The Wall Street
Journal is asking why Hillary Clinton’s State Department urged US investors to
fund Russian research for military
purposes.
Hillary
Clinton touts her tenure as secretary of state as a time of hardheaded realism
and “commercial diplomacy” that advanced American national and commercial
interests. . . The stated goal at the time: “identifying areas of cooperation
and pursuing joint projects and actions that strengthen strategic stability,
international security, economic well-being, and the development of ties
between the Russian and American people.”. . .
Consider
Skolkovo, an “innovation city” of 30,000 people on the outskirts of Moscow,
billed as Russia’s version of Silicon Valley—and a core piece of Mrs. Clinton’s
quarterbacking of the Russian reset.
What
could possibly go wrong?
Soon,
dozens of U.S. tech firms, including top Clinton Foundation donors like Google,
Intel and Cisco, made major financial contributions to Skolkovo, with Cisco
committing a cool $1 billion. . .
The
state-of-the-art technological research coming out of Skolkovo raised alarms
among U.S. military experts and federal law-enforcement officials. Research
conducted in 2012 on Skolkovo by the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Program
at Fort Leavenworth declared that the purpose of Skolkovo was to serve as a
“vehicle for world-wide technology transfer to Russia in the areas of
information technology, biomedicine, energy, satellite and space technology,
and nuclear technology.”
Moreover,
the report said: “the Skolkovo Foundation has, in fact, been involved in
defense-related activities since December 2011, when it approved the first
weapons-related project—the development of a hypersonic cruise missile engine.
. . . Not all of the center’s efforts are civilian in nature.”
That’s not Hillary’s only Russian
connection, according to Breitbart.
Hillary
Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta sat on the board of a small energy
company alongside Russian officials that received $35 million from a
Putin-connected Russian government fund, a relationship Podesta failed to fully
disclose on his federal financial disclosures as required by law. . .
The GAI
investigative report says it’s unclear how much, if any, money Podesta made.
The reason: Podesta was on the board of three Joule entities, but only listed
two on his disclosure; the most important entity, Joule Stichting, he did not
list. “Podesta’s compensation by Joule cannot be fully determined,” reads the
report. “In his 2014 federal government disclosure filing, Podesta lists that
he divested stock options from Joule. However, the disclosure does not cover
the years 2011-2012.”
Why
Podesta failed to reveal, as required by law on his federal financial
disclosures, his membership on the board of this offshore company is presently
unknown.
And then, there’s the uranium scandal,
from Business Insider.
The basic
facts: This story is about the sale of a controlling stake in a Canadian
company called Uranium One to Rosatom, the Russian atomic energy agency.
Because Uranium One controlled uranium mines in the United States, the sale had
to be approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment In the United States
(CFIUS), part of the executive branch. . .
What’s
the allegation against Hillary Clinton? The reason this is a story is the
potential that there was some quid pro quo involved: that in exchange for donations
to the Clinton Foundation and/or the speech Bill Clinton gave in Russia,
Hillary Clinton used her position as Secretary of State to make approval of
this sale happen. It need not be explicit, but at the very least there has to
be a connection between donations and official action that Clinton took.
What’s
the evidence for that allegation? There isn’t any, at least not yet. The only
evidence is timing: people who would benefit from the sale made donations to
the foundation at around the same time the matter was before the government.
Now to Trump, is it really all bad that
he’s so chummy with Putin? Not at all,
says Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at NYU and
Princeton.
Cohen says the media at large is doing a huge
disservice to the American people by ignoring the substance of Trump’s
arguments about NATO and Russia, and buying the Clinton campaign’s simplistic
smear that Trump is a Russian “Manchurian candidate.”. .
“Then along comes, unexpectedly, Donald Trump,” he
continued, “Who says he wants to end the New Cold War, and cooperate with
Russia in various places… and –astonishingly– the media is full of what only
can be called neo-McCarthyite charges that he is a Russian agent, that he is a
Manchurian candidate, and that he is Putin’s client.”. .
Cohen also said. “Trump said early on, he wanted to
know, 60 years after its foundation, what was NATO’s mission today. 100 policy
wonks in Washington since the end of the Soviet Union, 25 years ago, have asked
the same question. Is NATO an organization in search of a mission?” Source
