Armageddon (9 page)

But how the foundation spends its money is only a small part of the controversy it has generated. It's whom it gets its money from that is the real nub of its problems.

One of the most dangerous examples of this interplay between donations and favors concerned control of the world's uranium supply. The saga, spelled out in Peter Schweizer's landmark work
Clinton Cash,
involved Frank Giustra, a mining executive and a friend of Bill's and a member of the foundation's board. Giustra has pledged to donate $130 million.

It began when Giustra sold his mining company to Rosatom, a Russian firm seeking to acquire a dominant position over the world's uranium supply. Former President Clinton helped Giustra get a lucrative uranium mining deal with the nation of Kazakhstan. Giustra, in turn, helped arrange for Bill to be paid a half-million-dollar speaking fee. Giustra also arranged for Uranium One, a Russian-controlled company, to donate $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. Giustra personally donated $31.3 million to the foundation.

Kazakhstan, ruled by an iron-fisted tyrant named Nursultan Nazarbayev, is home to 20% of the world's uranium deposits. Giustra brought Bill Clinton there for a visit with Nazarbayev in 2005, during which Clinton praised the dictator for “opening up the social and political life of your country.” Bill endorsed Nazarbayev's effort to become leader of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2009. The United States refused to follow up on Bill's lead and endorse him itself due to corruption and rights abuses, and he lost. But the real purpose of Bill's endorsement was achieved—Nazarbayev got a quote from a former American president that he can use to answer those who criticize him.

A day after President Clinton left Kazakhstan, its government signed a $450 million deal with Giustra's company that the
New York Times
reported propelled the company to becoming one of the world's leading uranium producers overnight.
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Then the Russians moved in. In 2007, a South African company bought Giustra's company, and, in 2010, the Russian government-sponsored uranium company tried to buy the South African concern. But because the South African company, Uranium One, owned mining interests in the United States, the deal had to be approved by the US government Committee on Foreign Investment, a body that included Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state.

The stakes were high. Uranium One owned 20% of all uranium mined in the United States. Since we are not self-sufficient in that crucial metal, any deal that transfers ownership of our precious stockpiles requires government approval. And when the country getting control of a fifth of our uranium is Russia, the stakes are even higher.

On June 29, 2010, a few weeks after Russia sought to buy Uranium One, a Russian investment bank with ties to the Kremlin paid Bill (and therefore Hillary) $500,000 for a speech in Moscow. And in October 2010, the deal was approved by Hillary's committee. Stinks right? This cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack. Originally published by Peter Schweizer in his book
Clinton Cash
, the story was researched by
The New York Times
, a liberal organ. They subsequently ran it on page one. Schweizer's book is filled with conflict-of-interest stories like this one, but the uranium deal should draw particular fire as we run against Hillary. We can be thankful that no less a spokesman than Donald Trump will be attacking this loathsome deal.

Regardless of the endless contradictory explanations that Hillary has given for her use of her private server, we know this: Hillary's sole purpose in keeping a secret server in her Chappaqua basement was to make sure that neither people in government nor those seeking her
documents under the Freedom of Information Act would ever see them. Why? The most benign reason is her paranoia about secrecy. She never wants anyone to see anything. And, of course, she knew that she would run for president and wanted to make sure nothing transacted over e-mail would be a problem for her in the future. The more nefarious reason is that she wanted to transact business that could benefit her family financially. Transactions like helping the U.A.E. and the Saudis, who were the most generous benefactors to the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton bank accounts through speeches and other business arrangements.

We also know that Hillary knew all about the vulnerability of her unsecured Blackberry when she repeatedly refused a government issued one and insisted on using her own. In her own book
Hard Choices,
which chronicles her years as Secretary of State, Hillary describes the explicit warnings she received from State Department security officers to refrain from using her personal Blackberry in foreign countries. But Hillary's e-mails document how she and her top staff repeatedly flaunted that warning and, instead, used their cell phones all over the world.

In
Hard Choices,
Hillary recalled that:

She repeated that supposed protocol in a 2014 video released by the Daily Caller, claiming that she always had to leave cell phones on the plane because “they would get it . . . in a nanosecond.”

So there's no question that she knew what she was supposed to do. She just chose to disregard it. E-mails show, that despite the
acknowledged warnings, Hillary and her top aides routinely—and carelessly—used their Blackberrys all over the world.

In one strange e-mail, it appears that Kurt Campbell, Former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, left his Blackberry in a car in Bejing and needed the Chinese to unlock the car and get it for him. Here's the exchange in an e-mail to Hillary from her personal assistant, Monica Hanley:

First, Hillary asks: “Any luck for Kurt?”

Then Hanley's response:

Some security!

Hillary refused to use a government issued Blackberry, even though Eric Boswell, the Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security at the time, issued another strong warning about the dangers of using an unclassified Blackberry:

But Hillary continued to use her unsecured Blackberry in Ireland, Paris, China, Russia, the U.K., Georgia, Estonia, Tanzania, and who knows where else.

Although Clinton denies that her Blackberry was ever hacked,
The Daily Caller
reported on a March 5, 2009 e-mail that suggests otherwise. The e-mail appears to be from Boswell, but is heavily redacted:

So what was the intelligence they had regarding the vulnerability of Hillary's unsecured Blackberry?

