The headline on the website Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when its precursor served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”

The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.

But the untold story behind that story is one that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.

At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Frank Giustra, right, a mining financier, has donated $31.3 million to the foundation run by former President Bill Clinton, left. Credit Joaquin Sarmiento/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company’s assets to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show.

The New York Times’s examination of the Uranium One deal is based on dozens of interviews, as well as a review of public records and securities filings in Canada, Russia and the United States. Some of the connections between Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation were unearthed by Peter Schweizer, a former fellow at the right-leaning Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming book “Clinton Cash.” Mr. Schweizer provided a preview of material in the book to The Times, which scrutinized his information and built upon it with its own reporting.

Whether the donations played any role in the approval of the uranium deal is unknown. But the episode underscores the special ethical challenges presented by the Clinton Foundation, headed by a former president who relied heavily on foreign cash to accumulate $250 million in assets even as his wife helped steer American foreign policy as secretary of state, presiding over decisions with the potential to benefit the foundation’s donors.

In a statement, Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, said no one “has ever produced a shred of evidence supporting the theory that Hillary Clinton ever took action as secretary of state to support the interests of donors to the Clinton Foundation.” He emphasized that multiple United States agencies, as well as the Canadian government, had signed off on the deal and that, in general, such matters were handled at a level below the secretary. “To suggest the State Department, under then-Secretary Clinton, exerted undue influence in the U.S. government’s review of the sale of Uranium One is utterly baseless,” he added.

American political campaigns are barred from accepting foreign donations. But foreigners may give to foundations in the United States. In the days since Mrs. Clinton announced her candidacy for president, the Clinton Foundation has announced changes meant to quell longstanding concerns about potential conflicts of interest in such donations; it has limited donations from foreign governments, with many, like Russia’s, barred from giving to all but its health care initiatives. That policy stops short of Mrs. Clinton’s agreement with the Obama administration, which prohibited all foreign government donations while she served as the nation’s top diplomat.

Either way, the Uranium One deal highlights the limits of such prohibitions. The foundation will continue to accept contributions from foreign sources whose interests, like Uranium One’s, may overlap with those of foreign governments, some of which may be at odds with the United States.

When the Uranium One deal was approved, the geopolitical backdrop was far different from today’s. The Obama administration was seeking to “reset” strained relations with Russia. The deal was strategically important to Mr. Putin, who shortly after the Americans gave their blessing sat down for a staged interview with Rosatom’s chief executive, Sergei Kiriyenko. “Few could have imagined in the past that we would own 20 percent of U.S. reserves,” Mr. Kiriyenko told Mr. Putin.

Now, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Ukraine, the Moscow-Washington relationship is devolving toward Cold War levels, a point several experts made in evaluating a deal so beneficial to Mr. Putin, a man known to use energy resources to project power around the world.

“Should we be concerned? Absolutely,” said Michael McFaul, who served under Mrs. Clinton as the American ambassador to Russia but said he had been unaware of the Uranium One deal until asked about it. “Do we want Putin to have a monopoly on this? Of course we don’t. We don’t want to be dependent on Putin for anything in this climate.”

The path to a Russian acquisition of American uranium deposits began in 2005 in Kazakhstan, where the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra orchestrated his first big uranium deal, with Mr. Clinton at his side.

The two men had flown aboard Mr. Giustra’s private jet to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where they dined with the authoritarian president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. Mr. Clinton handed the Kazakh president a propaganda coup when he expressed support for Mr. Nazarbayev’s bid to head an international elections monitoring group, undercutting American foreign policy and criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, his wife, then a senator.

Within days of the visit, Mr. Giustra’s fledgling company, UrAsia Energy Ltd., signed a preliminary deal giving it stakes in three uranium mines controlled by the state-run uranium agency Kazatomprom.

Ian Telfer was chairman of Uranium One and made large donations to the Clinton Foundation. Credit Galit Rodan/Bloomberg, via Getty Image

If the Kazakh deal was a major victory, UrAsia did not wait long before resuming the hunt. In 2007, it merged with Uranium One, a South African company with assets in Africa and Australia, in what was described as a $3.5 billion transaction. The new company, which kept the Uranium One name, was controlled by UrAsia investors including Ian Telfer, a Canadian who became chairman. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Giustra, whose personal stake in the deal was estimated at about $45 million, said he sold his stake in 2007.

Soon, Uranium One began to snap up companies with assets in the United States. In April 2007, it announced the purchase of a uranium mill in Utah and more than 38,000 acres of uranium exploration properties in four Western states, followed quickly by the acquisition of the Energy Metals Corporation and its uranium holdings in Wyoming, Texas and Utah. That deal made clear that Uranium One was intent on becoming “a powerhouse in the United States uranium sector with the potential to become the domestic supplier of choice for U.S. utilities,” the company declared.

Still, the company’s story was hardly front-page news in the United States — until early 2008, in the midst of Mrs. Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, when The Times published an article revealing the 2005 trip’s link to Mr. Giustra’s Kazakhstan mining deal. It also reported that several months later, Mr. Giustra had donated $31.3 million to Mr. Clinton’s foundation.

(In a statement issued after this article appeared online, Mr. Giustra said he was “extremely proud” of his charitable work with Mr. Clinton, and he urged the media to focus on poverty, health care and “the real challenges of the world.”)

Though the 2008 article quoted the former head of Kazatomprom, Moukhtar Dzhakishev, as saying that the deal required government approval and was discussed at a dinner with the president, Mr. Giustra insisted that it was a private transaction, with no need for Mr. Clinton’s influence with Kazakh officials. He described his relationship with Mr. Clinton as motivated solely by a shared interest in philanthropy.

As if to underscore the point, five months later Mr. Giustra held a fund-raiser for the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, a project aimed at fostering progressive environmental and labor practices in the natural resources industry, to which he had pledged $100 million. The star-studded gala, at a conference center in Toronto, featured performances by Elton John and Shakira and celebrities like Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Robin Williams encouraging contributions from the many so-called F.O.F.s — Friends of Frank — in attendance, among them Mr. Telfer. In all, the evening generated $16 million in pledges, according to an article in The Globe and Mail.

“None of this would have been possible if Frank Giustra didn’t have a remarkable combination of caring and modesty, of vision and energy and iron determination,” Mr. Clinton told those gathered, adding: “I love this guy, and you should, too.”

But what had been a string of successes was about to hit a speed bump.

Arrest and Progress

By June 2009, a little over a year after the star-studded evening in Toronto, Uranium One’s stock was in free-fall, down 40 percent. Mr. Dzhakishev, the head of Kazatomprom, had just been arrested on charges that he illegally sold uranium deposits to foreign companies, including at least some of those won by Mr. Giustra’s UrAsia and now owned by Uranium One.

Publicly, the company tried to reassure shareholders. Its chief executive, Jean Nortier, issued a confident statement calling the situation a “complete misunderstanding.” He also contradicted Mr. Giustra’s contention that the uranium deal had not required government blessing. “When you do a transaction in Kazakhstan, you need the government’s approval,” he said, adding that UrAsia had indeed received that approval.

