The Democrats’ newfound paranoia about Russian influence on American affairs was certainly nowhere to be found when Hillary Clinton was cheerfully selling them a huge chunk of America’s uranium stockpile, right after a Russian bank paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech.
The Uranium One story is among the incidents detailed in Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash. A quick recap: Uranium One was originally a Canadian company, bought out by Russia’s state atomic energy agency, Rosatom.
Uranium One’s big shots were very, very generous donors to the Clinton Foundation, the “charity” through which so much foreign money flowed to Bill and Hillary Clinton. TheNew York Times reported in April 2015 about how those donations spiked as the deal for Rosatom to secure Uranium One and its holdings in the United States was brought to a successful conclusion, along with one of Bill Clinton’s biggest paydays ever:
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.
[…] 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.
The Russian bank in question, Renaissance Capital, was so pleased with Bill Clinton’s performance at that $500k Q&A that Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister at the time,personally called Clinton to thank him.
According to Clinton Cash, the total donations from Uranium One shareholders to the Clinton Foundation exceeded $145 million, in the run-up to Hillary Clinton’s State Department approving the Rosatom deal, which gave Russia control over about 20 percent of U.S. uranium.
The Clintons have always insisted that none of these big foreign contributions or six-figure speaking fees ever influenced policy decisions, but now they’ve suddenly become veryinterested in Russian influence on the DNC Leaks controversy.
That’s an impressive double standard, which the media also follows, since the same news organizations currently flooding the zone with Russian hacker stories were completely uninterested in asking Hillary Clinton about the Uranium One deal. Even papers that reported on the story, like the New York Times, made a point of never confronting Clinton about it, during her amusingly rare press availabilities.