Free associate the scattershot.

Interesting Twitter thread from "Lycaon" today. It lays out a series of dots (no better use of Twitter than laying out dots) that connects Clintons, various Trump-Russia actors, and money-laundering. I think Lycaon would do well to re-examine Bill Browder's  hole-pocked alibi as "anti-Putin avenger"; however, his discussion of HSBC, presented by a US Senate committee on July 17, 2012 as a money-laundering entity, and James Comey's arrival at HSBC as director on March 4, 2013, and then, seven months later, Comey's appointment as FBI director by President Obama is sequencing worth recalling. 

In between, of course, HSBC paid a giant fine in exchange for a clean bill of health.

In a recent Times of London (MI6?) article describing HSBC/Russian efforts to "silence" Browder, we are reminded that HSBC "was both banker and joint manager to Mr Browder’s Hermitage Fund."

As HSBC took the Senate hot seat on July 17,  2012, the Magnitsky Act was almost simultaneously  introduced on July 19, 2012. 

Nice drag hunting, perhaps? That is, what if Magnitsky Act theft-and-money-laundering stories, as pre-packaged by Browder in the Prevezon case, were just the launch of a false scent trail to take the main pack of hounds in the other direction? Trump-Russia becomes not the beginning, but the unforeseen continuation and escalation of they-ran-that-a-way misdirection -- away from Clinton-Obama-Swamp-Russia.

Lycaon points out elsewhere: "Also likely related is the Clinton and DNC relationship with the Russian mobster Gregori Loutchansky, who was well known for smuggling nuclear materials and was a guest and donor at DNC fundraisers."

Enter the Rodhams brothers, Anthony and Hugh. Turns out that back in 1999, it was mighty hard to pry them out of a dirty business deal linked to Loutchansky -- and what was wrong with the dear man anyway? As GotNews.com reported last year, even though Loutchansky's mob connections had long been identified by the CIA, he was plenty clean enough for Clinton-Gore White House Democratic Party circles (but Trump-Russia...). 

Then this:

Bill Clinton and Al Gore met privately with Loutchansky in 1993 at a Democratic Party dinner and took a photo with him wedged between them. According to court testimony London’s Times reported on in 2001, it was at that event Bill Clinton “had asked the Russian [Loutchansky] to act as an intermediary to make Ukraine a nuclear-free state.”

Really? How all-around interesting, especially Clinton's undoubtedly correct assumption that a  Russian mobster was close to the levers of political power even as the Washington-Moscow troika, Clinton, Gore and Talbott, was funneling US multi-millions to shore up those levers of power, including the central Russian government. The main reason this item caught my eye, though, was that it is also the case that in 2005, then-Senator Obama, whose Senate tenure was notably non-productive, was similarly advancing the demilitarization of Ukraine. 

Here are some details on the Obama Ukraine project from a 2017 post, "Covering His Tracks," (which also includes the classic Obama-Medvedev "flexibility"-Vladimir exchange -- the one John Brennan refused to answer questions about when testifying in Congress last year): 

When Barack Obama was a US Senator, one of the few things he actually did was make a three-day trip to Russia and Eastern Europe in 2005 with Big Globalist Sen. Richard Lugar. Cliff Kincaid describes their "mysterious trip" here. 

A Daily Mail report in 2014 revisits this staggering piece of information: 

As a U.S. senator, Barack Obama won $48 million in federal funding to help Ukraine destroy thousands of tons of guns and ammunition – weapons which are now unavailable to the Ukrainian army as it faces down Russian President Vladimir Putin during his invasion of Crimea.

This synergy between Bill and Barack on Ukraine is noteworthy. If this were a movie, and Clinton and Obama both became "The Red President," they would have both executed plans to help make Ukraine, well, Russian-occupation-ready. Why? To make this territory a stage, or staging ground? After all, well-armed locals can be such a headache if you're trying to set up a wider war, or something else. Of course, that's just the movie.

The Daily report continues:

In August 2005, just seven months after his swearing-in, Obama traveled to Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine with then-Indiana Republican Senator Dick Lugar, touring a conventional weapons site.

The two met in Kiev with President Victor Yushchenko, making the case that an existing Cooperative Threat Reduction Program covering the destruction of nuclear weapons should be expanded to include artillery, small arms, anti-aircraft weapons, and conventional ammunition of all kinds.

After a stopover in London, the senators returned to Washington and declared that the U.S. should devote funds to speed up the destruction of more than 400,000 small arms, 1,000 anti-aircraft missiles, and more than 15,000 tons of ammunition.

Here is more, including the 2005 Lugar-Obama press release.

Of course, whatever questions linger, I'm sure the answers are just a coincidence, and that Sens. Obama and Lugar were just being responsive to the concerns of their constituents in Illinois and Indiana.