But privately, Uranium One officials were worried they could lose their joint mining ventures. American diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks also reflect concerns that Mr. Dzhakishev’s arrest was part of a Russian power play for control of Kazakh uranium assets.

At the time, Russia was already eying a stake in Uranium One, Rosatom company documents show. Rosatom officials say they were seeking to acquire mines around the world because Russia lacks sufficient domestic reserves to meet its own industry needs.

It was against this backdrop that the Vancouver-based Uranium One pressed the American Embassy in Kazakhstan, as well as Canadian diplomats, to take up its cause with Kazakh officials, according to the American cables.

“We want more than a statement to the press,” Paul Clarke, a Uranium One executive vice president, told the embassy’s energy officer on June 10, the officer reported in a cable. “That is simply chitchat.” What the company needed, Mr. Clarke said, was official written confirmation that the licenses were valid.

The American Embassy ultimately reported to the secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton. Though the Clarke cable was copied to her, it was given wide circulation, and it is unclear if she would have read it; the Clinton campaign did not address questions about the cable.

What is clear is that the embassy acted, with the cables showing that the energy officer met with Kazakh officials to discuss the issue on June 10 and 11.

Three days later, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rosatom completed a deal for 17 percent of Uranium One. And within a year, the Russian government substantially upped the ante, with a generous offer to shareholders that would give it a 51 percent controlling stake. But first, Uranium One had to get the American government to sign off on the deal.

The Power to Say No

When a company controlled by the Chinese government sought a 51 percent stake in a tiny Nevada gold mining operation in 2009, it set off a secretive review process in Washington, where officials raised concerns primarily about the mine’s proximity to a military installation, but also about the potential for minerals at the site, including uranium, to come under Chinese control. The officials killed the deal.

Such is the power of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The committee comprises some of the most powerful members of the cabinet, including the attorney general, the secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce and Energy, and the secretary of state. They are charged with reviewing any deal that could result in foreign control of an American business or asset deemed important to national security.

The national security issue at stake in the Uranium One deal was not primarily about nuclear weapons proliferation; the United States and Russia had for years cooperated on that front, with Russia sending enriched fuel from decommissioned warheads to be used in American nuclear power plants in return for raw uranium.

Instead, it concerned American dependence on foreign uranium sources. While the United States gets one-fifth of its electrical power from nuclear plants, it produces only around 20 percent of the uranium it needs, and most plants have only 18 to 36 months of reserves, according to Marin Katusa, author of “The Colder War: How the Global Energy Trade Slipped From America’s Grasp.”

“The Russians are easily winning the uranium war, and nobody’s talking about it,” said Mr. Katusa, who explores the implications of the Uranium One deal in his book. “It’s not just a domestic issue but a foreign policy issue, too.”

When ARMZ, an arm of Rosatom, took its first 17 percent stake in Uranium One in 2009, the two parties signed an agreement, found in securities filings, to seek the foreign investment committee’s review. But it was the 2010 deal, giving the Russians a controlling 51 percent stake, that set off alarm bells. Four members of the House of Representatives signed a letter expressing concern. Two more began pushing legislation to kill the deal.

Senator John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming, where Uranium One’s largest American operation was, wrote to President Obama, saying the deal “would give the Russian government control over a sizable portion of America’s uranium production capacity.”

“Equally alarming,” Mr. Barrasso added, “this sale gives ARMZ a significant stake in uranium mines in Kazakhstan.”

Uranium One’s shareholders were also alarmed, and were “afraid of Rosatom as a Russian state giant,” Sergei Novikov, a company spokesman, recalled in an interview. He said Rosatom’s chief, Mr. Kiriyenko, sought to reassure Uranium One investors, promising that Rosatom would not break up the company and would keep the same management, including Mr. Telfer, the chairman. Another Rosatom official said publicly that it did not intend to increase its investment beyond 51 percent, and that it envisioned keeping Uranium One a public company

American nuclear officials, too, seemed eager to assuage fears. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote to Mr. Barrasso assuring him that American uranium would be preserved for domestic use, regardless of who owned it.

“In order to export uranium from the United States, Uranium One Inc. or ARMZ would need to apply for and obtain a specific NRC license authorizing the export of uranium for use as reactor fuel,” the letter said.

Still, the ultimate authority to approve or reject the Russian acquisition rested with the cabinet officials on the foreign investment committee, including Mrs. Clinton — whose husband was collecting millions in donations from people associated with Uranium One.

Undisclosed Donations

Before Mrs. Clinton could assume her post as secretary of state, the White House demanded that she sign a memorandum of understanding placing limits on the activities of her husband’s foundation. To avoid the perception of conflicts of interest, beyond the ban on foreign government donations, the foundation was required to publicly disclose all contributors.

To judge from those disclosures — which list the contributions in ranges rather than precise amounts — the only Uranium One official to give to the Clinton Foundation was Mr. Telfer, the chairman, and the amount was relatively small: no more than $250,000, and that was in 2007, before talk of a Rosatom deal began percolating.

But a review of tax records in Canada, where Mr. Telfer has a family charity called the Fernwood Foundation, shows that he donated millions of dollars more, during and after the critical time when the foreign investment committee was reviewing his deal with the Russians. With the Russians offering a special dividend, shareholders like Mr. Telfer stood to profit.

His donations through the Fernwood Foundation included $1 million reported in 2009, the year his company appealed to the American Embassy to help it keep its mines in Kazakhstan; $250,000 in 2010, the year the Russians sought majority control; as well as $600,000 in 2011 and $500,000 in 2012. Mr. Telfer said that his donations had nothing to do with his business dealings, and that he had never discussed Uranium One with Mr. or Mrs. Clinton. He said he had given the money because he wanted to support Mr. Giustra’s charitable endeavors with Mr. Clinton. “Frank and I have been friends and business partners for almost 20 years,” he said.

The Clinton campaign left it to the foundation to reply to questions about the Fernwood donations; the foundation did not provide a response.

Mr. Telfer’s undisclosed donations came in addition to between $1.3 million and $5.6 million in contributions, which were reported, from a constellation of people with ties to Uranium One or UrAsia, the company that originally acquired Uranium One’s most valuable asset: the Kazakh mines. Without those assets, the Russians would have had no interest in the deal: “It wasn’t the goal to buy the Wyoming mines. The goal was to acquire the Kazakh assets, which are very good,” Mr. Novikov, the Rosatom spokesman, said in an interview.

Amid this influx of Uranium One-connected money, Mr. Clinton was invited to speak in Moscow in June 2010, the same month Rosatom struck its deal for a majority stake in Uranium One.

The $500,000 fee — among Mr. Clinton’s highest — was paid by Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank with ties to the Kremlin that has invited world leaders, including Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, to speak at its investor conferences.

