Manafort and Podesta Group tied up in Mueller probe.

Like the author of a great epic story a rope is drawn around all the central characters, they're lassoed, the rope tightened and the characters drawn together to the center of action. ← I read that thirty years ago in a CliffsNotes to Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. You know, sometimes the CliffsNotes are better than the books they review, like Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier.

Unfortunately, no one will hang by this rope.

They won't even be discredited. Their party accepts these activities, their media gives them cover, and their voters are amoral, superficial with impressively varied and impossible emotional issues, their very identities. They need their party as weapon.

I'll tell you what this video says. I took notes. Here they are.

The Podesta Group has been sucked into the Muller’s investigation.

A man contacted Tucker Carlson and his staff (name cannot yet be revealed, but it will with more information to come) who is senior employee in Podesa group disgusted about the reporting being so off base that it's actually reversed.

There is Russian involvement in American politics but it has (almost) nothing to do with 2016 presidential campaign.

Paul Manafort is a central figure in Russia collusion investigation due to the several months he spent as Trump's campaign chairman. But that's only half true. Manafort is central in the investigation but not because of his ties to Trump. In fact, Manafort worked with the Podesta group on behalf of Russian interests for a very long time. The Russians sought to influence Capitol Hill, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and the Obama Administration. Manafort brought a parade of Russian oligarchs to Congress where they met with members and their staffs. The central effort was extended to the Executive branch, the Obama administration.

The vehicle Manafort used was a shell company named European Center for Modern Ukraine. Ostensibly based in Brussels there are no employees there, the Brussels phones ring in Ukraine where an office is staffed with two employees.

The Podesta group was chosen by Russians because both Podesta brothers are close to the Clintons, that is, influence peddling by Hillary Clinton through her position as Secretary of State.

[For some strange reason this doesn't bother Democrat voters. The slime that gets on them from that doesn't bother them at all. Perhaps someone can explain that to me.]

Podesta hired a chief Clinton employee giving them direct access to Hillary. They used this connection to facilitate Uranium One. Manafort was clear that Russia wanted to cultivate ties to Hillary Clinton believing she would become president. The connection to Hillary was valuable to Russia, the payments to Podesta group greatly exceeds the 1,000,000 paid, the extra through kickbacks that would be difficult for investigators to trace. The source says the Podesta books are a treasure trove and highly secret. Podesta Group has no board overseeing it and all decisions are made internally by Tony Podesta personally. The group’s employees include a person whose only job is managing Tony Podesta’s art collection. It’s easy for an organization structured so loosely to conceal financial transactions.

The source has been interviewed extensively by Robert Mueller’s investigators.

Press accounts still frame Mueller’s investigation as a hunt for collusion between Trump campaign and the government of Russian. The investigators are very interested in Manafort’s activities during the period he ran the Trump campaign but otherwise that description is bogus. The investigation is more interested in which people and which organizations in Washington have been operating for years secretly as de facto operatives on behalf of Russian government and business interests. The Podesta Group chief among them. Investigators are more interested in facilitators of Russian influence than they are of election collusion. The Podesta Group is in their crosshairs.

A lot of this lobbying is not illegal in the United State, but if true, then what is learned overturns much of what we think that we know about Russian attempts to influence policy.

Then Britt Hume joins Tucker Carlson for discussion and the two bring all that down to earth.

I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright (bright)
Bright (bright) sunshiny day.

Strangely, Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post has come way out of character.

It is not within them to frame an article damaging to Hillary Clinton. They simply cannot do it. Bezos is at war with Trump due to Trump's suggestion that Amazon runs roughshod over other retailers by not paying its due share in taxes.

They wrote an article Clinton campaign and DNC paid for research that led to Russian dossier published by Buzzfeed that's obviously bogus but still used to investigate collusion between Trump campaign and Russia to affect the 2016 election.

The judge in the case of the congressional subpoena into Fusion GPS bank records to discover financing for the bogus dossier gave Fusion until Friday to work out an agreement with Congress that would cancel the need for a judicial decision. So the article might have been advanced by Fusion itself because bank records will have a lot more information than Congress will ask for.

There is a possibility of other sources to finance the dossier including FBI, CIA, and an unhappy 2016 Republican candidate.

Fusion work researching Trump began during the Republican presidential primaries, when a GOP donor paid for the firm to investigate Trump's background.

They did not start out looking at Trump's Russian ties but quickly realized those relationships were extensive.

When the Republican donor stopped paying for research, a lawyer on behalf of Clinton campaign and the DNC agreed to pay for the work to continue.

Steele shared some findings with FBI so they launched an intelligence investigation into Trump associates and Russian government.

After the election the FBI agreed to pay Steele to continue gathering information, but FBI pulled their agreement after Steele was publicly identified.

Devin Nunes, head of the House Intelligence Committee is trying to get Fusion to identify the mystery client. And everyone is guessing while Fusion negotiates with Nunes until Friday.

And as usual, depending on the site, comments are even more interesting than the articles.

A sample:

A commenter asks a sincere but rather daft question:

*  If the dossier was paid for by the left or the right, why would it be illegal to have the opposition research done on a candidate? Did I miss something? Is it illegal to get information on a candidate. I’m just trying to put this new or existing revelation into some context.

The question is answered:

*  No it is not illegal to do opposition research. However, this was a Russian compiled piece of trash that was then used to try to subvert democracy in the USA. A sitting US President, duly and legally elected, has been undermined and maligned for close to a year now.
These lies were used to obtain FISA warrants to illegally spy on a campaign, used to unmask NSA captures… AND riled up the US populace to the point of anarchy.
 So, yes, you missed something.

They left out the dossier was used to fire up a special investigation of duly elected president of United States, to get him impeached, unlimited in scope and in financing, with tons of Democrat Washington insider lawyers. And the warrants were used for intimidating SWAT-like dead-of-the-night searches with computer confiscations.

*  Also, for a year or so, the Clinton/dnc camp has played innocent on the dossier and now they are exposed (again) as liars. 

* Sundance is correct that Perkins Coie admitted their role as bagman to create an excuse for the judge to quash the subpoena and for Dems to hammer Nunes to drop it. No doubt they expected to lose, and would rather get in front of the story. Hillary and the DNC must have agreed to this strategy; they are trying to get away with telling the partial truth in a gambit to hide the whole truth. Something much much worse lurks within those bank records. It is imperative that the subpoena be enforced and the entirety of the payment data be made public.

Throughout, the reporting on this is abysmal, America does not have a worthy free press. America has cages of clamoring monkeys.