1.The Clinton Foundation, State and Kremlin Connections
Why did Hillary’s State Department urge U.S. investors to fund Russian research for military uses?
By PETER SCHWEIZER, Wall Street Journal July 31, 2016
2. Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal
By JO BECKER and MIKE McINTIRE, New York Times APRIL 2 , 2015
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.
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.
Frank Giustra, right, a mining financier, has donated $31.3 million to the foundation run by former President Bill Clinton, left. Joaquin Sarmiento/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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 a more stringent agreement between Mrs. Clinton and the Obama administration that was in effect while she was secretary of state.
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.”
A Seat at the Table
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.
3. The Clinton Foundation … a tax free international money laundering scheme
Relating to Hillary Clinton’s foundation Canadian venture the following is interesting documentation: The Clinton Foundation is “organized crime” at its finest. Here is a good, concise summary of how the Clinton Foundation works as a tax free international money laundering scheme. It may eventually prove to be the largest political criminalenterprise in U.S. history. This is a textbook case on how you hide foreign money sent to you and repackage it to be used for your own purposes. All tax free.
Here’s how it works:
a. You create a separate foreign “charity.” In this case, the Clinton’s set it up in Canada.
b. Foreign oligarchs and governments, then donate to this Canadian charity. In this case, over 1,000 did –contributing mega millions. I’m sure they did this out of the goodness of their hearts, and expected nothing in return. (Imagine Putin’s buddies waking up one morning and just deciding to send untold millions to a Canadian charity). .
c. The Canadian charity then bundles these separate donations and makes a massive donation to the Clinton Foundation.
d. The Clinton Foundation and the cooperating Canadian charity claim Canadian law prohibits the identification of individual donors.
e. The Clinton Foundation then “spends” some of this money for legitimate good works programs. Unfortunately, experts believe this is on the order of 10%. Much of the balance goes to enrich the Clinton’s, pay salaries to untold numbers of hangers on, and fund lavish travel, etc. Again, virtually all tax free, which means you and I are subsidizing it.
f. The Clinton Foundation, with access to the world’s best accountants, somehow fails to report much of this on their tax filings. They discover these “clerical errors” and begin the process of re-filing 5 years of tax returns. .
g. Net result — foreign money goes into the Clinton’s pockets tax free and untraceable back to the original donor. This is the textbook definition of money laundering.
The Canadian “charity” includes as a principal one Frank Giustra. Google him. He is the guy who was central to the formation of Uranium One, the Canadian company that somehow acquired massive U.S. uranium interests and then sold them to an organization controlled by Russia. This transaction required U.S. State Department approval, and guess who was Secretary of State when the approval was granted.
If you’re still not persuaded this was a cleverly structured way to get unidentified foreign money to the Clinton’s, ask yourself this:
Why did these foreign interests funnel money through a Canadian charity? Why not donate directly to the Clinton Foundation? Better yet, why not donate money directly to the people, organizations and countries in need?
This is the essence of money laundering and influence peddling… Now you know why Hillary’s destruction of 30,000 e-mails was a risk she was willing to take.
4. One Year of Silence on Hillary Clinton Uranium Deal
by PETER SCHWEIZER, BREITBART, 1 May 2016
For more than a year, the mainstream media has failed to ask Hillary Clinton some very basic questions about a series of extremely troubling deals. Why?
Last Spring, my book Clinton Cash was released and it initially set off a media maelstrom. It began on April 19, 2015, with a leaked copy of the book going to the New York Times. The copy was not sent by me or my publisher. If the Clintons leaked the book with the hope of having it prematurely dismissed, that proved to be a mistake. The paper called the book “the most anticipated and feared book” of the political season. The Times went on to note that the book was hardly a hysterical attack on the Clintons, but rather, “mainly in the voice of a neutral journalist” who “meticulously documents his sources, including tax records and government documents.”