Renaissance Capital analysts talked up Uranium One’s stock, assigning it a “buy” rating and saying in a July 2010 research report that it was “the best play” in the uranium markets. In addition, Renaissance Capital turned up that same year as a major donor, along with Mr. Giustra and several companies linked to Uranium One or UrAsia, to a small medical charity in Colorado run by a friend of Mr. Giustra’s. In a newsletter to supporters, the friend credited Mr. Giustra with helping get donations from “businesses around the world.”

Renaissance Capital would not comment on the genesis of Mr. Clinton’s speech to an audience that included leading Russian officials, or on whether it was connected to the Rosatom deal. According to a Russian government news service, Mr. Putin personally thanked Mr. Clinton for speaking.

A person with knowledge of the Clinton Foundation’s fund-raising operation, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about it, said that for many people, the hope is that money will in fact buy influence: “Why do you think they are doing it — because they love them?” But whether it actually does is another question. And in this case, there were broader geopolitical pressures that likely came into play as the United States considered whether to approve the Rosatom-Uranium One deal.

Diplomatic Considerations

If doing business with Rosatom was good for those in the Uranium One deal, engaging with Russia was also a priority of the incoming Obama administration, which was hoping for a new era of cooperation as Mr. Putin relinquished the presidency — if only for a term — to Dmitri A. Medvedev.

“The assumption was we could engage Russia to further core U.S. national security interests,” said Mr. McFaul, the former ambassador.

It started out well. The two countries made progress on nuclear proliferation issues, and expanded use of Russian territory to resupply American forces in Afghanistan. Keeping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was among the United States’ top priorities, and in June 2010 Russia signed off on a United Nations resolution imposing tough new sanctions on that country.

Two months later, the deal giving ARMZ a controlling stake in Uranium One was submitted to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States for review. Because of the secrecy surrounding the process, it is hard to know whether the participants weighed the desire to improve bilateral relations against the potential risks of allowing the Russian government control over the biggest uranium producer in the United States. The deal was ultimately approved in October, following what two people involved in securing the approval said had been a relatively smooth process.

Not all of the committee’s decisions are personally debated by the agency heads themselves; in less controversial cases, deputy or assistant secretaries may sign off. But experts and former committee members say Russia’s interest in Uranium One and its American uranium reserves seemed to warrant attention at the highest levels.

“This deal had generated press, it had captured the attention of Congress and it was strategically important,” said Richard Russell, who served on the committee during the George W. Bush administration. “When I was there invariably any one of those conditions would cause this to get pushed way up the chain, and here you had all three.”

And Mrs. Clinton brought a reputation for hawkishness to the process; as a senator, she was a vocal critic of the committee’s approval of a deal that would have transferred the management of major American seaports to a company based in the United Arab Emirates, and as a presidential candidate she had advocated legislation to strengthen the process.

The Clinton campaign spokesman, Mr. Fallon, said that in general, these matters did not rise to the secretary’s level. He would not comment on whether Mrs. Clinton had been briefed on the matter, but he gave The Times a statement from the former assistant secretary assigned to the foreign investment committee at the time, Jose Fernandez. While not addressing the specifics of the Uranium One deal, Mr. Fernandez said, “Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any C.F.I.U.S. matter.”

Mr. Fallon also noted that if any agency had raised national security concerns about the Uranium One deal, it could have taken them directly to the president.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the State Department’s director of policy planning at the time, said she was unaware of the transaction — or the extent to which it made Russia a dominant uranium supplier. But speaking generally, she urged caution in evaluating its wisdom in hindsight.

“Russia was not a country we took lightly at the time or thought was cuddly,” she said. “But it wasn’t the adversary it is today.”

That renewed adversarial relationship has raised concerns about European dependency on Russian energy resources, including nuclear fuel. The unease reaches beyond diplomatic circles. In Wyoming, where Uranium One equipment is scattered across his 35,000-acre ranch, John Christensen is frustrated that repeated changes in corporate ownership over the years led to French, South African, Canadian and, finally, Russian control over mining rights on his property.

“I hate to see a foreign government own mining rights here in the United States,” he said. “I don’t think that should happen.”

Mr. Christensen, 65, noted that despite assurances by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that uranium could not leave the country without Uranium One or ARMZ obtaining an export license — which they do not have — yellowcake from his property was routinely packed into drums and trucked off to a processing plant in Canada.

Asked about that, the commission confirmed that Uranium One has, in fact, shipped yellowcake to Canada even though it does not have an export license. Instead, the transport company doing the shipping, RSB Logistic Services, has the license. A commission spokesman said that “to the best of our knowledge” most of the uranium sent to Canada for processing was returned for use in the United States. A Uranium One spokeswoman, Donna Wichers, said 25 percent had gone to Western Europe and Japan. At the moment, with the uranium market in a downturn, nothing is being shipped from the Wyoming mines.

The “no export” assurance given at the time of the Rosatom deal is not the only one that turned out to be less than it seemed. Despite pledges to the contrary, Uranium One was delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange and taken private. As of 2013, Rosatom’s subsidiary, ARMZ, owned 100 percent of it.

By Jo Becker and Mike McIntire.  Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting. Sarah Cohen contributed research.

Obama only mentions Christians to lecture them, rather than defend them from persecution.

What do you call it when 12 men are drowned at sea for praying to Jesus?

Answer: Religious persecution.

Yet, when a throng of Muslims threw a dozen Christians overboard a migrant ship traveling from Libya to Italy, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi missed the opportunity to label it as such. Standing next to President Obama at their joint news conference Friday, Renzi dismissed it as a one-off event and said, “The problem is not a problem of (a) clash of religions.”

While the prime minister plunged his head into the sand, Italian authorities arrested and charged the Muslim migrants with “multiple aggravated murder motivated by religious hate,” according to the BBC.

As Renzi was questioned about the incident, Obama was mute on the killings. He failed to interject any sense of outrage or even tepid concern for the targeting of Christians for their faith. If a Christian mob on a ship bound for Italy threw 12 Muslims to their death for praying to Allah, does anyone think the president would have been so disinterested? When three North Carolina Muslims were gunned down by a virulent atheist, Obama rightly spoke out against the horrifying killings. But he just can’t seem to find any passion for the mass persecution of Middle Eastern Christians or the eradication of Christianity from its birthplace.

Religious persecution of Christians is rampant worldwide, as Pew has noted, but nowhere is it more prevalent than in the Middle East and Northern Africa, where followers of Jesus are the targets of religious cleansing. Pope Francis has repeatedly decried the persecution and begged the world for help, but it has had little impact. Western leaders — including Obama — will be remembered for their near silence as this human rights tragedy unfolded. The president’s mumblings about the atrocities visited upon Christians (usually extracted after public outcry over his silence) are few and far between. And it will be hard to forget his lecturing of Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast about the centuries-old Crusades while Middle Eastern Christians were at that moment being harassed, driven from their homes, tortured and murdered for their faith.

