and Furious scandal and continues through the recent House impeachment show trial. There is a common element running through all of these cons — the actions of an organized crime conspiracy. A group of people either acting alone or in concert with others committed crimes with a common purpose - a criminal enterprise as described in "CRIMINAL RICO: 18 USC. §§1961-1968 A Manual For Federal Prosecutors."
The players acted together – in the usurpation of power, the abuse of power by public officials, bribery, thefts by fraud including federal funds, money laundering, perjury and the obstruction of justice, the violations of fundamental of civil rights, aided and abetted in the commission of these crimes and or to conceal these crimes. Criminals will lie and can't keep their lies straight. Their methods and behaviors are the same, whether engaging in street crimes or elaborate white-collar financial schemes. The only difference is when more money is involved, the perps are more adept in concealing, covering up their sins, and hiding where the money went. Many of these scandals are well known to the American Thinker readers. I will focus my comments on Hillary's home brew sever and the Clinton Foundation as an example of how RICO can be used to prosecute the players.
FBI Director James Comey indicted Hillary Clinton for her home brew server at his press conference. Comey then egregiously concluded that there was no evidence of criminal intent purportedly “required” to prosecute. Comey bastardized the Federal Espionage Act in absolving Hillary Clinton. FBI's investigation of Clinton's emails was low-balled. There was never a real search for the truth. The outcome was preordained. My jaw dropped wide open. I knew the fix was in. FBI Director Comey lied to the people with a straight face. Why?
The chance meeting of Bill Clinton and AG Loretta Lynch on the airport tarmac was no mere coincidence. This chat was not about the grandkids. Bill Clinton was there to convey a specific message to Lynch that there would be no indictment of Hillary. Hillary Clinton's email case must tank. This would have constituted bribery, if AG Lynch was assured she would continue as AG in Clinton Administration. This meeting took place only weeks before Comey's press conference dumping Hillary Clinton's email case.
The Deep State needed Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 presidential election, or the dike holding back the truth would burst. Trump, the disruptor, was an immediate threat to both the Republicans, Democrats, and the Deep State. If the truth were laid bare, it would expose the Obama Administration, Hillary Clinton, the Senate and House, and many executive departments for these abuses of power, corruption, bribery, frauds, and thefts of public funds.
High-level government officials and the Deep State committed many serious felonies either in furtherance of or to conceal the crimes committed in the pay to play scam. In exchange for favorable consideration by Secretary Clinton, those who benefited would donate to the Clinton Foundation. The FBI started and stopped investigations into the Clinton Foundation at least twice as reported by the Washington Post. Peter Schweizer's book, Clinton Cash, is the most damning. Dinesh D'Souza slammed the Foundation in the National Review, as did The Federalist.
The status of the investigation of the Foundation by US Attorney John Huber's is unknown. Rudy Giuliani said there was enough to pursue "Clinton Inc" as racketeering under RICO. The Foundation and its affiliated nonprofits require a real investigation with an in-depth forensic audit to determine where the money went. In financial crimes investigation, the prime rule is "follow the money, honey." Illicit nonprofits have many ways to divert funds by inflating salaries, expenses, and money laundering.
Illegal nonprofit schemes are difficult to prosecute without hard evidence and the testimony of insiders. The motive of Hillary Clinton's use of the home brew server was to conceal emails from FOIA requests that would provide the hard evidence. Hillary Clinton destroyed the data on her server and cell phones with the knowledge of the FBI. It took years for Judicial Watch and others to pry and recover some of these damning emails from the foot-dragging executive departments that were complicit and knew what was going on.
RICO initially was used to target mob families. RICO is also a useful tool to fight white collar conspiracies. They both have the same hierarchy of low-level crooks led by the top players, linked together with a common purpose. RICO has tools to squeeze the low-level operatives to gather evidence to prosecute, jail, and seize assets of the conspirators. The critical element required is a pattern of criminal or racketeering activity. This pattern is proved by showing two predicate crimes were committed within ten years. The list of predicate crimes is extensive and includes bribery, embezzlement, fraud, theft, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. The typical five-year statute of limitations for most federal felonies is extended to ten years from the last criminal act or acts committed to conceal the conspiracy, i.e., lying under oath and similar actions to obstruct justice. The prison sentences are steep. The effect is to cut off the head of the organization and not just the low-level players.
