Uranium One + fake Dossier

A YEAR of Clinton lies about the 'golden showers' dossier exposed as Hillary's lawyer is under fire for falsely denying paying for it
It's claimed that Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias and other Democrats falsely denied to reporters their involvement in the 'dirty dossier'
Two New York Times journalists say they were lied to at every turn
It's now established that Clinton lawyer Marc Elias arranged for the campaign and the Democratic Party to pay a dirt-digging firm to produce the dossier
'Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year,' Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted
By DAVID MARTOSKO, US POLITICAL EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM and WIRES
PUBLISHED: 11:36 EDT, 25 October 2017 | UPDATED: 11:52 EDT, 25 October 2017

A Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer who launched what would become known as the anti-Trump 'dirty dossier' denied involvement in the project for a year as reporters pressed him for information.

Marc Elias brokered a deal between the Clinton camp, the Democratic National Committee and opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on the president while he was running for office.

But a pair of New York Times reporters said Tuesday night on Twitter that Elias and others involved had lied about their ties to the arrangement.

'Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year,' Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted after The Washington Post linked the dossier to Elias and his law firm Perkins Coie.

Kennth Vogel, another Times journalist, tweeted: 'When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying "You (or your sources) are wrong".'

The deal began in the spring of 2016, when Elias was approached by Fusion GPS, and lasted until right before Election Day. When Fusion approached Elias, it had already been doing research work on Trump for an unnamed client during the Republican primary.

But the dossier itself was funded entirely by Democrats, using Elias as a middle-man.

After the DNC and the Clinton campaign started paying, Fusion GPS hired former British spy Christopher Steele to do the dirt-digging. His work later resulted in the dossier.

Trump has called the material 'phony stuff,' and on Wednesday he portrayed himself as the aggrieved party.

The president posted a quote on Twitter that he attributed to Fox News: "Clinton campaign & DNC paid for research that led to the anti-Trump Fake News Dossier. The victim here is the President".'

The FBI has worked to corroborate the document, and special counsel Robert Mueller's team, which is investigating potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, questioned Steele weeks ago.

The dossier circulated in Washington last year and was turned over to the FBI for its review. It contends that Russia was engaged in a long-standing effort to aid Trump and had amassed compromising information about the Republican.

Among its wild claims was that Russian officials have videos of the president cavorting with prostitutes, filmed during Trump's 2013 visit to a luxury Moscow hotel for the Miss Universe contest

It also contains a highly unusual and unsubstantiated report that the call girls performed a 'golden shower' routine that involved them urinating on a hotel bed as a sign of disgust for then-president Barack Obama.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the document as false and in recent days has questioned whether Democrats or the FBI itself had helped fund it.

Trump also has challenged the findings of the FBI, NSA and CIA that Russia waged a large-scale influence campaign to interfere in the election.

The FBI and the CIA have said with high confidence that the effort was aimed at hurting Clinton's candidacy and helping Trump. The NSA found the same with "moderate" confidence.

It's unclear what Fusion GPS had dug up by the time Perkins Coie hired it in April 2016. According to a copy of the dossier published by BuzzFeed last year, the earliest report from Steele dates to June 2016.

It was not immediately known how much money Fusion was paid or how many others in the Clinton campaign or DNC were aware that the firm had been retained.Clinton campaign officials did not immediately comment, but in a statement, a DNC spokeswoman said the party chairman, Tom Perez, was not part of the decision-making and was unaware that Perkins Coie was working with Fusion GPS.

Former Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said on Twitter that he regretted not knowing about Steele's hiring before the election, and that had he known, 'I would have volunteered to go to Europe and try to help him.'

'I have no idea what Fusion or Steele were paid but if even a shred of that dossier ends up helping Mueller, it will prove money well spent,' Fallon in another tweet.

The Washington Post's blockbuster report that the Hillary Clinton campaign, in partnership with the DNC, hired the firm that utilized gossip from various unnamed Russians to create the so-called Trump Dossier, marks a key turning point into the investigation into Russia's attempts at influencing American politics.

The DNC not only accepted this second-hand, uncorroborated information, but actually sought it out, financed it, and disseminated it through Washington.

Now rewind the clock to July, after The New York Times reported that Donald Trump Jr. had been approached by a mysterious Russian lawyer with an offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Trump Jr. accepted the meeting but by all accounts, the lawyer had misrepresented her intent, and no anti-Hillary intel was exchanged.

Nonetheless, the media and many prominent Democrats fell fit into a fit of hysteria.

Trump Jr. was quickly accused "treason" and "colluding" with a hostile actor. Some said he would certainly be going to jail.

CNN's Jake Tapper said, "It’s rather momentous: This can’t just be — this can’t be dismissed as people out to get Donald J. Trump Jr. or fake news. This is evidence of willingness to commit collusion.”

The former chairwoman of the DNC, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, said the meeting fits the definition of collusion.

"Clearly, what we learned today is that the president’s son, his namesake, a senior advisor and someone who was in the top tier of the Trump campaign colluded, which is the classic dictionary definition of what that means," Wasserman Schultz said. "There is no question what Donald Trump Jr. agreed to do -- with relish, I might add -- is meet with a lawyer who he believed was affiliated with the Russian government to assist his father’s campaign and collect dirt on Hillary Clinton. If that is not the definition of collusion, I don’t know what is."

Clinton's former running-mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, said the meeting could constitute treason.

"We are now beyond obstruction of justice in terms of what’s being investigated," Kaine said. "This is moving into perjury, false statements and even potentially treason.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal also leveled charges of treason:

As a former prosecutor, my reaction was these e-mails are a textbook example and evidence of criminal intent. I can almost hear the closing arguments of the jury using “I love it,” repeating again and again, “I love it.” Those three words are going to haunt Donald Trump Jr. Because they are a clear signal that he is looking for information, dirt, on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government and expecting an agent of the Russian government to be providing it to him, and having the meeting showing, and again signalling, the Trump campaign is open for business. We will accept information no matter how it is obtained legally or illegally. And that is potentially a violation of the FBI, yes, treason, and it is potentially a violation of the prohibitions of defrauding the government through conspiracy, against cyber fraud and abuse. There are a slew of statutes that may have been violated here.

CNN's Bakari Sellers said Democrats ought to make a bigger deal over Trump Jr.'s meeting, as "what he did was a threat to our democracy and borderline treason."

Attorney and former White House ethics czar, Richard Painter, became a fixture on the TV circuit, where he said the meeting could constitute treason.

"The facts reported in The New York Times article come very close if not is crossing the line with respect to treason if those facts are true," Painter said on MSNBC.

The former Watergate prosecutor, Nick Ackerman, likewise became a cable TV fixture, where he at one point said Trump Jr.'s meeting was "outright treason."

Stephen Colbert summed up the hopes of many when he concluded that Trump Jr. was "going to jail."

Will these same personalities level the same accusations against Clinton and the DNC?