A week and a half after Obama’s National Prayer Breakfast speech, 21 Coptic Christians were beheaded for being “people of the cross.” Seven of the victims were former students of my friend and hero “Mama” Maggie Gobran, known as the “Mother Theresa of Cairo” for her work with the poorest of the poor. She told me these dear men grew up in rural Upper Egypt and had gone to Libya seeking work to support their families. They died with dignity as they called out to their God, while the cowardly murderers masked their faces.

Rather than hectoring Christians about their ancestors’ misdeeds, Obama should honor these men and the countless Middle Eastern Christians persecuted before them.

Monday, there was more horrifying news: ISIL terrorists released a video purporting to show more religiously motivated killing. According to CNN, before beheading and shooting two groups of Christians in Libya, a speaker said, “The Islamic State has offered the Christian community (the opportunity to convert to Islam or pay a tax for being Christian) many times and set a deadline for this, but the Christians never cooperated.”

So they kill them.

Indeed, let’s talk more about the Crusades.

Kirsten Powers writes weekly for USA TODAY and is author of the upcoming The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign is just one week out of the gate, but already a supposedly bombshell book threatens to rock her candidacy.

The New York Times reported Monday that the book, set for release on May 5, will make new claims about donations to the Clinton Foundation by foreign donors. Specifically, the book reportedly claims foreign entities that donated to the foundation — and that gave former President Bill Clinton high-dollar speaking fees — in turn received favors from the Clinton State Department.

Author Peter Schweizer reportedly claims to have found a “pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable U.S. policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds.”

According to the Times, which got an advance copy of the book, Schweizer’s examples include a Colombia free-trade agreement that helped a major donor and projects in the wake of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

A Clinton spokesman told the Times the book is “twisting previously known facts into absurd conspiracy theories.”

The book, “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” could nevertheless mark the second major political headache for Clinton’s budding campaign. Weeks before she announced her candidacy, reports surfaced that she exclusively used a personal email account, and server, while secretary of state. Under pressure, Clinton held a press conference to explain her actions, but transparency questions continue to loom over her bid after she announced it a week ago.

Critics have long questioned, as well, the family foundation’s history of foreign donations and whether donors got any benefits in return. Republicans are eagerly anticipating the release of the book.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., himself a 2016 White House candidate, claimed earlier this month that “big news” is coming on the foundation.

“I think there are things that went on at the Clinton Foundation that are going to shock people,” he said, in response to a question from Fox News in New Hampshire. “And I think they’re going to make people question whether or not she ought to run for president.”

According to the Times, he and other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were briefed on the book’s contents.

FoxNews.com

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday officially announced her 2016 presidential campaign, ending months of speculation over her political plans and immediately elevating her as a target for the field of Republican contenders.

Clinton made the announcement in a YouTube video in which she says: “Everybody needs a champion. And I want to be that champion.”

The roughly two-minute video begins by showing a cross-section of Americans working to get ahead before Clinton says: “I’m doing something, too. I’m running for president.”

The 2016 White House winner will assuredly need to appeal to middle-class Americans and win their votes. And Clinton wasted little time making her pitch. “Americans have fought back from tough economic times,” she says in the video. “But the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.”

Clinton later released a similar, more condensed message on Twitter.

The former first lady is seeking the presidency for a second time, after losing the party nomination to then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008.

The 67-year-old Clinton has been the clear Democratic front-runner since speculation started last year about her potential candidacy, and her announcement makes her the only Democrat so far to officially start a 2016 White House campaign. A victory next year would make Clinton the United States’ first female president.

Clinton in 2000 won a U.S. Senate seat in New York, and in 2009 was appointed secretary of state, serving four years.

On Saturday, the group We Are Hillary for America circulated a memo to supporters that organizers called “guiding principles.” But the memo also provided some insight into to the underpinnings of a Clinton campaign. “Give every family, every small business and every American a path to lasting prosperity by electing Hillary Clinton the next president of the United States,” the memo in part stated.

Clinton now heads this week to key, early-voting states, starting with Iowa on Tuesday, then onto New Hampshire.

She has signaled that she intends to make a major push in the Iowa caucuses, won by Obama in 2008. Her team has hired a former top aide to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to lead her Iowa campaign.

Her ties to New Hampshire are much stronger. State Democrats remember Bill Clinton’s surprising second-place finish in the 1992 primary that helped him overcome charges of draft dodging and womanizing. Hillary Clinton surprised Obama by winning the 2008 New Hampshire primary.

Clinton has faced sharp criticism in recent weeks, after news reports that as secretary of state she used a private server and emails for official business, then made available only about half of the roughly 60,000 messages, permanently deleting those she considered personal.

Still, a Fox News poll released March 26 shows Clinton with support from 49 percent of early voters, numbers similar to those in other polls for roughly the past five months.

The response to Clinton’s announcement was quick and widespread with Democratic and Republican lawmakers, candidates and political groups eager to get in on the biggest news so far in the early 2016 election cycle.

“Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state resulted in an America that is less safe and trusted abroad,” said Our American Revival, a political action committee for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate. “We must stand together and speak out against Hillary Clinton’s dangerous liberal record.”

Carly Fiorina, another potential 2016 GOP candidate and a former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, release her own video.

“Hillary Clinton’s a highly intelligent woman, hard-working, she’s dedicated her life to public service,” Fiorina says the video that she posted on Facebook. “But unfortunately, she does not have a track record of accomplishment or transparency. … She’s not the woman for the White House.”

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul, who last week officially announced his 2016 bid, became the first candidate to release an attack ad on another official candidate with a video that in part says: “Hillary Clinton represents the worst of the Washington machine.”

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Clinton supporter who is seriously considering a bid for the Democratic nomination, said through a spokeswoman that he will make his decision “regardless of what other people decide.”

“He’s heard from Democrats that they are looking for someone who offers strong progressive values, new leadership and the experience of getting real results,” spokeswoman Lis Smith said. “The Democratic Party will benefit from a robust issues debate … should Governor O’Malley decide to enter the race.”

Democratic National Committee Chairman and Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz welcomed Clinton as the first official candidate seeking the party’s 2016 presidential nomination. But she also suggested Clinton would have to work for the mantle.

“We expect a competitive primary for the Democratic nomination,” Wasserman Schultz said. “I look forward to the contributions that Secretary Clinton and all of our eventual candidates will bring to this debate.”

As first lady to President Bill Clinton during the 1990s, she was a driving figure in a failed health care overhaul and lived through multiple ethics investigations and her husband’s impeachment.

Clinton graduated from Wellesley College and Yale Law School.

In Arkansas, she was a lawyer at a top firm while Bill Clinton was governor. She advised her husband after he won the White House in 1992. In the Senate, she struck a bipartisan tone at times. Her Senate vote for the 2002 Iraq invasion became a point of contention in 2008; Obama had spoken out against the “dumb war.” At the State Department, she was a hawkish member of Obama’s national security team. She helped set the foundation for nuclear talks with Iran.

