Yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing produced plenty of video clips of Al Franken badgering Jeff Sessions, making him look off-balance. That might comfort the sensibilities of Trump-haters, but it is all a phony distraction. It is now clear that real collusion with Russians did take place – between Secretary Clinton's machine and the Russians.

It is now clear to anyone who filters through all the media chaff on condolence calls that the FBI and Department of Justice allowed a criminal conspiracy to proceed, endangering national security but enriching the Clintons, and have been covering up the evidence. The two people responsible for targeting the special counsel on Trump and Russia are directly responsible for the cover-up.

Greg Jarrett, a lawyer and fearless Fox News correspondent, lays out the case that racketeering laws apply to the Uranium One scandal (hat tip: Jim Host, Gateway Pundit).

There is much more to this clear-eyed presentation, including Jarrett's call for Mueller and Rosenstein to resign, since they were responsible for the investigation, kept quiet and allowed it to unfold, and kept it secret. It is well worth five minutes.

The old bromide that "the cover-up is worse than the crime" derives from Watergate, a third-rate burglary, criminally. Endangering national security through racketeering could be a serious crime, indeed. But the cover-up, implicating the pinnacle of our justice and law enforcement hierarchies, could be even bigger, if you think about it. When you lose the police and prosecutors, you are no longer a functioning democratic republic.

No matter how much chaff the media generates, about half the public (46%, according to a poll released today) believes that the media make up stuff about Trump. And the Truth will out.

The key figure in blowing open the Uranium One scandal is the FBI informant:

... [a] confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

That witness is represented by Victoria Toensing and is going to end up testifying before Senator Grassley's committee, though there may be another fight by Dems to suppress the testimony. That would be foolish, only implicating them down the road when this busts open.

John Solomon reports in The Hill:

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday sought permission to interview an FBI informant who helped agents uncover a major corruption scheme by Russian nuclear officials seeking to aggressively expand their American business under the Obama administration. The undercover witness, who has not been publicly identified, spent nearly five years helping agents build a case that resulted in one of Russia's top nuclear industry officials in the United States, a Russian financier and an American trucking executive to plead guilty in 2015 to charges related to a racketeering scheme that prosecutors said involved bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering. The informant possesses information about the extent of Russian efforts to curry favor inside the United States that he has been prevented from disclosing to the courts and Congress because he signed an FBI nondisclosure statement, his lawyer Victoria Toensing told The Hill on Tuesday. The undercover witness was threatened by Justice officials when he tried to disclose some of the information in a lawsuit during last year's election, forcing him to withdraw his legal action, the lawyer alleged.

I am not schooled in the niceties of the law, but it seems to me that a nondisclosure agreement under a previous attorney general can be waived by the current attorney general – especially when the NDA covers up the original A.G.'s potential misbehavior. But even if there is a lawsuit to be launched, it looks bad for the Dems to be covering up such a huge scandal.

This is real.

There is evidence.

A.G. Sessions just got his own man in place at the head of the Criminal Division of the FBI. Now actual investigations can begin and grand juries convene, as warranted. Witnesses can be called to those grand juries and placed under oath and on the record – with no counsel on hand. Ignoring that subpoena will get you thrown in jail, not just censured. Once the records of the Clinton Foundation are in hand, the work of Charles Ortel will be of tremendous assistance to prosecutors.

The Clinton machine has gotten away with big crimes for big money for decades. China picked up access to our aerospace technology, vaulting ahead its missile programs, during the Bill Clinton administration, and Clinton re-election campaign entities got illegal money from Chinese sources – some of it in paper bags.

But there is at least a chance that this time around, with a president who doesn't play by the old rules favoring his opponents, that the wheels of justice can resume turning for the Clintons, as they are supposed to do for all of us.