The criminal activity extends back to the ATF's Fast and Furious program through the House impeachment show trial to cover up the illegal acts of the Obama Administration, Hillary Clinton, the Department of State, the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA. A telltale sign that the DOJ under US Attorney General Barr is willing to play hardball and may use RICO, came when he spoke to the Federalist Society: "Barr accuses liberal 'resistance' of trying to 'sabotage' Trump." AG Barr said this, "shows FBI launched Trump campaign investigation on the 'thinnest of suspicions." AG Barr is the new sheriff in town, he wears a badge, has guns and will travel, can impanel grand juries, indict and arrest people, and is not limited in his jurisdiction, like DOJ IG Horowitz.
The collective actions of the Deep State are and were a silent coup to delegitimize a Presidential candidate. Once elected to impede and resist the duly elected President. The President's law enforcement and intel agencies were corrupted at the highest level and went rogue.
Organized crime can't exist without corrupt law enforcement. As I wrote in a letter to President Trump earlier this year:
. . . I believe you understand the gravity of the situation and of its importance to the very survival of our Country as we know it. If the people involved are not held accountable for their actions, we will be no different than some Third World Banana Republic.Failure to act will destroy our founding principle of the Rule of Law as stated by President John Adams, "We Are a Nation of Laws, Not of Men" and we cannot allow a two-tiered justice system to prevail.
Ron Wright is a retired detective from Riverside PD, CA. BA in political science CSUF, M. Adm. University of Cal, Riverside. Facebook at Ron T. Cop.
Our Russia Collusion
Nightmare: All Hillary's Fault?
Hillary Clinton's Russia collusion IOU: The answers she owes
America
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/446736-hillary-clintons-russia-collusion-iou-the-answers-she-owes-america
Our Russia Collusion
Nightmare: All Hillary's Fault?
The biggest political scandal in the history of the United
States. Three years of constant lies told by government agents,
political operatives, and deceitful news personalities. Thousands of
hours of criminal investigative interviews; thousands of written stories and
television segments; thousands of leaks and insinuations and threats. All
to take down the legitimately elected American president, Donald J. Trump.
Now that some light is finally revealing just how rotten this
whole nonsense has been from the very beginning, the most maddening aspect of
all is the one thing not said nearly enough: every bit of this frame-up job to
hang the American president for being a Russian agent and traitor to his nation
began as a way to inoculate Hillary Clinton from her largest political
vulnerabilities going into the 2016 campaign.
Aside from her questionable health and a lifetime of scandal,
Hillary had two sizable liabilities (of her own creation) that threatened her
ability to win the general election: (1) her use of the Clinton Foundation as a
vehicle for laundering bribes from foreign governments and moneyed interests
and (2) her decision to conduct the business of the State Department (as well
as to discuss our nation's most guarded secrets) on an unsecured private email
server that had been hacked by known and unknown foreign governments and
adverse entities. Peter Schweizer's Clinton Cash did a remarkable job
exposing the Clinton Foundation as a spectacular pay-to-play operation that had
allowed Hillary to trade the powers of her office for personal aggrandizement
(including the sale of 20% of America's uranium to Russia for, among other
things, $145 million transferred to her foundation). And even though
the Obama Justice Department was doing its best to minimize the revelation of
Hillary's gross breach of national security and slow-walk any repercussions,
the American people were discovering that life-and-death secrets had been
entrusted to a person with such disregard for our well-being that she stored
them on a personal server in a downstairs bathroom.
For a normal person with a modicum of ethical concern, sense of
shame, or patriotic duty, these crimes would have been more than sufficient to
prompt withdrawal from an election for the country's highest
office. This type of honest self-reflection and private admission of
guilt is alien to the Clintons, though, so what would have represented
immovable obstacles to anyone else became just another set of political
variables that had to be neutralized in her favor.
I can just imagine the conversation Hillary had with her most
trusted advisers — not the ones with the official titles like Robby Mook and
Brian Fallon, whose chief value lay in their expendable nature and the ease
with which Hillary could roll them up into any unexpected scandal to be
disposed with the trash at a future time of her convenience. I mean
the real group of confidants, the ones who have "the ends justify the
means" tattooed on their souls and have gotten away with more crimes than
we'll ever know. If you're Sid Blumenthal or John Podesta or Cheryl
Mills or Marc Elias or Lanny Davis and you know where some of the bodies are
buried along the spectacular trail of Clinton corruption through the years,
then the prospect of a massive pay-to-play scandal or criminal indictment for
mishandling top-secret intelligence or engaging wittingly or unwittingly in
espionage is just another bump on the long road of progressive relativism and
Clinton nihilism. If Clinton
Cash and FBI investigators come knocking, you simply accuse
all your political opponents of being the real grifters and foreign agents.
