PrairiePundit

NY Times:
Prosecutors’ Narrative Is Clear: Trump Defrauded Voters. But What Does It Mean? President Trump’s lawyer minimized the importance of any potential campaign finance violations, but Democrats said they could potentially lead to impeachment. This claim is absurd.  It has to be made up by the same team that screwed up the Enron case. 

After the report of the hush money payments, Trump's popularity did not drop at all and was already higher than when he was elected.   By reimbursing Cohen the money came out of Trump's own pocket and did not come from any campaign funds.  It was much more legitimate than the government paying hush money to Congressional staffers who alleged sexual harassment.  The John Edwards case also shows the weakness of the charge since his payments actually came out of campaign funds and the jury acquitted him of the charge.

The only voters who care about this are Democrats who didn't vote for him anyway.  They care about because it is an excuse f…

He is talking about his book Spygate and reveals some interesting connections between the figures in the attempt to take down President Trump.  It is well worth listening to.

Ed Timperlake:
The legal dodge used by James Comey to exonerate Hillary Clinton from her prima facie crimes in using an unsecured server for official business won’t be any help to the Clinton Foundation as it faces charges coming from whistleblowers.

Clinton Inc. criminal defense lawyers trying to hide behind the word “intent” won’t work because the Clintons were previously warned early and often about improper compliance:

.. internal legal reviews that the foundation conducted on itself in 2008 and 2011.

Those reviews flagged serious concerns about legal compliance, improper commingling of personal and charity business and "quid pro quo" promises made to donors while Hillary Clinton was secretary of State. ...

One of the elements of a crime is that the criminal behavior has to be documented as being undertaken knowingly and purposeful which is exactly what the whistleblower documents prove.

Often, charity scammers walk away clean because the Government cannot prove “intent”…

Stanislaw Zarin:
Poland, Europe, and NATO have all been targeted by Russian information attacks. Moscow has been mastering the methods of covert aggression for years, bringing down the levels of security in many European countries, and particularly in the Central and Eastern European countries (CEE). The strengthening of NATO’s Eastern Flank would serve to curtail Russia’s influence over the region. Therefore, the Kremlin has intensified its aggressive activities. This was particularly visible during this year’s edition of the Anakonda military exercise, a key training event for Polish Armed Forces with a high participation of allied countries and organizations.
...
The aim of information offensives is to render the audience vulnerable to Russian influence to take for granted a distorted picture of reality. To achieve this, Russia uses very simple tools, namely it publishes false information, manipulates the content posted to credible media, and attributes fabricated words to authori…

Daily Caller:
A super PAC that spent millions attacking Republican Sen. Ted Cruz during the midterm election was revealed Thursday to be funded almost entirely by Washington, D.C., Democrats.

The Texas Forever PAC, which spent $2.3 million on last-minute anti-Cruz attack ads, was funded by the Senate Majority PAC except for $10,000, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings in December. The Senate Majority PAC has strong ties to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and fundraises to help Democrats win control of the Senate.

Texas Forever was created less than a month before the November election and after the last deadline to report donors prior to Election Day. Because it launched so close to the election, Texas Forever was able to sidestep revealing where the funds came from until a month after voting concluded, a strategy that has been more frequently utilized with super PACs this election cycle, reported Politico.

The Super PAC’s goal was to help Cruz’s Democratic challe…

NJ.com:
Immigration officials took 105 immigrants and foreign nationals into custody in a five-day operation that included the arrests of several people wanted by Interpol for alleged crimes in their home countries, federal officials said Friday.

The sweep by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in 16 counties in N.J. also targeted immigrants who illegally re-entered the U.S. after deportation and several members of alleged gangs, including MS-13, officials said.

About 80 percent of those arrested had prior criminal convictions, ICE officials said.

