RUTHFULLY YOURS

To help celebrate the 242nd birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps, my wife and I recently visited one of the best museums in the Washington, D.C., area — the National Museum of the Marine Corps, located just outside Quantico Marine Base about a half-hour drive south of Washington in Virginia.

Most visitors to Washington spend their time visiting the Smithsonian museums, not realizing that another terrific museum is just a short drive away. From the splendid architecture of the building itself — it’s designed to look like the raising of the flag on Mt. Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima — to the interior displays and exhibits, it provides an informed, educational, interesting, and frankly emotional tour through the storied and dramatic history of the Marines.

In fact, the second flag raised on Mt. Suribachi — the one captured by Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Joe Rosenthal in one of the most famous photographs in history — is actually on display in the museum.

You can’t help but get a taste of the toughness, professionalism, and go-for-broke style of the Marines as soon as you walk in the door. There, carved on the wall of the high atrium that is the center of the museum, are the words of a legend in the Marine Corps — Sergeant Major Daniel Joseph “Dan” Daily: “Come on you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?”

Daily yelled those famous words at his men as they were charging the Germans during the Battle of Belleau Wood during World War I, a battle in which the Marines defeated much larger German forces while losing more men than had been killed and wounded in all of the prior battles of the Marines combined since their founding.

There is a special exhibit at the museum dedicated to the Battle of Belleau Wood. Daily received the Navy Cross for heroism during that battle and is one of only 19 men in the entire history of the U.S. to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor twice — once for his defense of the U.S. and foreign diplomatic delegations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and a second time in Haiti in 1915.

There are special exhibit halls dedicated to everything from the Continental Marine’s first sea battles as part of the fledgling U.S. Navy during the Revolution to the “shores of Tripoli,” the “Halls of Montezuma” during the Mexican-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Besides the major conflicts the Marines participated in, the museum also highlights the “savage wars of peace,” to quote Rudyard Kipling — the numerous battles fought by the Marines all over the world during official times of peace. Soon to come in 2018: exhibits showing the Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fusion GPS, the research firm commissioned by the Clinton campaign to compile the so-called Trump dossier, is also responsible for a second dossier — the information that Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya provided to top Trump-campaign officials in June 2016. The second dossier reportedly alleged financial misconduct by major contributors to the Clinton Global Initiative, a project of the Clinton Foundation.

Fusion dug up this information in connection with its work in behalf of Prevezon, a Russian company controlled by Putin cronies. At the time, Prevezon was the defendant in a multi-million-dollar asset-forfeiture suit brought by the Justice Department. The suit stemmed from the Putin regime’s fleecing of an investment fund called Hermitage.

Years earlier, to investigate the Russian government’s role in the fraud, Hermitage hired Sergei Magnitsky, a private lawyer in Moscow. His exposure of the Putin regime’s complicity led to his imprisonment, torture, and murder. That atrocity led Congress to pass the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which allows the federal government to seize and forfeit fraud proceeds. This, in turn, has led to a furious Kremlin campaign to smear Hermitage’s chief executive officer, Bill Browder, and to get the Magnitsky Act repealed. In the United States, that campaign has been spearheaded by Veselnitskaya.

It was the Magnitsky Act that the Justice Department used to sue Prevezon. Veselnitskaya is Prevezon’s lawyer in Moscow, and she helped the company retain American counsel to defend them in the suit — a lawyer ironically named John Moscow and his firm, Baker Hostetler. These lawyers hired Fusion GPS to do research on Browder and Hermitage for litigation purposes. It was in that role that Fusion prepared the dossier, which, as far as we currently know, did not actually implicate Mrs. Clinton directly in any misconduct.

My conjecture is that there are three explanations for what happened here, none of which excludes the others: (a) The Russians do not understand American political campaigns well enough to appreciate that alleged misconduct by a donor does not hurt a candidate if the candidate is not complicit in the misconduct; (b) the Putin regime attempted (unsuccessfully) to lure the Trump campaign into its anti–Magnitsky Act effort by convincing Don Trump Jr. and other campaign officials that there was a useful anti-Clinton angle to be exploited; and (c) the Putin regime calculated that, simply by taking a meeting with a Kremlin emissary on the promise of damaging information about Clinton, the Trump campaign would foolishly expose itself to blackmail by Putin.