The story continues alleging that the Clintons were involved in bribery schemes.
There were all sorts of warning signs about Russia's push into the uranium market. For example, the US International Trade Commission was in the midst of a large investigation into allegations dating as far back as 1991 that Russia was dumping uranium on US markets to damage the American uranium industry."
In early 2010 Admiral Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, appeared before a congressional committee and warned about the perils of doing business with state-owned entities in Russia, stating that "criminally linked oligarchs will enhance the ability of state or state-allied actors to undermine competition in gas, oil, aluminum and precious metal markets."
He didn't name specific Russian entities involved, but referred to the problem as "a growing nexus in Russian and Eurasian states among governments, organized crime, intelligence services and big business figures."
He indicated that the United States needed to address the Russian instances of "bribery, fraud, violence and corrupt alliances with state actors to gain the upper hand against legitimate businesses. In the midst of this complex and controversial transaction, which would require US cabinet-level approval, a small Canadian investment company named Salida Capital became intimately involved with the Clinton Foundation.
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. Salida Capital also cosponsored a speech by Bill Clinton on May 21, 2010, in Calgary, Canada. While the speech was publicly listed by the Clintons as an event for "The Power Within," a Canadian motivational-speaking organization, according to State Department documents filed by Bill Clinton's office, sponsors for the event included Salida Capital.
Salida Capital invests in natural resource companies, including several in the Russian-dominated portions of Ukraine. In 2010, when Salida moved aggressively into the Ukrainian market, their chief business partner in the country happened to be the personal adviser to Energy Minister Yuri Boyko, who helped create the trading company Vladimir Putin used to control the Ukrainian trade.
Boyko was described in a confidential State Department cable as being "very close to Russia" and as the "point of contact for the Kremlin" on energy dealings in the country.”
In 2011 a company named Salida Capital would be identified in a Rosatom annual report as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian state nuclear agency. Is it the same firm? There is compelling evidence that it is, but we cannot say for sure.
I contacted Salida Capital in Toronto on three occasions and provided it with the opportunity to deny that it is connected to the Salida Capital listed as a subsidiary of Rosatom. It has refused comment. The timing of events raises questions. If it were the same firm, an entity owned and controlled by Rosatom funneled millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation at the very time Hillary would have been involved in deciding whether to approve Rosatom's purchase of Uranium One. But the Clintons' fortune didn't end there.
In June, shortly after the Rosatom 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.
In correspondence with the State Department seeking approval for the speech, Clinton's office simply describes the firm as "an investment bank focusing on emerging markets." According to Businessweek, when Putin became president of Russia in 2000, RenCap "hired several executives with connections to the Kremlin and Russian intelligence service, now known as the FSB [Russian Domestic Intelligence Service]."
Yuri Kobaladze, executive director at the firm, served for thirty-two years as a KGB and SVR (the foreign intelligence arm of the Russian government) officer, retiring with the rank of general.
Yuri Sagaidak, the deputy general director at RenCap, was a colonel in the KGB. Vladimir Dzhabarov served simultaneously as FSB and first vice president at RenCap from 2006 to 2009. RenCap was also watching the Uranium One deal. Only three weeks before Clinton's speech, on May 27, RenCap had been pushing Uranium One stock. "We believe the company is well positioned to provide impressive volume growth in the global sector and play the uranium spot price recovery," RenCap wrote in a twenty-eight-page report on the company.
It actively encouraged investors to buy the stock. Clinton's hour-long, half-million-dollar speech on the theme of Russia "going global" was followed by a plenary session that included Renaissance Capital executives and senior Russian government officials. During his Moscow visit, Bill also met with Putin himself. Just days earlier the FBI had made a series of arrests, breaking up a Russian spy ring.
Ten sleeper agents, using encrypted data transferred through digital images, invisible ink, and a sophisticated system for transferring information by switching bags at a train station in Queens, had been broken up. Among the spy ring's targets: a leading fundraiser for Hillary who also happened to be a Clinton friend.
A Russian sleeper agent named "Cynthia Murphy" was instructed "to single out tidbits unknown publicly but revealed in prívate by sources close to State Department." According to the FBI, intercepted communications showed that the chief assignment of the ring would be "to search and develop ties in policy-making circles in U.S."
When Bill sat down with Putin, it didn't take long for the subject of Russian espionage to come up. "You have come to Moscow at the exact right time," Putin told the former president, according to the New York Times. Waving a finger at him, Putin continued, "Your police have gotten carried away, putting people in jail." In response, "Clinton appeared to chuckle.”
Clinton and Putin had a close relationship. President Boris Yeltsin first appointed Putin prime minister 1999, while Bill was still president, and they had remained in contact ever since. In January 2009, while at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Clinton had gone to Putin's private party at the Sheraton, where he was greeted by the Russian leader as "our good friend" before cheering him with vodka shots.
The pair then headed off to a private room where they "talked deep into the night." In September 2013, as the Ukrainian crisis built, Clinton offered what the Russian news agency RIA Novosti called "Rare U.S. Praise for Putin" on CNN. Clinton described the Russian leader as "very smart" and "brutally blunt."
When he was asked by CNN's Piers Morgan if Putin ever reneged on a deal, Clinton responded: "He did not. He kept his word on all the deals we made." Remember, for the Russian purchase of Uranium One to go through, it required approval by CFIUS, of which Hillary was a member. "We have provided all relevant information requested in the U.S., and elsewhere and we expect approval in due time," said spokesman Dmitry Shulga.
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. After a Bush administration CFIUS review approved the 2005 purchase of several ports in the United States by the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates, then senator Clinton was quick to denounce it.
When the Senate Armed Services Committee held hearings on the matter in early 2006, Hillary promptly assumed the role of chief prosecutor. She not only argued that the CFIUS decision was wrong, she condemned administration officials for failing to consider the national security implications of the ports deal. She was particularly concerned because the deal involved not just a forejgn company, but a foreign government.
"For many of us," she said, "there is a significant difference between a private company and a foreign government entity.” In 2007 Hillary led the charge to pass legislation to significantly strengthen CFIUS. And during her 2008 presidential bid, it was Hillary alone among the major candidates from either party who raised the case for strengthening CFIUS as an important way to protect America's economic sovereignty and national security.
Her presidential campaign rightly described her as "an outspoken proponent of strengthening CFIUS.” 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 fiber-optic company, and even a wind farm in Oregon. But however hawkish Hillary might have been on other deals, this one sailed through.
The Russian purchase of Uranium One was approved by CFIUS on October 22, 2010. Hillary's opposition would have been enough under CFIUS rules to have the decision on the transaction kicked up to the president. That never happened.
The result: Uranium One and half of projected American uranium production were transferred to a private company controlled in turn by the Russian State Nuclear Agency. Strangely enough, when Uranium One requested approval from CFIUS by the federal government, Ian Telfer, a major Clinton Foundation donor, was chairman of the board, a position he continues to hold.
Ian Telfer
In 2010, in reporting to the US government, Russian officials said they were looking to buy just slightly more than 50 percent of the company and promised "not (to] increase its share in Uranium One, Inc." But by the beginning of 2013, the Russian government moved to buy out the company's other shareholders entirely. Today it owns the company outright.
At the center of disinformation campaigns, one finds the truth a publicity team is working together to hide.
It’s usually the perspective the publicity team is painting as bad and wrong and stupid and crazy and fringe.
Just that a topic gets a highly funded disinformation campaign should tell the public and whole lot about what’s really going on.
I have been encouraged many times to spread disinformation by various agents throughout the last few years. Some of it was to obscure child trafficking. At least one of the agents was employed by the US government.
If your're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
Malcolm X