Clinton is the daughter of a small-business owner and homemaker, and grew up in suburban Chicago. As a college senior, Clinton delivered a 1969 commencement speech that earned national attention. The Clintons met at Yale. After working as a child advocate, Clinton followed her future husband back to Arkansas, where he launched his political career. The couple’s 35-year-old daughter, Chelsea Clinton, gave birth to her first child, Charlotte, in September.

A 1995 address in Beijing and her final campaign event in 2008 are signature moments. As first lady, Clinton declared in a speech at a U.N. conference on women that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.”

The speech challenged human rights abuses of women and helped set the tone for Clinton’s work years later in the State Department.

Her critics remember her for blaming her husband’s scandals on a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Clinton wrote “Hard Choices,” about her time as secretary of state, and promoted the book around the country in 2014. The book generated mediocre sales and Clinton stumbled at times during the book tour, saying in one interview that she and her husband were “dead broke” when they left the White House.

While they faced large legal bills from the Whitewater investigation, the couple made millions after Bill Clinton’s presidency; the comments were considered tone-deaf. Clinton already was a publishing powerhouse at that point.

During her husband’s presidency, she released “It Takes a Village” in 1996, a book that discussed her work in child advocacy and steps to help children become productive adults.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The jury has reached a verdict in the federal death penalty trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Reports are circulating that the jury has found the Islamic Extremist guilty.

The verdict was reached Wednesday afternoon after a little over 12 hours of deliberations over two days.

Tsarnaev’s lawyers admitted he participated in the bombings, but said his now-dead older brother was the driving force behind the 2013 deadly attack.

The jury was asked to decide 30 charges against Tsarnaev, including using a weapon of mass destruction.

If the jury convicts Tsarnaev, it will move on to a second phase of the trial to decide whether he should receive the death penalty or spend the rest of his life in prison.

Three people were killed and more than 260 were injured when twin pressure-cooker bombs exploded near the marathon finish line on April 15, 2013.

PUBLIUS, FoxNews.com, Associated Press contributed to this report.

A federal judge has issued a scathing rebuke to lawyers for the Obama administration in a case involving the president’s unilateral immigration action. In an order issued Tuesday night, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, who had put a temporary hold on the action, not only refused to lift the hold — he also came very near to accusing administration lawyers of flat-out lying to him.

The administration’s assertions in the immigration case have been “misleading,” “troublesome,” and “belied by the facts,” Hanen wrote. “Any number of federal judges, given this misconduct, would consider striking the government’s pleadings.” Doing so would effectively end the case altogether, and Hanen wrote that he had decided not to take that action because the issues at stake are of great national importance.

The case was brought by the attorneys general of 26 states seeking to stop the president’s decision to grant quasi-legal status and work permits to millions of illegal immigrants. The controversy that angered Judge Hanen involved the timing of the president’s new measures. Administration lawyers told the court that the first part of the president’s action, expansion of DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, was scheduled to begin Feb. 18, 2015. The second part, known as DAPA, or Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, was scheduled to go into effect in mid-May.

In court arguments, Hanen specifically asked the administration lawyers whether the Department of Homeland Security would begin implementing DACA before Feb. 18. They said no. Hanen therefore issued an injunction temporarily stopping DACA on Feb. 16, two days before it was scheduled to go into effect. At that point, Hanen thought he had stopped things while he considered the larger issues of the lawsuit, which focus on the constitutionality of Obama’s action.

The judge was stunned when, on March 3, administration lawyers filed a “Defendant’s Advisory” admitting that the administration had begun implementing the expanded DACA program back in November, and had in fact granted new protections and work permits to “approximately 100,000 people” by the time administration lawyers told the judge nothing was happening.

An angry Hanen ordered the government to explain why he should not punish the administration for misleading him. The two sides argued the issue in a hearing last month, and now Hanen has issued an order refusing to lift the stay and declaring the administration’s actions “misleading.”

In the order, Hanen quotes extensively from the January hearing in which administration lawyers told him the Department of Homeland Security had not yet begun to implement DACA — only to file a “clarification” with the court weeks later. Hanen’s unhappiness is obvious:

Clearly, if a “clarification” on any ongoing actions taken by the DHS was ever necessary, which of course it was, [the January hearing] was the time. Silence here, and then later during the scheduling discussion, was misleading. Whether by ignorance, omission, purposeful misdirection, or because they were misled by their clients, the attorneys for the Government misrepresented the facts. The Court, relying on counsels’ representations, not only gave the Government extra time for its briefing, but it also took February 18, 2015, as the agreed-upon date by which to rule on the motion for a temporary injunction.

Hanen’s anger is apparent throughout the order. One government assertion “is belied by the facts.” A government explanation is “troublesome.” Omissions from the government’s filings are “mysterious.” And then this:

Section 3.3 of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct and Section 3.03 of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct…require a lawyer to act with complete candor in his or her dealings with the Court. Under these rules of conduct, a lawyer must be completely truthful and forthright in making representations to the Court. Fabrications, misstatements, half-truths, artful omissions, and the failure to correct misstatements may be acceptable, albeit lamentable, in other aspects of life; but in the courtroom, when an attorney knows that both the Court and the other side are relying on complete frankness, such conduct is unacceptable.

“Any number of federal judges, given this misconduct, would consider striking the Government’s pleadings,” Hanen concluded. Hanen said he would be tempted to do the same in this case, were the subject not so important. “The issues at stake here have national significance and deserve to be fully considered on the merits by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and, in all probability, the Supreme Court of the United States,” Hanen wrote. Throwing the case out now would “not only penalize those with an interest in the outcome, but would more importantly penalize the country, which needs and deserves a resolution on the merits.”

By Byron York 

Because of all the buzz in the press lately about religious freedoms coming under attack, there has been a great deal of discussion about the role of religion in our nation.

Barack Hussein Obama has declared that “America is no longer a Christian nation,” and in our article of May 28, 2012 Obama vs. Catholic Church, we outlined how one of his first acts as POTUS was to insist that the gold “IHS” monograms for the name of Christ be covered up with black painted plywood in Gaston Hall at the Catholic church’s Georgetown University, where he delivered a speech on economics.

We see on national television, in the movies, magazines and other media, on left-leaning news programs, newspapers and the blogs and social networks a hardening stance against Christianity in America. Even our political leaders who claim a Christian background not only embrace practices and policies that are clearly against the teachings of the Bible, but publicly belittle and berate anyone who endorses them—or endorses Jesus Christ or His Father, the God of Israel.

The Democratic Party, and indeed, many if not most liberals and progressives in this country have adopted an anti-God, anti-Christian approach to public life, and in a growing number of cases, their personal lives. See, e.g., our article of September 9, 2012 DNC Boos God. The support for the State of Israel has waned with the decline of Christianity in this country—leaving American Jewish families to wonder if they’ve been abandoned by the Democratic Party that they so willingly embraced.

