A new report is reviving allegations that Bill and Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia during the early years of the Obama administration to develop projects later identified as security concerns, but which also enriched the Clinton Foundation.
John Solomon, executive vice president for video for The Hill, outlined his case in a piece The Hill
published Sunday.
Solomon begins his tale of connections in 2009 and continues through 2016 by noting that allies of the Clintons with ties to Russia presented the
now-discredited dossier of claims against President Donald Trump.
Solomon focuses on the 2009 effort to develop a Russian version of Silicon Valley known as Skolkovo, which Clinton, as secretary of state, worked closely on with Russians including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-President Dmitri Medvedev, Solomon wrote.
“Clinton’s handprint was everywhere on the 2009-2010 project, the tip of a diplomatic spear to reboot U.S.-Russian relations after years of hostility prompted by Vladimir Putin’s military action against the former Soviet republic and now U.S. ally Georgia,” Solomon wrote.
“A donor to the Clinton Foundation, Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, led the Russian side of the effort, and several American donors to the Clinton charity got involved. Clinton’s State Department facilitated U.S. companies working with the Russian project, and she personally invited Medvedev to visit Silicon Valley.
“The collaboration occurred at the exact same time Bill Clinton made his now infamous trip to Russia to pick up a jaw-dropping $500,000 check for a single speech.”
The Skolvo project was savaged last year by Deroy Murdock in
National Review. Murdock outlined a pattern in which projects Russia wanted moved forward and the Clinton Foundation received major donations.
Clinton’s advocacy of the Skolkovo project was further
outlined in a report by the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative watchdog group, that noted that as secretary of state, she was a major proponent.
Should the Clintons be investigated for their ties to Russia?
That report further noted that another big winner was the Clinton Foundation.
The report said 60 percent of the project’s partners “have made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation or sponsored speeches by Bill. The Clinton Foundation only discloses donations in ranges, so it is impossible to determine the precise amount of money the Skolkovo benefactors gave to the Clinton Foundation, but based on those disclosures, the money ranges from $6.5 to $23.5 million. However, keep in mind that the Clinton Foundation has admitted that it has failed to release the names of all of its contributors, so the amount could be substantially higher. “
While the money flowed, so did warnings that are cited by Solomon.
One of them was from the United States European Command, or EUCOM:
“Skolkovo is an ambitious enterprise, aiming to promote technology transfer generally, by inbound direct investment, and occasionally, through selected acquisitions. As such, Skolkovo is arguably an overt alternative to clandestine industrial espionage — with the additional distinction that it can achieve such a transfer on a much larger scale and more efficiently,”
EUCOM’s intelligence bulletinwrote in 2013, according to Solomon.
“Implicit in Russia’s development of Skolkovo is a critical question — a question that Russia may be asking itself — why bother spying on foreign companies and government laboratories if they will voluntarily hand over all the expertise Russia seeks?”
By 2014, the project Hillary Clinton helped launch was being publicly questioned by the FBI.
“The (Skolkovo) Foundation may be a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research, development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial applications,” Assistant Special Agent in Charge Lucia Ziobro wrote in the
Business Journal of Boston.
Solomon also brought in concerns that were raised by the efforts by the Russian agency Rosatom to buy the Canadian firm Uranium One, which had “massive U.S. uranium reserves.”
“The FBI had equal concern about Rosatom’s acquisition of Uranium One. An informer named William Douglas Campbell had gotten inside the Russian nuclear giant in 2009 and gathered evidence that Rosatom’s agents in the United States were engaged in a racketeering scheme involving kickbacks, extortion and bribery,” he wrote.
“Campbell also obtained written evidence that Putin wanted to buy Uranium One as part of a strategy to obtain monopolistic domination of the global uranium markets, including leverage over the U.S.
“Campbell also warned that a major in-kind donor to the Clinton Global Initiative was simultaneously working for Rosatom while the decision for U.S. approval was pending before Hillary Clinton’s department. Ultimately, her department and the Obama administration approved the transaction.
“The evidence shows the Clintons financially benefited from Russia — personally and inside their charity — at the same time they were involved in U.S. government actions that rewarded Moscow and increased U.S. security risks.”
Solomon then brought his concentration to bear on the 2016 election, and the connections between the Clinton camp and Russia that led to the 2016 dossier against Trump.
The Clinton campaign hired the political intelligence firm Fusion GPS for opposition research on Trump, Hill wrote. He noted that Glenn Simpson, co-founder Fusion GPS, and Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence agent hired by Fusion GPS to compile the dossier, both “had Russian-tied business connections, too, while they formulated the dossier.”
At one point, Solomon quoted California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes as saying there was “obvious collusion the Democrats had through Glenn Simpson and through Fusion GPS, that they were talking directly to Russia.”
“Collusion can be criminal if it involves conspiracy to break federal laws, or it can involve perfectly legal, unwitting actions that still jeopardize America’s security against a ‘frenemy’ like Russia,” Solomon wrote in summing up his research.
“There is clear evidence now that shows Hillary Clinton’s family and charity profited from Moscow and simultaneously facilitated official government actions benefiting Russia that have raised security concerns.
“And there’s irrefutable evidence that her opposition research effort on Trump — one that inspired an FBI probe — was carried out by people who got information from Russia and were consorting with Russians,” Solomon wrote.
“It would seem those questions deserve at least some of the scrutiny afforded the Trump-Russia collusion inquiry that is now two-plus years old.”