That's exactly what Team Hillary did. They leveled
allegations of criminal bribery at Jeb Bush; they questioned Marco Rubio's
loyalty to the United States; but Donald Trump was the prize. A man
who had spent a lifetime in the exotic world of luxury real estate around the
globe while mixing it up with all kinds of powerful figures in that often shady
world was the ideal mark, and he also happened to be a political novice who the
Democrats universally believed would lose in a landslide of historical dimensions
for political lore long to come. When Paul Manafort joined his team
just before the kickoff to the general election and brought with him a lifetime
of political baggage that included skullduggery around Russia's zone of
interest, it must have seemed as if Christmas had come early for the Clinton
team. (Kind of makes you wonder how coincidental this unforced error
really was.)
And so, after a lifetime in the public eye, starring in a popular
television show, and rubbing elbows with celebrities and politicians of all
stripes, Donald Trump woke up one day to find himself being generally slandered
(and libeled) as a Russian spy by the information merchants who control
America's airwaves and print media. That had to have made him laugh,
considering that the press had spent most of his foray into politics demeaning
him as a greedy capitalist playboy nationalist who selfishly placed America's
interests before those of our common world.
Yes, before John Brennan devised a global espionage ring to frame
President Trump as a national security risk and enable the FBI to open up
counterintelligence investigations into his political associates; before Jim
Comey and Andrew McCabe attested to false information with the FISA Court;
before Robert Mueller put the screws to General Flynn in order to sink a
lifetime defender of America for political purposes; before President Obama
initiated changes to security classification that opened up scurrilous
investigative records on President-Elect Trump to an exponentially greater
number of bureaucrats with partisan motivations; before Susan Rice left an
electronic CYA memorandum at 12:15 P.M. on Inauguration Day of 2017 noting that
Sally Yates and James Clapper and John Brennan and Joe Biden and Jim Comey had
all agreed in the Oval Office with President Obama to continue any
investigations "by the book"; before Samantha Power unmasked hundreds
of names picked up during the course of electronic surveillance that were
deemed to somehow implicate the new president in wrongdoing; even before the
Clinton operatives and Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele first started
composing the fan fiction now known as "the Dossier" — before all of
this and everything else we have been forced to endure for three long years,
there was Hillary Clinton, doing what she and her people know best: accusing
her political opponent of the very crimes she had committed
herself.
As awful as this orchestrated campaign against President Trump has
been, it is absolutely maddening to realize that none of it would have happened
had Hillary Clinton not engaged in one of the greatest pay-for-play operations
in American history while placing our most guarded secrets (as well as the very
lives of our soldiers and civilians) on a silver platter for those governments
and adversaries who wish us the most harm in this world. Three years
of Russian hysteria happened only because of the deep corruption of Hillary
Clinton.
This scheme of political projection and wicked treachery should go
down as a final reminder that America survives today only because President
Trump managed to prevail against the nearly insurmountable wave of our
government's intelligence agencies, the justice system, media propagandists,
and the combined wills of the Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans intending to
swamp him.
Victorious Democrats would
also end congressional investigations into the Hillary-Deep
State-DNC-Russian-Clinton Foundation collusion and corruption. All the players
in these massive, sordid affairs will be deemed “too big to jail” – and too
closely tied to the Democratic Party to be investigated further. Paul Driessen
Hillary Clinton's Russia collusion IOU: The answers she owes
America
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/446736-hillary-clintons-russia-collusion-iou-the-answers-she-owes-america
BY
JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION
During the
combined two decades she served as a U.S. senator and secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s patrons regularly donated to her family charity when they had
official business pending before America’s most powerful political woman.
The pattern of
political IOUs paid to the Clinton Foundation was so pernicious that the State
Department even tried to execute a special agreement with the charity to avoid the overt appearance of “pay-to-play” policy.
Still, the
money continued to flow by the millions of dollars, from foreigners and
Americans alike who were perceived to be indebted to the Clinton machine or in
need of its help.
It’s time for
the American public to call in their own IOU on political transparency.
The reason?
Never before — until 2016 — had the apparatus of a U.S. presidential candidate
managed to sic the weight of the FBI and U.S. intelligence community on a rival
nominee during an election, and by using a foreign-fed, uncorroborated
political opposition research document.
But Clinton’s
campaign, in concert with the Democratic Party and through their shared law
firm, funded Christopher Steele’s unverified dossierwhich, it turns out, falsely portrayed Republican Donald Trump as a treasonous asset colluding with Russian President
Vladimir Putin to hijack the U.S. election.