Antichrist is a personage mentioned in the New Testament of the Bible on a few occasions; but also described is a “Spirit of Antichrist,” illustrated by John the Apostle in 1 John 4 thus:

3 And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

The Apostle further elaborates the principle of the Spirit of Antichrist in 2 John 1, explaining:

7 For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.

Indeed, we are deluged in a sea of deceivers. We live in that Orwellian world where good is bad and bad is good, where our universities churn out “spin doctors” by the millions, whose only purpose is to make wickedness appear to be goodness through “tolerance” and “inclusion,” and to make enslavement appear as liberty through taxation, regulation and the public dole. They belly up to news desks and slither on couches looking into television cameras and lie about everything with a sophistry that oozes effortlessly from their filthy lips, and assail anyone who dares speak a word of decency or honesty.

Yes, the Spirit of Antichrist has doubtless overtaken our nation’s media, government, education and many other institutions. Deceivers rule the country. It has also overtaken the rest of the world, where hundreds of innocents are murdered every day for nothing more than professing that Jesus is the Christ. It was all foretold, and we must accept its eventuality and reality.

The only questions that remain are: a) which team’s jersey do you wear? and b) is the person of Antichrist already among us, arising on the scene?

Publius

The Justice Department has declined to pursue contempt of Congress charges against Lois Lerner for refusing to testify about her role at the IRS in the targeting of conservative groups.

The department announced the decision in a letter Tuesday to House Speaker John Boehner, whose Republican-controlled chamber made the request to prosecute, after holding Lerner in contempt for refusing to testify at committee hearings.

“Once again, the Obama administration has tried to sweep IRS targeting of taxpayers for their political beliefs under the rug,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel told FoxNews.com.

Lerner asserted her Fifth Amendment privilege, which allows people to not testify against themselves, during a May 2013 hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and then again at a March 2014 hearing.

However, House Republicans argued Lerner waived the privilege with an opening statement she made before the committee in the May 2013 appearance. All the chamber’s Republican members and six Democrats officially voted in May 2014 to hold Lerner in contempt.

Ron Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said in the seven-page letter that federal prosecutors concluded Lerner did not waive her privilege because she made “only general claims of innocence” during the opening statement.

“Thus, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution would provide Ms. Lerner with an absolute defense should be prosecuted … for her refusal to testify,” wrote Machen, who was appointed to the U.S. attorney post by President Obama and left for private practice Wednesday, one day after sending the letter.

He also said he will not refer the case to a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute.

Lerner ran the IRS’s exempt organizations unit when Tea Party and other nonprofit groups with conservative names applying for tax-exempt status were targeted for additional auditing from April 2010 to April 2012.

She was placed on administrative leave in May 2013 and retired four months later.

“I have not done anything wrong,” Lerner said in her 2013 opening statement. “I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations. And I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.”

The IRS scandal broke in May 2013 when Lerner said at an American Bar Association gathering and during a follow-up conference call with reporters there was a “very big uptick” in nonprofit applications and that the vetting process was limited to the agency’s Cincinnati office.

However, the extent to which the Obama administration knew about the targeting, beyond Lerner’s unit in Washington, remains unclear in part because, she says, her computer crashed and emails were lost.

Lerner attorney William Taylor said he and is client are “gratified but not surprised” by the decision by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“Anyone who takes a serious and impartial look at this issue would conclude that Ms. Lerner did not waive her Fifth Amendment rights.” he said. “It is unfortunate that the majority party in the House put politics before a citizen’s constitutional rights.”

Steel also said the White House still has the opportunity to “do the right thing and appoint a special counsel to examine the IRS’ actions.”

Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan said federal prosecutors made the “wrong” decision.

“As one of his final acts as U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Ronald Machen used his power as a political weapon to undermine the rule of law,” Jordan said. “Machen was legally bound to convene a grand jury, but instead he ignored his obligation and unilaterally decided to ignore the will of the House. … This is wrong, and a great example of why so many Americans distrust their government.”

FoxNews.com

Democrat Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid told a close friend that the injuries he sustained 3 months ago were inflicted by one of the men he was “with” at a gay orgy party in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Recent rumors that Senator Reid was beaten by a mobster when Reid failed to deliver promised political favors forced the Democrat leader to come clean on the source of his injuries.

The “anonymous source” said that Reid has often traveled to exotic locations at taxpayer expense to meet with underage men for “personal” reasons. Another “anonymous source” confirms that Reid has a penchant for burly, hairy men, who “smell like baby apes,” to put it in Reid’s own words.

Another anonymous source says, “Oh, you know that little bitch likes the rough stuff,” referring to Reid’s facial wounds.

Reid, who personally ensured that every piece of legislation sought by Barack Obama was passed in the Senate, may be best remembered in US history for blatant and purposeful lies he told on the Senate Floor, saying that that then presidential candidate Mitt Romney had paid no taxes for 10 years. When asked on CNN about those lies, which were described by CNN as McCarthyism, Reid said that he had no regrets about being a liar, and that his lies kept Romney from winning the election–and that was all that mattered.

Sen. Reid, an admitted liar, and some of his supporters, claim that the statements in this article are untrue. Let Harry Reid prove that he wasn’t beat up by a gay lover in a homosexual orgy, and that he hasn’t traveled to meet with underage men. If it isn’t true, he should be able to prove it.

Happy April 1st ;~)

Relatives of the Coptic Christians beheaded last month by jihadists in Libya – their deaths immortalized in a gory video set against the backdrop of a Mediterranean beach – are facing new extremist-Muslim violence as they seek to build a church to honor their murdered loved ones.

An angry mob in the Upper Egyptian village of Al Our – the proposed site of the church because it was home to 13 of the 21 Christians murdered in the mass “beachfront” decapitation – descended on the community’s current church after the midday Islamic prayer Friday and chanted that they’d never allow construction of the new place of worship to begin, witnesses told Egyptian activists in the U.S.

“There were already cars on fire. People had been bloodied. Stones and bricks had been thrown.” – Mina Abdelmalak, Coptic Christian

Things turned far uglier after nightfall, the witnesses said, as a smaller number of individuals threw Molotov cocktails and stones at the church, injuring several people, and setting cars ablaze, including one that belonged to a relative of one of the victims of the Libyan massacre.

“The police came, but after the attack,” said Mina Abdelmalak, a Coptic Christian living in Washington who is in close contact with the witnesses to the events in Al Our. “There were already cars on fire. People had been bloodied. Stones and bricks had been thrown.”

Some protesters also appeared at the family home of massacre victim Samuel Alham Wilson, but, in a gesture that provided some hope, were chased off by Muslim neighbors when the protesters started throwing stones.

Copts are the native Christians of Egypt, accounting for about 10 percent of the country’s 88 million people.