“These outstanding results, which were made possible by our officers and law enforcement partners, highlight the tremendous commitment that ICE ERO has to public safety throughout the state,” said John Tsoukaris, field office director for ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations in Newark. “Our focus has been and will continue to be on arrests of illegal aliens who have been convicted of serious crimes or those who pose a threat t…

Sara Carter:
Over the past two years Republican and Democratic lawmakers have waged battles both behind closed doors and in public, which have exposed startling evidence of possible malfeasance within the FBI, as well as mounting concerns regarding conflicts of interest, back channeling of information within the DOJ and possible criminal violations regarding the FBI’s dealings with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
But with Democrats taking over the House next year, Republicans will be limited in their scope to investigate and will lose their power to subpoena witnesses. The party, will in effect, be at the mercy of Democrats. So where does this leave the Republican’s ongoing investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe and Hillary Clinton’s use of private servers for government business?

It may all lie in the hands of Barr, who served as attorney general during the first Bush administration from 1991 to 1993. It is in his purvey to appoint a second Special Cou…

Kimberley Strassel:
Robert Mueller looks to be approaching his endgame, and the press is alive with speculation as to how bad the special counsel’s report will be for President Trump. It’s also worth noticing how good Mr. Mueller has been to another president, Barack Obama, and his team.

This benevolence was on display in the sentencing document the special counsel’s office filed on Tuesday for Mike Flynn. The former Trump national security adviser, we are told, has provided “substantial assistance,” sitting for 19 interviews that aided in “several ongoing investigations.” In light of this help, the Mueller team recommends leniency—perhaps even sparing him prison time.

That would be just. The special counsel provides no evidence Mr. Flynn was part of any collusion with Russia. He was instead brought up on a charge of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And it’s not even clear he did that. The FBI officials who first interviewed Mr. Flynn didn’t think he lied about his intera…

KSAT:
Boeing is looking to double its San Antonio workforce in the next 18 months to two years. The company could be hiring as many as a thousand new workers at Port San Antonio.

“When you start approaching 100 percent capacity, you need a good planning tool, and that's what this is all about,” said Jay Galloway, Boeing’s San Antonio site leader.

Boeing is trying to figure out where to fit all the aircraft the company will service in San Antonio in the near future.

“Probably the most exciting thing about that going forward is the growth,” Galloway said.

Galloway is overseeing the Boeing expansion, from the little planes to the mammoth C-17s. Soon, Boeing San Antonio will be working on F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets and supertankers, along with commercial aircraft. The company will even play a part in production of the new Air Force One planes.

“We'll almost double the size of our workforce in the next 18 months,” Galloway said.

That's approximately 1,000 new jobs. Lookin…

Forbes:
...
In pushing its Manchurian-candidate-Trump narrative, the media fail to mention the much deeper ties of Democratic lobbyists to Russia. Don’t worry, the media seems to say: Even though they are representing Russia, the lobbyists are good upstanding citizens, not like the Trump people. They can be trusted with such delicate matters.

The media targeted former Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for consulting for deposed Ukrainian president’s (Yanukovich’s) Party of the Regions. He also worked for billionaire oligarch, Firtash, who stands accused of skimming billions in the Ukraine gas trade in league with Russian oligarchs. The media also singled out Trump’s former national security advisor, General Michael Flynn, for attending a dinner with Putin and appearing on Russia’s foreign propaganda network RT. Trump’s own Russian ties were the subject of intense media coverage of an unverified opposition-research report purportedly prepared by an ex-British spy, who remains in h…

John Solomon:
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The failures of Comey’s remarkably turbulent and short tenure as FBI director were on display again Friday on Capitol Hill, when he was interviewed in a closed-door session by two House committees. Republican lawmakers were aghast at his sudden lack of recollection of key events.

He didn’t seem to know that his own FBI was using No. 4 Justice Department official Bruce Ohr as a conduit to keep collecting intelligence from Christopher Steele after the British intel operative was fired by the bureau for leaking and lying. In fact, Comey didn’t seem to remember knowing that Steele had been terminated, according to sources in the room.

“His memory was so bad I feared he might not remember how to get out of the room after the interview,” one lawmaker quipped. Lamented another: “It was like he suddenly developed dementia or Alzheimer’s, after conveniently remembering enough facts to sell his book.”