Steele went to
the FBI to get an investigation started and then leaked the existence of the
investigation, with the hope of sinking Trump’s presidential aspirations.
On its face, it
is arguably the most devious political dirty trick in American history and one
of the most overt intrusions of a foreigner into a U.S. election.
It appears the
Clinton machine knew that what it was doing was controversial. That’s why it
did backflips to disguise the operation from Congress and the public, and in
its Federal Election Commission (FEC) spending reports.
Clinton and the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) used the law firm of Perkins Coie to hire Glenn Simpson’s research firm, Fusion GPS, which
then hired Steele — several layers that obfuscated transparency, kept the
operation off the campaign’s public FEC reports and gave the Clintons plausible
deniability.
But Steele’s
first overture on July 5, 2016, failed to capture the FBI’s imagination. So the
Clinton machine escalated. Steele, a British national, went to senior
Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr — whose wife, Nellie, also worked for
Fusion — to push his Trump dirt to the top of the FBI.
Nellie Ohr
likewise sent some of her own anti-Trump research augmenting Steele’s dossier
to the FBI through her husband. Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann used his connection to former FBI general counsel James Baker to dump Trump
dirt at the FBI, too.
Then Steele
and, separately, longtime Clinton protégé Cody Shearer went to the
State Department to get the story out,
increasing pressure on the FBI.
In short, the
Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure — and bad intel — until an
investigation of Trump was started. The bureau and its hapless sheriff at the
time, James Comey, eventually acquiesced with the help of such Clinton fans as
then-FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
To finish the
mission, Simpson and Steele leaked the existence of the FBI investigation to
the news media to ensure it would hurt Trump politically. Simpson even called the leaks a “hail Mary” that failed.
Trump won,
however. And now, thanks to special counsel Robert Mueller, we know the
Russia-collusion allegations relentlessly peddled by Team Clinton were bogus.
But not before the FBI used the Clinton-funded, foreign-created research to get
a total of four warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, transition and presidency from October 2016 through the
following autumn.
The Clinton
team’s dirty trick was as diabolical as it was brilliant. It literally used
house money and a large part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to carry out
its political hit job on Trump.
After two years
of American discomfort, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent, it’s
time for the house to call in its IOU.
Hillary Clinton
owes us answers — lots of them. So far, she has ducked them, even while doing
many high-profile media interviews.
I’m not the
only one who thinks this way. Longtime Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen said
Friday night on Fox News that it’s time for Clinton to answer what she knew and
when she knew it.
Here are 10
essential questions:
1.
In January 2018, the Senate
Judiciary Committee sent a formal investigative request for documents and
written answers from your campaign. Do you plan to comply?
2.
Please identify each person in
your campaign who was involved with, or aware of, hiring Fusion GPS, Glenn
Simpson and Christopher Steele.
3.
Please identify each person in
your campaign, including Perkins Coie lawyers, who were aware that Steele
provided information to the FBI or State Department, and when they learned it.
4.
Describe any information you and
your campaign staff received, or were briefed on, before Election Day that was
derived from the work of Simpson, Steele, Fusion GPS, Nellie Ohr or Perkins
Coie and that tried to connect Trump, his campaign or his business empire with
Russia.
5.
Please describe all contacts
your campaign had before Election Day with or about the following individuals:
Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, former foreign policy scholar Stefan Halper and Maltese academic Joseph
Mifsud.
6.
Did you or any senior members of
your campaign, including lawyers such as Michael Sussmann, have any contact
with the CIA, its former Director John Brennan, current Director Gina Haspel,
James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page or former FBI Deputy Director Andrew
McCabe?
7.
Describe all contacts your campaign had with Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal concerning Trump,
Russia and Ukraine.
8.
Describe all contacts you and
your campaign had with DNC contractorAlexandra
Chalupa, the Ukraine government, the Ukraine Embassy in the United States or
the U.S. Embassy in Kiev concerning Trump, Russia or former Trump campaign
chairman Paul Manafort.
9.
Why did your campaign and the
Democratic Party make a concerted effort to portray Trump as a Russian asset?
10.
Given that investigations by a
House committee, a Senate committee and a special prosecutor all have concluded
there isn’t evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, do you regret the actions by
your campaign and by Steele, Simpson and Sussmann to inject these unfounded
allegations into the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community and the news media?
Hillary Clinton
owes us answers to each of these questions. She should skip the lawyer-speak
and answer them with the candor worthy of an elder American stateswoman.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose
work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the
Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in
drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an
investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill.
Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports.
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