While they have traditionally faced varying levels of persecution in the mainly Muslim country, the Copts of Al Our — a village on the Nile about 125 miles south of Cairo — have additionally been in deep mourning since the Islamic State released its video Feb. 15 showing the beheading of the Christians — 20 of them Copts, the other from Ghana.

The 13 from Al Our – like their fellow Christians with whom they died – had gone to Libya to seek work because their poverty-stricken home communities offered none or little that was viable.

Abdelmalak told FoxNews.com that the Al Our Copts had sought permission from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to build a church to honor the loss of their loved ones and the others who died with them.

Until recently, such high-level permission was necessary to carry out even minor repairs on churches in Egypt, while similar permissions are not necessary for the building of mosques.

But the Friday attacks on the Copts have driven a further wedge between the village’s Christian and Muslim communities — and are seen as particularly insensitive in light of the losses suffered because of the massacre in Libya.

“This is a classic issue in Egypt,” said Abdelmalak. “Even after you struggle to get permission from the president to build a church, you still have to face the mob, which rejects the idea of having a church built in their neighborhood.”

A Coptic news Facebook page displays pictures of men with facial injuries it says they suffered during the attack on the church.

“I fear that the security [services] will as usual issue a report saying that the situation in the village [is so bad] that [they] will not [now] allow us to build a new church,” says the author of the entry, according to a translation from Arabic.

After receiving presidential permission for construction, the Coptic community bought some land, but local Muslims objected to its positioning at the entrance to the village, according to Daily News Egypt, which publishes in English.

A new location outside the village is now eyed following a meeting between Muslim and Coptic residents that the regional governor brokered.

“This has been effectively imposed on the Coptic residents,” Abdelmalak said. “Dictates to the Christian community are always presented as agreements.”

A report in Arabic in the al-Masry al-Youm newspaper said “tens of residents” protested against the building of the new church, despite presidential approval for the project.

“Witnesses from the village said protesters repeated chants saying, ‘Whatever you do, there won’t be a church on the ground.’”

Abdelmalak said the words in original Arabic rhymed and would have instilled fear by sounding like the aggressive chants heard in European soccer stadiums.

He added that police arrested several members of the mob, but released them a few hours later.

By Steven Edwards

The New Testament of the Bible contains the story of the life of Jesus Christ. Within its pages is recounted how He was crucified on Friday, and his body was hastily removed from the cross and placed into a tomb hewn into the rock, with very little time to appropriately prepare the body for final burial before the Jewish Sabbath started at sunset.

It was early Sunday morning when Mary Magdalene and other women disciples arrived at the tomb to enter the sepulcher and prepare His body. Suddenly there was a great earthquake and an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat on it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow.

The angel said, “Fear not: for I know that you seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is arisen. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.” He then instructed the women to go and tell Jesus’ disciples that He was risen from the dead and that He would go before them to Galilee; and there they would see Him.

The others ran to tell the Apostles what they had seen and heard, but Mary stood at the door of the sepulcher weeping. As she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulcher, and saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head and the other at the feet where the body of Jesus had lain.

They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”

She said, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.”

And when she had spoken she turned back, and saw Jesus standing, but knew not that it was Him. He spoke to her and said, “Woman, why are you crying? Whom do you seek?”

She, supposing him to be the gardener, said, “Sir, if you have borne him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

Jesus said, “Mary.”

Suddenly recognizing His voice, she turned herself and said to him, “Rabboni,” which is to say, Master.

Jesus said to her, “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say to them, ‘I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.’”

What is the significance of this story nearly 2,000 years later? Each of us must decide its implications and importance for ourselves, and apply its lessons in our own lives as we interpret the message for ourselves. John, the Apostle who recorded this version of the incident gives us his own explanation of why he recorded it: “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing, ye might have life through his name.”

PUBLIUS

As the deadline for an agreement draws near, it is looking more and more like the proposed nuclear deal with Iran is a really bad deal.

Not that we didn’t already know this, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned about a bad deal, as has a majority of Congress.

But now comes confirmation of just how one-sided the negotiations have been, straight from a top Iranian official in Switzerland for the nuclear talks who has defected to the West.

“The US negotiating team are mainly there to speak on Iran’s behalf with other members of the 5+1 countries and convince them of a deal,” said Amir Hossein Motaghi, exposing U.S. President Barack Obama’s seeming obsession with reaching any sort of deal with Iran.

Motaghi was a close media aide for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and was the head of his public relations team and social media efforts during his 2013 election campaign.

But now, according to The U.K. Telegraph, Motaghi has sought asylum in Switzerland, denouncing both the government of his home country and the ongoing nuclear talks.

Motaghi said that he quit his job with the Iran Students Correspondents Association, having become disillusioned with his job as a reporter due to the fact that he was only allowed to write about what he was told to write about.

“My conscience would not allow me to carry out my profession in this manner any more,” said Motaghi, as he went on to reveal that a number of so-called “journalists” at the nuclear talks are only there to ensure that all news makes it back to Iran through the proper channels.

This man took a courageous step to expose the ongoing nuclear talks and can likely never return to Tehran, as he would probably be arrested and forgotten in prison.

Hopefully, as more information surrounding the one-sided horribleness of the impending nuclear deal leaks out, it will prove too much.

It seems that the best possible outcome now would be for the talks to fall apart, dashing Obama’s hopes for his legacy moment — proclaiming peace in our time while Iran celebrates nukes in no time.

Senate Republicans are renewing efforts to learn why Huma Abedin, a top assistant to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was allowed to keep working at the agency under a special, part-time status while also being employed at a politically-connected consulting firm.

The new requests are being made by Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, following revelations that both women used a private Internet server and email accounts for State Department correspondence.

Grassley says the earlier requests to the department have been largely ignored, so the new ones have gone to the department’s inspector general and to Secretary of State John Kerry, seeking their involvement.

Grassley’s probe started in 2013, when he requested all communications between Abedin, after she switched from a full-time deputy chief of staff for Clinton to a part-timer, then started working for Teneo, a consulting firm that says it “brings together the disciplines of government and public affairs.”

A July 2013 letter from the department to Grassley, provide by the senator’s office, states Abedin worked full-time from January 2009 to June 2012. It also states Abedin did not list outside employment upon ending her full-time employment and that the department retained her as an adviser-expert at the hourly rate of a SGA GS-15/10.

The most recent available federal documents show the rate as $74.51 with a maximum pay of $155,500 annually.

“A number of conflict-of-interest concerns arise when a government employee is simultaneously being paid by a private company, especially when that company (is) Teneo,” Grassley said in the March 19 letter to Kerry that also raised concerns about Abedin and other department employees appearing to have been “improperly categorized” as special government employees, or SGEs.

Grassley says he specifically wants to know “what steps the department took to ensure that … Abedin’s outside employment with a political-intelligence and corporate-advisory firm did not conflict with her simultaneous employment at the State Department.”

