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Mueller should probe Clintons' $152 million-plus in Russian-collusion payoffs

Deroy Murdock

By Deroy Murdock

Published March 22, 2018

Mueller should probe Clintons' $152 million-plus in Russian-collusion payoffs

Strolling one afternoon near Manhattan's Sixth Avenue and West 34th Street, I spotted two tourists with their faces nestled in a map. They looked hopelessly lost.

"Can I help you?" I asked.

Thoroughly flummoxed, they pleaded, "Where's the Empire State Building?"

I pointed straight up, one block east, and said: "It's right there!"

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team resemble those hapless visitors. They scour their guidebook in vain for any trace of Team Trump's alleged Russian collusion. Meanwhile, just steps away, the Clintons' Russian-collusion skyscraper soars into the clouds.

Although they started sniffing around in July 2016, neither the FBI's bloodhounds nor those of Mueller or Congress have detected a whiff of evidence that ties Trump to Russian collusion.

In contrast, Team Mueller studiously ignores something more conspicuous than the iridescent onion domes atop Red Square's St. Basil's Cathedral: Private interests that closed deals with Vladimir Putin and his agents — thanks to then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton's public favors — gave the Clinton Foundation $152 million to $173 million.

Hillary's March 2009 button-pushing "Russian reset" ceremony with Moscow's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, triggered this bonanza. Hillary captured its essence in March 2010 when she told former Soviet propagandist Vladimir Pozner on First Channel TV: "Our goal is to help strengthen Russia."

The Clintons also strengthened their coffers. Three key transactions compose their pro-Kremlin graft.

• "The Ex-Im Bank would welcome an application for financing from Rosavia to support its purchase of Boeing aircraft," Hillary said in Moscow on October 13, 2009. Three days later, according to the Washington Post, "Boeing formally submitted its bid for the Russian deal." Kremlin-owned Rostekhnologii decided on June 1, 2010 to buy up to 50 Boeing 737s for Aeroflot, Russia's national airline. Price: $3.7 billion.

That August 17, Boeing gave the Clinton Foundation $900,000 to "help support the reconstruction of Haiti's public education system" after a severe earthquake the previous January.

• Hillary pushed Skolkovo, "a high-tech corridor in Russia modeled after our own Silicon Valley," as she explained in Moscow in October 2009. Her State Department colleagues encouraged 22 top American venture capitalists to tour Skolkovo in May 2010.

State convinced Cisco, Google, and Intel, among others, to open shop in Skolkovo. By 2012, 28 "Key Partners" from the U.S., Europe, and Russia supported this project.

But the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Program warned in 2013: "Skolkovo is arguably an overt alternative to clandestine industrial espionage." Lucia Ziobro, a top FBI agent in Boston, explained in 2014: "The FBI believes the true motives of the Russian partners, who are often funded by their government, is to gain access to classified, sensitive, and emerging technology from the companies."


Never mind this threat to U.S. national security. The Clintons got paid. An August 2016 Government Accountability Institute study titled From Russia with Money reported that 17 of Skolkovo's "Key Partners" plied Bill with speaking fees or gave the Clinton Foundation between $6.5 million and $23.5 million. (Some such donations, unfortunately, were reported in ranges, not precise sums.)

• Russia's State Atomic Energy Corporation, Rosatom, announced on June 8, 2010, a $1.3 billion bid for a majority stake in Canada's Uranium One. Its assets included 20 percent of American reserves of the main ingredient in atomic bombs. Hillary was one of nine federal-agency chiefs on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which evaluated this strategically sensitive proposal. As America's chief diplomat, Hillary could have sunk it. She didn't. Despite Republican lawmakers' grave reservations, CFIUS approved Rosatom's offer and handed the Kremlin one fifth of U.S. uranium supplies.

Before, during, and after CFIUS's review, Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer calculates, "shareholders involved in this transaction had transferred approximately $145 million to the Clinton Foundation or its initiatives."

All told, the companies and investors in these Russia-strengthening deals gave the Clinton Foundation between $152 million and $173 million.

If Robert Mueller seeks Russian collusion, it's right there.
Previously:


    01/25/18Time to effectively up the anti-illegals argument --- by ending rhetoric and instead offering the complete, verified truth
    01/12/18 President Trump seems far saner than his critics
    01/05/18 The FBI Did Everything But Drive Hillary's Getaway Car
    12/29/17 2017 was Trump's Year of Winning Dangerously
    08/17/17 Trump accurately blames both sides for Charlottesville mayhem
    06/08/17 Senate must shift judicial confirmations into high gear
    04/28/17 Good, Bad & Ugly of Trump's First 100 Days
    04/06/17 Kremlin-crazed Trumpophobes snored as Clintons made Russia great again
    11/11/16 Voters just saved America from disaster, and for that they should be thanked
    11/04/16 On Election Day, voters should flush the toilet
    10/28/16 Hillary's new hires would go FAR beyond the Supreme Court
    10/14/16 How Hillary hides dangers of plan for Syrian refugees
    10/07/16 Trump should make bureaucrats removable again
    09/30/16 Temperamentally unfit for president, indeed
    09/23/16 What Senate Armed Services Committee members -- current and former -- know about 'clueless' Clinton
    09/09/16 Hillary now will campaign for president as the chant,'Lock her up!' rings in her ears --- and correctly so
    08/26/16 Never Trump seeds would bear socialist fruit
    08/18/16 What other Republican standard bearers understood but were never brave enough to utter
    08/12/16 Never Trump: Clinton's Fifth Column
    07/22/16 GOPers are the political extremists --- seriously?
    07/15/16 Invisible men: Black victims of black killers remain in the shadows
    06/03/16 Henchman's appeal leaves Hillary on hook

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