Faintness of memory is a common symptom for witnesses under the intense spot…

George Neumyer:
James Comey uncorked the whopper earlier this year that he still “didn’t know for a fact” Hillary Clinton financed the infamous dossier of Christopher Steele — an epic lie reminiscent of his denial, leaked through James Clapper and other stooges, that the FBI spied on Trump Tower, even as warrants to spy on Trump Tower sat on his desk!
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So Comey knew that at least someone inside the Justice Department thought the application tainted and signed it anyways. Hillary, in effect, was purchasing a FISA warrant against her opponents, and the FBI went along with it. Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s name for the espionage against the Trump campaign, was supposed to be her October surprise, but it fell flat, though not for lack of trying on the part of Team Hillary, both inside and outside the Obama administration. In the weeks before the election, John Brennan at the CIA, Peter Strzok at the FBI, Jonathan Winer at the State Department, among others, were leaking mentions of th…

Maureen Callahan:
If the Dems want to lose in 2020, Beto O’Rourke is the perfect candidate O'Rourke has a knack for pretending to be a moderate who will work with others, but the reality is he is a far leftist who will push a leftist agenda.  He should have a harder time doing that in a national race.

Washington Post:
Endangered Hawaiian monk seals keep getting eels stuck up their noses, and scientists want them to stop It all began about two years ago when a scientist woke up to a strange email from researchers in the field. The subject line was short: “Eel in nose.”









What makes a monk seal want to sniff eels?

Jay Lehr:
For three decades, global warming alarmists have harassed society with stories of gloom and doom as a result of the carbon dioxide emitted into the air by the burning of fossil fuel. They are exercising precisely what prominent writer H.L. Mencken described as “the whole point of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”.

In fact, the man-caused global warming or climate change panic may well be the best hobgoblin ever conceived. It has half the world clamoring to be led to safety from climate change without a shred of physical evidence. Every single statement issued to support these fearmongering claims presented in a new 1,500-page report from 13 separate agencies of the federal government by 300 Obama-appointed scientists, has no basis in physical measurements or observations.

What they do have are mathematical equations considered to be models of t…

Conservative Treehouse:
The Media are Just as Complicit in DOJ, FBI, Corruption and FISA Abuse…

... The media engagements with the parties swirling around the FBI, DOJ and Clinton-Steele Dossier are so pervasive they cannot reasonably report on any aspect of the story without exposing their own duplicity.
... I think they wanted their collusion stories to be true because of their political bias.  They were willing to jump through hoops and ignore contra evidence to do so.  This is a long piece that lays out their complicity.

Washington Times:
U.S. leaders say Vladimir Putin used a familiar cyber playbook to “muck around” in the midterm elections last month, but intelligence officials and key lawmakers believe a much more sinister, potentially devastating threat lies just down the road — one that represents an attack on reality itself.

Policy insiders and senators of both parties believe the Russian president or other actors hostile to the U.S. will rely on “deep fakes” to throw the 2020 presidential election cycle into chaos, taking their campaign to influence American voters and destabilize society to a new level.

The eerie process, which relies on cutting-edge, deep-learning algorithm technology, produces high-quality audio and video of individuals saying things they never said or doing things they never did. The phony video, analysts say, will be virtually indistinguishable from real footage, mimicking voices, speaking patterns, facial expressions and surroundings to a frighteningly realistic degree.

U…

Fox News:
Former FBI Director James Comey’s lawyers have prevented him from answering a number of questions during Friday’s closed-door testimony before House lawmakers, according to a lawmaker in the room.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., told reporters that some lawmakers have been frustrated with the testimony so far and that Comey didn’t seem upset about being told by his lawyers that he doesn’t have to answer certain questions.

"One of the disappointments of this deposition so far has been the amount of times in which the FBI believes that Congress doesn’t have a right to know," Issa said.

Issa said Comey has two attorneys, including one from the DOJ, who have “instructed” the former FBI director not to answer “a great many questions that are clearly items at the core of our investigation.” Issa said the instructions have been followed with Comey’s “gleeful acceptance.”

"The Department of Justice is going to have to agree to allow him to come back and answer a great ma…

Politico:
The email controversy that dogged Hillary Clinton through much of the 2016 presidential race could well be kicking around through the 2020 contest after a federal judge ordered additional fact-finding into whether Clinton’s use of the private email system was a deliberate effort to thwart the Freedom of Information Act.

