Hillary Tries to Rebut Clinton Cash, Fails

Yesterday Hillary Clinton finally answered a few questions about Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash. We have written extensively about the revelations in that book, but the best place to start may be the podcast interview we did with Peter just after the book came out. Mrs. Clinton chose a local TV news show in New Hampshire to talk about Clinton Cash. Breitbart News records the key exchange:

When asked about the specific details about the appearance of quid pro quo in the Uranium One deal brought up in the book Clinton said, “I don’t know if we have enough time in this interview to debunk all the allegations that were made by people who are wielding the partisan axe but there is no basis for any of that. The timing doesn’t work. It happened in terms of the support for the foundation before I was secretary of state. There were nine government agencies who had to sign off on that deal. I was not personally involved because that wasn’t something the secretary of state did. I mean literally we could have a whole show debunking a lot of these really wild, inaccurate allegations.”

Hillary was secure in the knowledge that neither the interviewer nor most of those watching the show had read Schweizer’s book. In fact, there are two stages to the Uranium One scandal, as Schweizer spells out in detail. Stage one was when Bill Clinton helped to facilitate and legitimize the acquisition of vast uranium deposits in Kazakhstan by a previously-unknown company called UrAsia Energy, and the subsequent merger of UrAsia with Uranium One. The individuals who benefited from those transactions poured more than $100 million into the Clinton Foundation prior to 2009. These are the donations that Hillary refers to when she says that “the timing doesn’t work” because she was not yet Secretary of State.

The second stage of the Uranium One scandal occurred later, when a Russian company controlled by the Russian State Nuclear Agency bought Uranium One, which by that time controlled around one-half 20% of the uranium in the United States. The Russian transaction was announced in 2010, when Hillary was Secretary of State, and was approved by her. Hillary deliberately failed to mention that contributions from the principals of Uranium One and the company’s Russian buyers continued to flow to the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State:

The Clinton Foundation also failed to disclose major contributions from entities controlled by those involved in the Uranium One deal. Thus, beginning in 2009, the company’s chairman, Telfer, quietly started funneling what would become $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation through a Canadian entity he controlled called the Fernwood Foundation. …[A]ccording to Canadian tax records, Telfer’s Fernwood Foundation donated more than $2 million to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state. The Clinton Foundation’s public disclosures don’t list Fernwood as a donor.

In 2009 Fernwood contributed $1 million to the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative (CGSCI). In 2010 its donation was $250,000. In 2011 it gave another $600,000 and in 2012 the amount was $500,000. According to Canadian tax records, nearly all of the funds CGSCI collects are transferred directly to the Clinton Foundation in New York. In other words, it operates as a pass-through.

The fact that these donations are not listed in Clinton Foundation public disclosures violates the Clinton Foundation’s memorandum of understanding with the Obama White House…and contract’s Hillary’s correspondence with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Then there is a company called Salida Capital:

According to Canadian tax records, Salida Capital received in 2010 an anonymous donation of $3.3 million into their charitable foundation (Salida Capital Foundation), which allowed the tiny firm to make the dramatic announcement that it would contribute millions to the Clinton Foundation. In 2010 it donated $780,220 to the Clinton Foundation. This amounted to about 90 percent of all Salida’s charitable giving that year. It was part of a multimillion-dollar commitment that would send more than $2.6 million to the Clintons between 2010 and 2012.

This was precisely when Hillary had the Russian Uranium One acquisition under consideration. In 2011, Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear agency, identified Salida Capital as a wholly-owned subsidiary. Schweizer contacted Salida at its office in Toronto on three occasions to ask whether it is the same Salida Capital that is wholly owned by the Russian state nuclear agency. Salida refused to answer.

So Hillary was simply lying when she said “the timing doesn’t work” because contributions related to Uranium One were “before I was secretary of state.”

Clinton Cash is not only about corruption related to the Clinton Foundation. Schweizer also delves into Bill Clinton’s incredibly lucrative speaking engagements, the price of which skyrocketed after Hillary became Secretary of State. This, too, figures in the Uranium One story:

In June, shortly after the Rosatom [Uranium One] deal was announced, Bill was in Moscow for a particularly well-compensated speech. He was paid $500,000 to deliver remarks at an event organized by a firm called Renaissance Capital (RenCap). Bill had not given a speech in Russia in over five years and then it had been for a British firm, Adam Smith International. His pay for that speech was only $195,000.

RenCap, which is registered in Cyprus, is populated by former Russian intelligence officers with close ties to Putin.

RecCap was following the Uranium One deal closely, and urging investors to buy Uranium One stock. During that same visit to Moscow, Bill Clinton also met with Vladimir Putin.

The upshot of the Uranium One deal is that Russia now owns one-half 20% of all American uranium resources. One might have expected Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, to block a transaction having such obvious national security risks, especially since, although she was only one of nine members of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, she was known to be tough on such deals:

Hillary Clinton had long had a reputation as a CFIUS hawk, opposing the sale of US strategic assets to foreign governments. She had also been a consistent critic of lax reviews by that body in the past….

When she became secretary of state, Hillary Clinton continued to support a robust CFIUS and led efforts by the panel to block Chinese companies from buying a mining business, a fiberoptic company, and even a wind farm in Oregon.

But however hawkish Hillary might have been on other deals, this one sailed through.

The Uranium One scandal is far from the only one documented by Peter Schweizer in Clinton Cash, but it is more than enough to disqualify Hillary from the presidency.

One more thing: Hillary was lying about this, too, in the same interview:

She ignored the donation disclosure was a request by the Obama administration to avoid any appearance of conflicts of interest while she served as Secretary of State and said, “I think part of the interesting twist to this is most foundations, charities do not publish all of their contributors. The Clinton Foundation does.”

But, as already noted, one of Schweizer’s revelations in Clinton Cash is that the Clinton Foundation does not, in fact, disclose all of its donors. Hillary is well aware of this, but apparently calculates that she can get away with the false claim.

Hillary’s responses to the copiously-documented revelations in Clinton Cash will be enough to satisfy the Democrats’ army of the uninformed, but their inadequacy will immediately be obvious to anyone who has read the book.

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