Things got worse for the Clintons a few days later when two New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters, Jo Becker and Mike McIntire, took two of the most explosive chapters in the book and did their own digging. What they found confirmed what I had reported. They ran a 3,000-word, front-page article in the paper confirming that:
–Bill and Hillary Clinton had helped a Canadian financier named Frank Giustra and a small Canadian company obtain a lucrative uranium mining concession from the dictator in Kazakhstan;
–The same Canadian company, renamed Uranium One, bought uranium concessions in the United States;
–The Russian government came calling and sought to buy that Canadian company for a price that would mean big profits for the Canadian investors;
–For the Russians to buy that Canadian company, it would require the approval of the Obama administration, including Hillary’s State Department, because uranium is a strategically important commodity;
–Nine shareholders in Uranium One just happened to provide more than $145 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation in the run-up to State Department approval;
–Some of the donations, including those from the Chairman of Uranium One, Ian Teler, were kept secret, even though the Clintons promised to disclose all donations;
–Hillary’s State Department approved the deal;
–The Russian government now owns 20 percent of U.S. uranium assets.
In short, here was what you might call a radioactive scandal. It included secret donations, the Russian government, foreign financiers, more than $145 million, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. And this was just two chapters of the book.
And yet, one year later, Hillary Clinton has never once been asked about this controversial uranium deal by the national media. It never came up during the many Democratic Party presidential debates; never during any of her media appearances on cable news or network television; never by print journalists who are covering her campaign.
The single time she was asked about the uranium deal was by a local reporter in New Hampshire. In June 2015, she sat down with Josh McElveen of local television WMUR. Kudos to McElveen, who raised the uranium deal during the interview. Hillary’s response was evasive. She tried to obscure the facts. She argued that as Secretary of State she was unaware of the deal. She also claimed that the flow of money and the transfer of the uranium were not connected because the timing “doesn’t work.” She claimed that the money flowed from the Canadians to the Clinton Foundation before she was Secretary of State.
This is flat out untrue. As I reported, and the New York Times confirmed, the chairman of Uranium One, Ian Telfer, was making donations to the Clinton Foundation at the time that the State Department was reviewing the sale to Russia. Those donations were kept secret by the Clinton Foundation. Remember: the Clintons had promised President Obama and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee that they would disclose all donations.
It is remarkable that in the year following the release of Clinton Cash and a 3,000-word article on the front page of the New York Times confirming these facts, that no one in the media (save Mr. McElveen) has been interested in asking Hillary Clinton about this troubling uranium deal.
5. Hillary’s lobbyist donations
Documentation: “Meet the lobbyists, donors and bundlers behind Hillary Clinton’s $157 million juggernaut” by Michael Isikoff 2-4-16
On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said she will stand up to big banks, drug companies and other special interests. “Democracy can’t just be for billionaires and corporations,” she proclaims.
But she has struggled to answer questions about her ties to Wall Street, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper Wednesday night she accepted $675,000 in speaking fees from one investment bank because “that’s what they offered” and that financial firms are not giving her “very much money now.” In fact, as new campaign disclosure reports filed this week reveal, Clinton has been fueled by millions from a network of well-connected Washington lobbyists, Wall Street bundlers and billionaire donors.
Here is a Yahoo News guide to some of the key players in Clinton’s $157 million campaign:
A savvy political operative who was once chief of staff to Democratic Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, Elmendorf now runs Subject Matter, a go-to Democratic lobbying firm for corporate interests, raking more than $10 million in fees last year. Among its top clients: Wall Street banks (Goldman Sachs and Citigroup), the casino industry (the American Gaming Association), telecoms (Verizon and Time Warner), tech firms (Facebook and Microsoft), agribusiness (Monsanto) and the NFL.
The superlobbyist brother of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, he runs Podesta Group — a powerhouse firm for defense contractors (Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Bechtel), pharmaceutical and health insurance giants (Merck and Blue Cross-Blue Shield) and banking and private equity firms (Well Fargo, Credit Suisse Group, KKR). Podesta has used his D.C. mansion, famously decorated with expensive modern art, to host a Clinton fundraiser (offering fine Italian cooking by him and his brother) as well as a book party for Clinton super-PAC attack dog David Brock (co-hosted by Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias and Clinton email pal Sidney Blumenthal.) Another branch of Podesta’s portfolio: foreign governments, including several — Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Burma and the Maldives — accused by the State Department of human rights abuses. A new senior partner working on the firm’s new $1.68 million a year Saudi account: David Adams, former assistant secretary for legislative affairs while Clinton was secretary of state.
