Another Morning Eye Opener

Have a cup of coffee, and scan these posts from Ace's "Morning Report 11/22/17." If these don't get you going, maybe the coffee will:

Unsealed Fusion GPS Bank Records Show Russia-Related Payments...

...Payoffs From Fusion GPS Also Went to Journalists

Newly filed court documents confirm that Fusion GPS, the company mostly responsible for the controversial “Trump dossier” on presidential candidate Donald Trump, made payments to three journalists between June 2016 until February 2017.

The revelation could be a breakthrough for House Republicans, who are exploring whether Fusion GPS used the dossier, which was later criticized for having inaccurate information on Trump, to feed anti-Trump stories to the press during and after the presidential campaign. The three journalists who were paid by Fusion GPS are known to have reported on "Russia issues relevant to [the committee's] investigation," the House Intelligence Committee said in a court filing.

But the recipients' names, the amounts, and purposes of those payments were either redacted from the documents that Fusion GPS filed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia or were not disclosed.

What, journolists being paid to plant opposition research on Republicans? I thought they did that for free!

Russia Scandal Just Got Much Worse... For Hillary and Obama

. . .Now a cache of documents 5,000 pages long, which were reviewed by The Hill, sheds new and more troubling light on this story.

The documents detail work done by undercover informant Douglas Campbell, who was paid nearly $200,000 for his cooperation with the FBI while he was working as a lobbyist on behalf of a Russian company. The Justice Department had previously barred Campbell from telling anyone about his work, a gag order it lifted only after the initial Hill story ran.

Among the revelations contained in these documents:

• Campbell had documented a bribery/kickback scheme by Russian officials in the U.S. more than a year before Obama approved the Uranium One sale.
• He also "relayed detailed information about criminal conduct throughout 2010."
• Campbell was directly solicited by Russian officials to help overcome political opposition from Republicans to the Uranium One sale.
• He regularly told his FBI handlers about what The Hill describes only as a "Washington entity with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton," which was paid millions to help expand Russia's U.S. uranium business and "began increasing its financial support" to the Clinton Foundation.
• Russia saw the Uranium One purchase as part of a long-term strategy to dominate energy markets and make the U.S. more dependent on Russia's nuclear fuel.
• Russians used "racially tinged insults to boast about how easy they found it to win uranium business under Obama."

It's important to note that all this transpired while Obama was embarking on his ill-fated Russian "reset" — in which he tried to make nice with Russia, and during which his administration not only approved the Uranium One sale but made other rulings favorable to Russian energy interests.

Uranium 1 Noose Is Tightening