While Democrats and liberal media outlets are pushing the Donald Trump Jr. and Russia collusion narrative, they seem to have forgotten about the many connections the beloved Clinton family has with Russia.
“If you want to talk about having relationships with Russia, I’d look no further than the Clintons,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, deputy press secretary last week. “Bill Clinton was paid half a million dollars to give a speech to a Russian bank, personally thanked by President Putin.”
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called Bill Clinton personally following his speech, which he was paid $500,000 for by the finance firm Renaissance Capital.
“The speech is now coming back to haunt the Clintons, considering the company that cut the check was allegedly tied to the scandal that spurred the Global Magnitsky Act, a bill that imposed sanctions on Russians designated as human-rights abusers and eventually would become law in 2012,” writes Fox News. “This was the same law Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya was lobbying against during her sit-down with Trump Jr. last year. And back in 2010, it would have put the Clintons on her side.”
Right before Clinton’s scheduled speech, Congress was pushing Hillary Clinton to refuse visas to Russian officials as part of a 2010 sanctions bill, the State Department refused.
Weeks later, Bill Clinton gave his speech. If the Russian sanctions bill was passed, the Renaissance’s Russian investment bank executives would not have been allowed into the country at that time.
The Global Magnitsky Act was named after a tax attorney who discovered that Russian government stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the foreign company, Hermitage Capital Management. Renaissance officials were part of this scheme.
The bill was eventually passed in 2012.
But there’s more. The Clinton Foundation benefited from the Clinton’s cozy relationship with Russia.
“When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, the Russian-owned Rosatom was buying up a Canadian mining company called Uranium One, which had mining prospects in the U.S. Bill Clinton received $500,000 from a Russian bank selling Uranium One futures, while the chairman of Uranium One donated over two million dollars to the Clinton Foundation prior to the sale. The sale had to be approved by the Committee On Foreign Investment, in which the secretary of state is one of the principal actors reviewing business transactions that involve America’s national security priorities. Needless to say, with the cash flowing, the sale was approved. Is there a direct link? No, there is nothing saying if you give us money, we’ll approve the sale, but it’s part of a long history of donations to the Clinton Foundation that ends up benefitting the donor economically or politically somewhere down the road,” writes Town Hall.
Bloomberg News uncovered this in 2015, but Clinton’s team was quick to quiet the publication according to a memo found in the WikiLeak documents.
“With the help of the research team, we killed a Bloomberg story trying to link HRC’s opposition to the Magnitsky bill a $500,000 speech that WJC gave in Moscow,” said Jesse Lehrich, a member of the Rapid Response Communications team for Hillary For America, in May 2015.
Back in 2012, Hillary Clinton also promoted improving relations with Russia in the Wall Street Journal titled “Trade With Russia Is a Win-Win.”
Author’s note: The Donald Trump Jr. and Russian connection is the latest reach by liberals to prove the Trump team colluded with Russia. But the truth is the Clintons have much more ties to Russia.
Editor’s note: The Clinton Foundation was the largest organized graft organization in the history of America. Billions were pledged in the hopes of influencing future President Hillary Clinton. It collapsed immediately when she failed.