The letter to department Inspector General Steve Linick also questions whether the department’s “excessive” use of SGE designations undermines ethics standards and if Clinton and Abedin’s private emails have the potential to impede the department from fulfilling Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests, over which the upper chamber’s Judiciary Committee has legislative jurisdiction.

Grassley says the department’s answers have so far been “largely unresponsive” and points to a November 2014 response that in part states “an individual may receive an SGE designation if he or she is joining the department from the private sector or is coming from another government position.”

However, Abedin came neither from the private sector nor another government position, Grassley argues.

“She converted from a full-time employee … with seemingly little difference in her job description or responsibilities,” he wrote.

Grassley also argues that the purpose of the SGE program is to help the government get temporary services from people with special knowledge and skills whose principal employment is outside the government.

However, Abedin essentially kept the same job and was subsequently hired by Teneo and the Clinton Global Initiative.

“It is unclear what special knowledge or skills Ms. Abedin possessed that the government could not have easily obtained otherwise from regular government employees,” Grassley wrote.

The State Department says Abedin was an SGE until February 2013, essentially doing the same job that she did as a full-time employee, advising on Clinton’s schedule and travel. It also states she reviewed department ethics guidelines but was allows to work part-time without a new security clearance.

Grassley also says the department’s current use of the SGE designation “blurs the line between public and private sector employees” and that department employees getting full-time salaries for what appears to be part-time work is “especially troubling.”

“The taxpayer deserves to know,” Grassley wrote.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid announced Friday he will retire at the end of his term, closing a long and controversial career in Congress that spanned four decades.

The five-term Nevada Democratic senator announced the decision in a YouTube video message.

Appearing with bruises on his face from a recent at-home exercising accident, Reid, 75, said the injury has allowed him and his family to have a “little down-time,” giving him time to think.

“We’ve got to be more concerned about the country, the Senate, the state of Nevada than us. And as a result of that, I’m not going to run for reelection,” the senator said in the video.

Reid, ribbing his Republican counterpart, added: “My friend, Senator McConnell, don’t be too elated. I’m going to be here for twenty-two months.”

Reid has been a controversial figure, and during his tenure as majority leader was blamed by Republicans for much of the dysfunction in the chamber. Republicans won the majority last fall.

“On the verge of losing his own election and after losing the majority, Senator Harry Reid has decided to hang up his rusty spurs,” National Republican Senatorial Committee Director Ward Baker said in a statement welcoming the announcement.

Praise from fellow Democrats, meanwhile, was effusive.

“Harry is one of the best human beings I’ve ever met,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said. “His character and fundamental decency are at the core of why he’s been such a successful and beloved leader.”

First elected to the Senate in 1986, Reid previously served in the House. He has endured tough re-election battles in 1998, 2004 and most recently 2010 — against Tea Party-backed candidate Sharron Angle.

Among other decisions, Reid will be remembered for allowing the so-called “nuclear option” in late 2013, when he unilaterally moved to change Senate rules to allow a simple majority vote to overcome filibusters for certain nominations. While procedural, the change was significant because it meant the Senate no longer needed the usual 60 votes to advance on controversial nominations.

Republicans quickly gloated that his seat would be a prime pickup opportunity in 2016. GOP figures ranging from Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval to Rep. Joe Heck and others could be interested.

Though Reid plans to serve out his term, his departure also touches off a leadership battle among Democrats. Schumer, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and others would likely be in contention.

Fox News’ Chad Pergram contributed to this report. 

It didn’t take long for the major media to attack Senator Ted Cruz. In fact, they started before his Monday announcement that he’s running for president. On Sunday, “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd teased an interview with California Governor Jerry Brown who said Cruz is “unfit” to be president. His reason? Cruz doesn’t agree there is sufficient scientific evidence proving climate change.

Monday morning, the commentators at MSNBC were after Cruz. One compared him to 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain and his “9-9-9 plan” and another compared him to Sarah Palin. Can’t win. No chance, some of them said.

Next for Cruz is the discovery of a first name he wasn’t given at birth: “extremist.” The media love to label conservatives, but rarely do they label liberals. To them no liberal is “extreme,” or extreme enough.

In our age of identity politics, you might think the media would mention Cruz’s Latino background, but you would think wrongly. Neither have they mentioned the comments by liberal professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, who said this about the Texas Republican Senator: “He had brilliant insights and was clearly among the top students, as revealed by his class responses.” Cruz graduated magna cum laude from the law school.

Cruz’s coming out speech at Liberty University hit all the right notes, especially when he called for elimination of the hated IRS reform of the tax code and stronger support for Israel. He has a great personal story, which will resonate well with the conservative and especially evangelical Christian base.

Can he win the nomination and the general election with less than one full term as a senator? The current one did – twice.

Cal Thomas is America’s most widely syndicated op-ed columnist. His latest book is “What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America” is available in bookstores now. Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com

ESPN host Stephen A. Smith says that if every African-American voted Republican for one election, it would send a strong message to the GOP that their vote is important.

“What I dream is that for one election, just one, every black person in America vote Republican,” Smith said Tuesday during an appearance at Vanderbilt University, according to audio published by Breitbart.com.

During the 2012 presidential election, an overwhelming 93 percent of black voters supported President Barack Obama, while just 6 percent voted for Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

“Black folks in America are telling one party, ‘We don’t give a damn about you,’” Smith said. “They’re telling the other party, ‘You’ve got our vote.’ Therefore, you have labeled yourself ‘disenfranchised’ because one party knows they’ve got you under their thumb, the other party knows they’ll never get you and nobody comes to address your interest[s].”

Smith compared voting with “shopping around” to let store owners know they have to cater to you to win your business.

“We don’t do that with politics, and then we blame white America for our disenfranchisement,” he said.

TV personality Stephen A. Smith attends ESPN the Party at WestWorld of Scottsdale on January 30, 201 …

The “First Take” commentator is known for being outspoken.

Earlier this month, Smith suggested that Philadelphia Eagles coach Chip Kelly was racist for trading away black players like LeSean McCoy, DeSean Jackson and Jeremy Maclin while keeping Riley Cooper, a white receiver who was fined by the team in 2013 for using the N-word at a Kenny Chesney concert.

“Chip Kelly makes decisions over the last couple of years that, dare I say, leave a few brothers feeling uncomfortable,” Smith said. “I think that’s fair to say. I mean, we’re sitting here looking at some of the decisions that Chip Kelly makes, and I’m like, what is up? What’s up with that? I mean, it’s like you’ve got to be his kind of guy, you know? And I’m like, well, Riley Cooper’s your kind of guy?”

Last year, Smith was suspended by ESPN after he made controversial comments suggesting that Janay Palmer, the wife of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, could have done something to prevent the domestic violence incident that was caught on tape in an Atlantic City elevator.

Smith later apologized.

“I made what can only amount to the most egregious error of my career,” Smith said. “My words came across that it is somehow a woman’s fault. This was not my intent. It is not what I was trying to say.”

Related video:

By Dylan Stableford