In a scathing opinion issued Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said that despite FBI, inspector general and congressional investigations into Clinton’s use of a private account for all her email traffic during her four years as secretary of state, the conservative group Judicial Watch should be permitted to demand documents and additional testimony about the practice.

Lamberth, who has clashed with Clinton and her aides in cases dating back to her husband’s administration, was unsparing in his assessment of the former secretary’s actions. He blasted Clinton’s email practices as “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

Lam…

John Solomon:
When a House subcommittee chairman bangs his gavel next week to convene an unprecedented investigative hearing into the Clinton Foundation, two questions will linger as preeminent: Is the Clinton family charity really the international do-gooder that earned a perfect four-star rating from Charity Navigator, or does it suffer from corruption and illegalities as conservatives allege? And if it is the latter, how much evidence of wrongdoing does the government possess?

The answer to the first question is that the foundation and its projects reported collecting about $2.5 billion to help global crises, from AIDS to earthquakes, even as its own auditors, lawyers and employees privately warned of problems over the years.


The answer to the second question may reside in 6,000 pages of evidence attached to a whistleblower submission filed secretly more than a year ago with the IRS and FBI.

That evidence was assembled by a private firm called MDA Analytics LLC, run by accomplished…

Washington Post:
Now that Democrats will soon control one branch of Congress, President Trump is again signaling that infrastructure could be an area of compromise. We agree, but if the president wanted to earn Democratic support in the Senate, any infrastructure bill would have to include policies and funding that help transition our country to a clean-energy economy and mitigate the risks the United States already faces from climate change.

For too long, Congress has failed to act in a meaningful way to combat the threat posed by climate change. Powerful special interests have a stranglehold on many of my Republican colleagues; some GOP legislators even refuse to acknowledge that climate change is happening. So despite the immense size of the problem, despite wildfires that sweep through the West and hurricanes that grow more powerful over the years, real action on climate change has been stymied by the denialism of the president and too many Republicans in Congress. While notable p…

Ronald Wright, New York Times:
Yes, Jury Selection Is as Racist as You Think I think lawyers look for jurors who will be fair.  I recall one of my bigger cases was a trial in Kingsville, Texas of a defendant who was accused of defrauding returning POW's out of their back pay with the sell of some zero coupon bonds that were of little value. 

The complaining witnesses were Navy pilots who had recently been freed from North Vietnam who were stationed at the Kingsville Naval Air Station.  The defendant was a former Marine who falsely claimed that he had been a POW in Korea.  He was selling bonds out of Ft. Lauderdale.

The jury pool was a mix of the community made up of Hispanics and Anglos and a few blacks.  Among those finally selected was a foreman from the historic King Ranch which was near the town.  We also chose a black woman who worked at a welfare agency.  While I wondered if she would be sympathetic to the accused, I found I had nothing to worry about. 

The courtroom in the …

Washington Post:
They stood in the rain for hours, waiting. Ranchers, retirees and Cub Scouts clutching tiny flags in the cold , waiting to see the train carrying the casket of President George H.W. Bush through the center of town.

After the pomp and circumstance of Bush’s memorial service at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston on Thursday, his casket was transferred to a windowed car in a train powered by a Union Pacific locomotive long ago painted “4141” in his honor. The train made a 70-mile journey to College Station, where Bush would be laid to rest at his presidential library, through the wintry farmland of the state Bush had grown to love.

As president, Bush had vowed to bring his message of hope and growth “to the loneliest town on the quietest street.” Now his train was passing through tiny Texas towns with only a few dozen residents.

“Is it coming?” everybody kept asking, peering down the tracks, where the residents of Navasota — population 8,000 — were lined up for blo…

NY Times:
‘Yellow Vest’ Protests Shake France. Here’s the Lesson for Climate Change. There is little doubt among scientists and economists that carbon taxes are needed to reduce fossil fuel dependence. The question is how to design them to cushion the blow on the most vulnerable. Here is an idea.  Try to find an alternative that is truly competitive with fossil fuels.  If you can't do that, it is unlikely that you can ever structure a program that attacks fossil fuels by lowering people's standard of living that will be acceptable. 