The stylish ex-wife of Tony Podesta, who battled with him over the expensive art in their home during a messy divorce, she runs her own rival firm, Heather Podesta & Partners. It raked in $7.5 million last year lobbying for MacAndrews & Forbes (the Wall Street investment firm owned by billionaire Ronald Perelman) as well as Marathon Oil, the Cigna Corp. and the National Pork Producers Council, among others. But one of her new clients has raised the most eyebrows: the National Cannabis Industry Association, making her the pot lobbyist in chief on Capitol Hill.
Sullivan is the former DNC finance chair who first got attention as the supervisor of John Huang, the fundraiser convicted of campaign finance violations during Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection. Sullivan, who is Clinton’s most prolific Lobbyist bundler, now is a partner at Capitol Counsel, which specializes in protecting tax breaks for private equity and real estate investment firms (Blackstone, Beacon Capitol Partners and the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts.) Other big clients include the PhRMA, the drug industry’s lobbying arm, and two of its leading members (Roche Holdings and Amgen.) Sullivan recently dropped one of his clients, a firm that electronically monitors prison inmates, after Clinton met with a racial justice group and said she would not take money from lobbyists for private prison companies. Sullivan’s partner at his lobbying firm, David Jones, another longtime Democratic fundraiser, has bundled another $386,000.
When the former Indiana Democratic senator announced his retirement in 2010, he bemoaned the “corrosive” impact of money in politics. But since then, Bayh has become a K Street fixture as a “strategic adviser” to the business clients of McGuireWoods, the legal, lobbying and fundraising juggernaut that represents Exxon Mobil, Duke Energy and the National Association of Manufacturers, among others. Bayh, who hosted a fundraiser for Clinton at the McGuireWoods K St. office last spring, also serves as a strategic adviser to Apollo Management, the Wall Street private equity firm (which paid Clinton $225,000 for a speech after she left office.) Two of his McGuireWoods colleagues, Andrew Smith and former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, are also bundlers who have raised $240,000 for the Clinton campaign while lobbying for clients that include Smithfield Foods (now owned by the Chinese-based Shuanghui Group) and Dandong Port Group, a Hong Kong-registered port and grain importing firm owned by secretive Chinese billionaire Wenliang Wang, who has donated $2 million to the Clinton Foundation.
After serving as Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, Nides returned through the Wall Street revolving door to become vice chairman of Morgan Stanley. A top Clinton bundler, he has helped raise $205,198 from the investment bank’s executives and employees, including donations from the firm’s chief operating officer, its chiefs of fixed income and wealth management, two managing directors and four members of its board of directors. Morgan Stanley, which last year agreed to pay a $2.6 billion fine to settle U.S. government claims over its role in the 2008 financial crisis, has donated $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. It also paid Hillary Clinton $225,000 for a speech in 2013, two and a half months afar she stepped down as secretary of state.
He is the chairman of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street colossus that last month agreed to pay a $5.1 billion fine to settle a Justice Department investigation for its role in marketing subprime mortgage bonds in the runup to the 2008 financial crisis. Among the Goldman executives who helped Blankfein’s firm profit from the crash: Donald Mullen, the former chief of its credit department, who last year made a $1 million donation to Clinton’s super-PAC, Priorities USA Action. “Sounds like we will make some serious money,” Mullen wrote in an email in the fall of 2007, after learning the subprime mortgage market was about to crash, according to a 2011 Senate report. The firm has also been the single biggest source of funds for Hillary Clinton’s post-government speaking career, paying her $625,000 for three speeches since she stepped down as secretary of state in 2012. Blankfein so far has been sitting out the 2016 race. “I don’t want to help or hurt anybody by giving them an endorsement,” he said in a rare TV interview this week. But his wife, Laura, gave the legal maximum of $2,700 to Clinton, and Blankfein, in his interview this week, said that Sanders’ candidacy has “the potential to be a dangerous moment.” Goldman Sachs’ ties to the Clintons have been personal and political: Goldman’s executives and employees have contributed $750,000 to Clinton’s political campaigns, including $100,616 to this year’s run. The firm itself has donated at least $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation and paid $1.2 million to Bill Clinton for speeches dating back to 2001. Blankfein, who has described himself as a friend of Hillary Clinton, has lent a helping financial hand to the Clinton family: He (along with two other former Goldman executives) is among the investors in Eaglevale Partners, the hedge fund founded in 2011 by Marc Mezvinsky, husband of Chelsea Clinton, and the former secretary’s son in law.