Now Guccifer, the Romanian hacker who infiltrated Sid Blumenthal's e-mails to and from Hillary, has claimed that he hacked directly into Hillary's e-mails, too. In an odd turn of events, Guccifer was extradited by the Justice Department from a Romanian prison where he was serving a sentence for other hacking crimes. He has said that Hillary's server was easy to hack.

The timing of Guccifer's extradition on a charge of hacking into the e-mails of private citizens is odd. It's not exactly a priority case for the Justice Department. He was already in jail serving a seven-year term, and could not hack anything. And he was extradited for only 18 months. That's very odd. Because if he were to be tried and convicted, he might get a sentence of more than 18 months. So, is it possible that the FBI brought Guccifer to the U.S. to talk about Hillary's e-mails?

The FBI is still investigating Hillary's use of e-mails and has admitted that it is a criminal investigation. Hillary's top aides have been notified that the agency intends to question them—and Hillary too.

Each week brings new information on Hillary's use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state. And it seems that each revelation is coupled with Hillary's release of a new restatement of her position.

• • When the server was first discovered in March 2015, Hillary originally insisted that no classified information was ever transmitted on her servers. (It's not illegal to have a private server; it is illegal to use it for classified information.)
  
• • Then her story changed to insist that she never personally sent or received classified e-mails.
  
• • Then, at least 104 e-mails were released by the State Department that were classified that Hillary wrote and sent herself.
  
• • So then her story changed again to say that she never sent or received e-mails with “classification markings.” This revision
  of her defense raised two questions that have not yet been answered satisfactorily:
  
  1. 1. On some of the e-mails, Hillary is caught directing her staff to remove the classification marking and to send the information to her as a “paperless” document. This would vitiate her defense that none of the docs were marked classified; and
     
  2. 2. Hillary, as secretary of state, is one of the few people who is charged with the duty of deciding what is classified and what is not. Many of her documents contained material that was obviously classified and, marked or not, she should have known it.
     

The State Department, in releasing Hillary's e-mails sent over her private server, redacted material from hundreds and even thousands of them. Each redaction is presumably of classified material, undermining further Hillary's claim not to have used the server for classified material.

At this writing, we have no idea how this scandal will end up. Some predict an indictment. Others suggest a special prosecutor will be appointed. Many fear that Attorney General Loretta Lynch will refuse to move against Hillary once she becomes the Democratic nominee. Then the question will be: What did the FBI investigators find and what did they recommend to Attorney General Lynch? Any way it comes down, the e-mail scandal will be devastating for Hillary. But for our purposes, the very fact that Hillary so wanted to guard her secrecy that she used a private server and engendered all this unnecessary controversy emphasizes Hillary's penchant for secrecy and paranoia and is, in itself, a pretty good reason not to elect her.

“Even paranoids can have enemies,” said Henry Kissinger.
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The former secretary of state probably wasn't directly referring to his
successor, but it's not a bad fit. Hillary has far more than her share of enemies, critics, and partisan opponents. So do most politicians. The longer they have played the game, the more they attract. But the good ones handle it lightly. Like Reagan, they don't dwell on it and tend to laugh off the attacks.

Then there is the Nixon/Hillary sort who let their resentments fester and spread. They brood over slights and suspect everyone of being an enemy. Hillary's entire political career is one big example of how such paranoia can be one's own undoing. Like a Greek tragedy where the heroine is undone by her shortcomings and defects, Hillary's paranoia has gotten her into no end of trouble time after time after time.

Dick recalls from his own dealings with her how often she needed to be saved from her own paranoia. In August 1996, Dick and Eileen attended Bill Clinton's 60th birthday party. Typical of the Clintons, it was not a small intimate affair but a gigantic fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall in New York City to amass money for his reelection campaign. In the middle of Bill's speech, a group of gay demonstrators called Act Up stood in their seats and shouted at the president, demanding that he veto the Defense of Marriage Act and allocate more to AIDS research. The cops hurried over and removed them, with the president cautioning them, in his microphone, to be respectful and not to injure anyone and to respect their rights.

Hillary was not so tolerant a few days later when Dick met with her and the Convention Committee to finalize plans for the Democratic National Convention to be held three weeks hence. She was in a foul mood. “Were you at the birthday party?” she asked Dick, pointing her finger in his face.

“Yes, Hillary, Eileen and I both went,” he answered.

“Where were you sitting? How much were your seats?” she asked. Briefly, Dick wondered if she was trying to figure out if he paid the $1,000 maximum.

When Dick told her he had, her real purpose in the interrogation emerged. “Did you see those gay demonstrators?”

“Yes,” Dick replied. You couldn't miss them.

“Do you think they paid for their own seats?” she followed up.

“I don't know.”

“Well I'm sure they didn't. Where would they get the thousand dollars each? They were planted there by the Republicans who paid their way so they would disrupt our birthday party,” she said, her voice rising in intensity and volume, her face crunching into a hateful grimace.

She was off. “They're going to do that at our convention. They'll plant people in the galleys and get them to scream and yell and disrupt the convention during Bill's speech and mine.” She continued: “I want to know who is in that [convention] hall. I want IDs, Social Security numbers, background checks on every single person in that hall.”