Also, stop trying to frighten people into buying into the global warming theory.  All these dire warnings that are being projected have so far failed to happen and you are just destroying your credibility.  If the models continue to fail to accurately project the future temperature few will buy into a control freak solution to a perceived problem.

Washington Times:
One of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s accusers admitted this week that she made up her lurid tale of a backseat car rape, saying it “was a tactic” to try to derail the judge’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee revealed the fraud in a letter to the FBI and Justice Department Friday, asking them to prosecute Judy Munro-Leighton for lying to and obstructing Congress.

Mr. Grassley said Ms. Munro-Leighton is a left-wing activist who hijacked another “Jane Doe” anonymous report about a backseat rape and claimed it as her own story, calling it a “vicious assault.”

“I am Jane Doe from Oceanside CA — Kavanaugh raped me,” Ms. Munro-Leighton wrote in an Oct. 3 email claiming to have been a victim of the judge.

Mr. Grassley’s investigators tried to reach her for a month but were unsuccessful until this week, when they spoke to her by phone and she confessed that she was not the original Jane Doe, and “did that as a way…

Charles Moore:
It is sad that the death of George H W Bush has been so little marked here in Britain. He matters for at least two reasons. The first was the way he helped Germany to reunite after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Reunification was the logical result of the collapse of the Soviet empire, but it was fraught with danger, because the Soviets might have crushed it.

The harder-line Communists might have regained control and tried to refreeze the shape of Europe. (Indeed, this nearly happened.) Bush gave wholehearted support to Germany, while building trust with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The Cold War came peacefully to a close. Forty‑five years after the end of fighting, the Second World War was thus finally won by the West. Totalitarianism of the Right lost in 1945, totalitarianism of the Left not until 1989-90. Others – Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev – were more important in bringing the right situation about, but it fell to Bush to handle the …

Marc Thiessen:
"When you strike at a king you must kill him," Ralph Waldo Emerson once said. Well, this year China tried to strike at President Trump for daring to launch a trade war with Beijing -- and missed the mark entirely.

After Trump imposed massive tariffs on Chinese goods earlier this year, Beijing responded in June with what appeared to be a clever strategy: targeting retaliatory tariffs against Trump voters in rural farming communities across the United States. China is the largest importer of U.S. soybeans, buying $14 billion of them in 2017. Three of the biggest soybean-producing states, Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, not only voted for Trump, but also in the 2018 midterms had Democratic senators, Joe Donnell, Ind., Claire McCaskill, Mo., and Heidi Heitkamp, N.D., who were up for reelection. If Beijing imposed painful tariffs on soybeans, Chinese leaders likely calculated, they could create a rift between Trump and rural voters who put him in the White Hous…

Washington Free Beacon:
The Trump administration disclosed that Iran is behind the construction of several underground tunnels leading into Israel that Hezbollah militants and other terror forces have been using to conduct attacks, according to multiple U.S. officials who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon and communicated fears that Tehran is preparing to lead a "massive regional war."

The public identification of Iran isn't likely to surprise international observers, but signals aggressive moves by the Trump administration to tie Iran to the rise of terrorism not just in Israel, but across the Middle East, where Iranian-backed militants continue to strike U.S. interests and allies.

The Obama administration, in contrast to Trump, was careful to avoid singling out Iran as the chief force for terrorism against Israel and U.S. allies in the region in hopes of appeasing the hardline regime as it sought to ink the landmark nuclear pact that Trump abandoned earlier this year…

Obama should get the Chutzpah award for this bogus claim.

Fuel Fix:
The Permian Basin's Wolfcamp and Bone Spring formations in West Texas and New Mexico hold the most potential oil and gas resources ever assessed, the U.S. Interior Department said Thursday.

The region in the Permian's western Delaware Basin holds more than twice as much oil as the largest previous assessment - the Wolfcamp shale in the Permian's separate Midland Basin southeast of Midland. That study was completed two years ago.

To put the new results into perspective, the Delaware Basin's Wolfcamp and Bone Spring plays would hold almost seven times as much oil as North Dakota's Bakken shale.