A billionaire hedge fund kingpin, co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucs and avid high-stakes poker player (for stakes as much as $20,000 a hand) Lasry is among Clinton’s most steadfast Wall Street backers, with close personal ties to her family. He has donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation, hired Chelsea Clinton at his Avenue Capital hedge fund, invested (along with Blankfein) in son-in-law Mezvinsky’s fund and made his corporate jet available to Clinton while she was senator. When Clinton launched her campaign last year, Lasry threw one of the initial fundraisers, sending out an email saying he would “love to try to raise 270” — as in $270,000.
The former right-wing journalist now runs an interlocking network of pro-Clinton nonprofits and super-PACs informally known as “Brocktopus.” One of Brock’s arms is Correct the Record, a super-PAC that has collected $3.4 million from wealthy donors while openly proclaiming its intention to coordinate with the Clinton campaign — an arrangement that some experts say may violate campaign finance law. (The Clinton campaign has made two payments to Brock’s super-PAC totaling $281,000 for “research.”) The Brock super-PAC, which received a $1 million infusion from allied pro-Clinton super-PAC Priorities USA Action last December, was the first to raise questions about Bernie Sanders’ medical records; Correct the Record was also recently outed for offering “off the record” tips about Sanders to a Vermont newspaper. Brock’s ties to the Clinton world are close and multilayered: When he held the book party for his tome, “Kill the Messenger,” last September at the home of Clinton bundler Tony Podesta (see the K Street Army), the co-hosts included Marc Elias, chief counsel for the Clinton campaign, who also serves as the lawyer for Correct the Record and allied Democratic super-PACs, and Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton’s most prolific email correspondent, who was being paid by another Brock outfit, Media Matters, as well as the Clinton Foundation.
The billionaire Hungarian-born hedge fund investor has been among the biggest donors to Democratic causes for years but has recently stepped up his game for Clinton. New disclosure reports show he cut a $6 million check last December to Priorities USA Action — the main super-PAC backing her candidacy. That’s on top of another $1 million check to Priorities earlier in the year as well as $1 million to American Bridge 21st Century, an allied super-PAC run by David Brock (see above). An insight into Soros’ thinking was revealed in a State Department email in which a Clinton ally described a conversation in which Soros said “he has been impressed that he can always call/meet with you on an issue of policy” and that he regretted backing then-Sen. Barack Obama over her in 2008. Other million-dollar donors to Priorities: Hollywood moguls Stephen Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, Wall Street heavyweights Donald Mullen (a former Goldman Sachs executive) and Donald Sussman and investor Haim Saban (see below).
A one-time bass guitarist in an Israeli rock band, multibillionaire Los Angeles-based tycoon Saban — who is best known for creating the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers — may be Clinton’s most generous and committed superdonor: He proclaimed last year he would spend “whatever it takes” to elect her president. But Saban, who has donated $10 million to the Clinton Foundation and whose wife serves on its board, may be in a position to help her candidacy in other ways: He is principal owner and CEO of Univision, the largest Spanish-language media organization in the country.
Dennis Cheng is the silent chief of the Clinton fundraising operation — the national finance director who is almost never seen in public and refuses to talk to reporters. Cheng joined the campaign after serving for four years as chief fundraiser for the Clinton Foundation, where he collected hundreds of millions of dollars from overseas donors that have generated intense media scrutiny and allegations of conflict of interest for Clinton. Cheng’s ties to Clinton go way back: He started as an intern during her 2000 Senate run, gradually moving up to become her finance director while she was in the Senate, then moving with her to the State Department as deputy chief of protocol.
· * Bundlers raise “hard money” to Clinton’s campaign in individual checks that, under federal law, are limited to $2,700 apiece. Super-PACs are permitted to raise sums from donations in unlimited amounts.
· ** Total includes $2.5 million donated by his wife, Cheryl Saban.
Source for numbers: Federal Election Commission and Center for Responsive Politics