FBI scandal

The FBI scandal began as a series of abuses within the Obama administration.

Uranium One

Main article: Uranium One bribery scandal

Mueller investigation

According to court filings in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, in 2009, the FBI began an investigation into corruption and extortion by senior managers of Tenex, a subsidiary of Rosatom, a Russian entity. Robert Mueller was FBI Director at the time the investigation into the Rosatom subsidiary began.

The investigation began as an intelligence probe into Russian nuclear officials. Mueller's investigation also obtained an eyewitness account known as CS-1 — backed by documents, recordings, and emails — indicating Russian nuclear officials routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on the Committee on Foreign Investment, a government body that provided the approval of the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom.

During the investigation, federal agents attempted to convince Mikerin to turn on his Russian colleagues by showing him evidence of relationships between “shell companies and other Russian energy officials, including President Vladimir Putin.” He refused to expose them and was subsequently arrested on charges of criminal conspiracy to extort kickbacks for lucrative contracts to transport imported uranium of dismantled Russian warheads to power plants within the United States.

TASS reported "the US authorities tried to exert pressure on Mikerin and persuade him to secretly cooperate against Russia." Mikerin's arrest was scheduled for early summer, but later in August the decision was overturned by prosecutors Rod Rosenstein and Adam Aik, according to the court documents. The appeal, signed by Rosenstein and Aik, urged Judge William Connelly to cancel Mikerin's arrest order since the law enforcement agents were allegedly hoping that Mikerin would secretly collaborate with them against high level Rosatom officials. In a statement to the press the US Attorneys office commented, "This is a sealed document, I'm not sure how it found its way into the proceedings," in an attempt to object to the defense discussing the motion publicly. Defense attorney Dan Hurson remarked "In my 40 years [of legal practice] I haven't seen anything like that."

The investigation found some kickbacks paid in cash and some in foreign wire transfers. From April 2009 to April 2011, the wire transfers went to Wiser Trading, registered in the Seychelles. From July 2011 to July 2013 - to the British Leila Global Limited account in a Latvian bank. And from August 2013 to May 2014 - to Ollins Development in the British Virgin Islands.

The Director of British Leila Global Denny Banger, a Latvian citizen, appeared as a nominal director in a hundred organizations. Latvian journalists, participants in the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), found Banger. He was listed as the head of several firms related to the "Magnitsky case".

Andrew Weissmann

The plea agreement shows that the Obama DOJ’s Fraud Section was then run by Andrew Weissmann, who is now one of the top prosecutors in Robert Mueller’s special-counsel Trump-Russia investigation.

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. Section 371 is for less serious conspiracy cases. Using it for money laundering — which caps the sentence below Congress’s intent for that behavior — subverts federal law and 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. (See in The Hill’s report, the third document embedded at the bottom, titled “Mikerin Plea Deal.”) No RICO, no extortion, no fraud — and the plea agreement does not to mention any of the extortions in 2009 and 2010, before Committee on Foreign Investment in the US approved Rosatom’s acquisition of Uranium One. Mikerin just plead guilty to a nominal “money laundering” conspiracy charge, insulating him from a longer sentence. Thus, he got a term of only four years’ for a major national security crime.

Clinton email server

Main article: Hillary Clinton email scandal

On May 2, 2016 FBI Dir. James Comey wrote an internal memorandum saying Hillary Clinton and others were guilty of gross negligence punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment.

On July 5 FBI Dir. James Comey revised his findings at the behest of Peter Strzok from felonious gross negligence when he publicly announced that Sec. Clinton and staff were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," and "there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information…There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about the matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation." Comey referred the matter to the Justice Dept. for a prosecutorial decision. In the absence of prosecution, security or administrative sanctions are the norm. Comey's decision to by-pass DoJ rules and take matters into his own hands may have been part of a counterintelligence ooeration.

Peter Strzok

Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin lie to FBI investigator Peter Strzok. “Mills did not learn Clinton was using a private server until after Clinton’s [Department of State] tenure...Mills stated she was not even sure she knew what a server was at the time....Abedin did not know that Clinton had a private server until about a year and a half ago when it became public knowledge.” Email exchanges from 2009 to 2011 exist in which both Mills and Abedin directly discussed or were involved in discussing Clinton’s server. Mills asked about it in a Feb. 27, 2010 email to Abedin and an aide to Bill Clinton who helped set up the Clinton Chappaqua server. “Ur funny. We are on the same server,” Cooper replied. Mills and Abedin were also involved in an Aug. 30, 2011 exchange in which State Department official Stephen Mull mentioned that Clinton’s “email server is down.” In a Jan. 9, 2011 email exchange, Cooper told Abedin that Clinton’s server had been malfunctioning because “someone was trying to hack us.” “Had to shut down the server,” wrote Cooper, who told the FBI in his interviews that he discussed Clinton’s server with Abedin in 2009, when it was being set up. Neither Mills or Abedin were prosecuted for making lying to the FBI.

James Comey

On September 28 FBI Dir. James Comey perjurored himself before the House Governmental Affairs Oversight Committee. In response to a question from Rep. Ratcliffe, Comey testified his decision not to recommend prosecution of Hillary Clinton came after her 2 July interview with the FBI. Subsequent internal FBI documents reveal Comey decided against recommending prosecution more than six weeks earlier, while the investigation was still in progress.

Mr. RATCLIFFE. ...If there was ever any possibility that something Hillary Clinton might have said on July 2 could have possibly resulted in criminal charges that might possibly have resulted in a trial against her relating to this classified information, well, then, to use your words, Director, I don’t think that there is any reasonable prosecutor out there who would have allowed two immunized witnesses central to the prosecution proving the case against her to sit in the room with the interview, the FBI interview, of the subject of that investigation.

And if I heard you earlier today, in your long career, I heard you say that you have never had that circumstance. Is that—did I hear you correctly?

Mr. COMEY. That is correct, but——

Mr. RATCLIFFE. Okay. And I never have either, and I have never met a prosecutor that has ever had that.

So, to me, the only way that an interview takes place with the two central witnesses and the subject of the investigation is if the decision has already been made that all three people in that room are not going to be charged.

Mr. COMEY. Can I respond?

Mr. RATCLIFFE. Yes. Please.

Mr. COMEY. I know in our political lives sometimes people casually accuse each other of being dishonest, but if colleagues of ours believe I am lying about when I made this decision, please urge them to contact me privately so we can have a conversation about this.

All I can do is to tell you again, the decision was made after that, because I didn’t know what was going to happen in that interview...

Russian meddling

Main article: Trump-Russia

Steele dossier

In early June FusionGPS hired Christopher Steele to begin working on the Steele dossier. On June 9 Rinat Akhmetshin and Natalia Veselnitskaya, working for FusionGPS and Ike Kaveladze, meet with Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner. On June 20 Christopher Steele filed his first report entitled Company Intelligence Report.

See also

• 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign
• Deep state coup timeline 2016-2017
• Deep state coup