The Wolfcamp shale and overlying Bone Spring in the Permian's booming Delaware Basin hold an estimated 46.3 billion barrels of oil, 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 20 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's new assessment.

Interior Secretary and oil and gas advocate Ryan Zinke said the news is an early Chr…

Monica Showalter:
The ballot-harvesting issue, which gave Democrats an absolute monopoly of power in even Orange County, signals a sort of the bottom dropping out in California. Now that Democrats have discovered they can flip any race based on selective collections of mail-in ballots by Democratic door-knockers from voters who didn't ask for them, their one-party state of the past 20 years in California has gotten even more entrenched in power. One gets the sense that the landscape has changed and what the voters want no longer matters. Voting is no longer about you, or what you think or the decisions you make, it's now all about that unasked-for piece of paper on the kitchen table known as a ballot and how Democrats can get their hands on it. You are incidental.

The creepy Democratic machine, with its 1980s PRI-style politics, rigged this state this way, and in so doing would make Hugo Chávez or Daniel Ortega envious. PRI Mexico was, after all, once called "the perfe…

Legal Insurrection:
Mueller Claims Flynn Gave “First-Hand” Details About Trump Transition Team’s Contact With Russian Officials — But What Part of That is Illegal? Democrats mad-dog attacks on the Trump campaign and allusions to Russian collusions led several figures including Flynn to engage in "defensive" lying when the truth would have served them better.

When I prepared witnesses to testify I always made the point that the truth was a lot easier to explain than a lie.  Flynn evidently did not get that advice and the bogus charges of violating the Logan Act probably spooked him.  Papadopoulos was also spooked by the mad-dogging.  Cohen, who should have known better was trying to minimize the attempts to get an agreement to build a skyscraper in Moscow, which was perfectly legal.  Donald Trump, Jr. avoided that trap by disclosing the efforts accurately.  None of their underlying activities disclosed so far normally prosecuted.

Power Line:
In my contrarian “Notes on the Cohen plea,” I made these points among others: • Thanks to the work of Rep. Devin Nunes and his Republican colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee, we know of actual collusion by a presidential campaign with organs of Russian intelligence. I refer to the Clinton campaign’s work with the friends of Vladimir Putin via the Perkins Coie, Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele. It’s on the face of the Steele Dossier. • If one seeks false statements to Congress that bear on Russian interference and campaign collusion, look no further than Glenn Simpson’s testimony to the congressional intelligence committees. John and I wrote about Simpson’s testimony in several posts that can be accessed here. • Republican counsel questioning Simpson focused mostly on Simpson’s simultaneous work with the BakerHostetler law firm on behalf of the Russian company Prevezon in support of its defense of the money laundering/asset forfeiture case brought by t…

David Harsanyi:

Climate Change Alarmism Is The World’s Leading Cause Of Hot Gas

How long can fearmongering work?

Even as anti-gas tax riots raged in France this week, the naturalist David Attenborough warned a crowd at a United Nations climate change summit in Poland that the “collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” UN General Assembly President Maria Espinosa told the media that “mankind” was “in danger of disappearing” if climate change is allowed to progress at its current rate.

Speakers, who flew in to swap doomsday stories and partake of the meat-heavy menu, advocated for radical changes to avoid this imminent environmental apocalypse. These days, “the point of no return” is almost always in view, yet always just out of reach.

Sorry, but by now, this rhetoric is familiar. You can go back to 1970, when Harvard biologist George Wald, riding a wave of popular environmental panic during the decade, estimated that “civilization wil…

Kevin Mooney:
The Russian meddling in the US that you haven't heard about

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... Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the outgoing chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, has asked the Treasury Department to investigate the “paperless money trail” that flows from President Vladimir Putin’s Russian government into the coffers of U.S. environmental groups for the purpose of funding propaganda campaigns against the process of hydraulic fracturing and the natural gas development that innovative drilling techniques make possible. In response to my media inquiries, the Treasury Department has acknowledged receiving Smith’s letter, but department officials have not said that they are pursuing an investigation. The FOIA request names individual department employees who would have responsibilities in the areas discussed in the letter.

Given all the media interest in the allegations of Russian interference with U.S. elections, shouldn’t there be at least as much focus and a…