The People's Champion or Staggering White Privilege?

I was working on another Clinton Campaign/Finance story reviewing replies to my story "Hillary Clinton's Shifting Stance on Abortion and Birth Control" when I read the following reply, which just jumped off the page !

“Everyday Americans need a champion & I want to be that champion”- Hillary Clinton, April 12, 2015.

When "Everyday Americans" set up illegal servers in their house, accept foreign illegal donations to their foundation, delete 30,000 emails & scrub their servers while under Congressional subpoenas, they go to jail. Talk about White Privilege.

When you look at the Clinton history of controversies over the years and recently you really begin to wonder, how, why are they still a feature in American politics. Anyone else except maybe the Kennedy's could never have weathered the storm(s). The majority of the press are even more critical (and growing more so each day) of the Obama administration than they seem to be of the Clinton dynasty. There is however a recently emerging story which is beginning to gain real traction, one which is so "fantastical" that as you read it, it almost sounds like a movie plot for some barely plausible espionage film, but which brings up some very strong ethics/conflict of interest questions, and potential for genuine criminal charges.

How is a Canadian/Russian Uranium Deal tied directly and indirectly tied to the infamous Clinton cashcow/charity known as The Clinton Foundation? You know that same organization which is supposed to champion "Women's Rights as Human rights" by taking millions from countries where women are treated worse than cattle? Yeah that "charity". We are going to look at two sources for this story (there are others) but these two sources are on decidedly opposite sides of the political aisle. First The New York Times By JO BECKER and MIKE McINTIRE APRIL 23, 2015

The headline on the website Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when its precursor served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”

The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.

But the untold story behind that story is one that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one. At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company’s assets to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show.

American political campaigns are barred from accepting foreign donations. But foreigners may give to foundations in the United States. In the days since Mrs. Clinton announced her candidacy for president, the Clinton Foundation has announced changes meant to quell longstanding concerns about potential conflicts of interest in such donations; it has limited donations from foreign governments, with many, like Russia’s, barred from giving to all but its health care initiatives. That policy stops short of Mrs. Clinton’s agreement with the Obama administration, which prohibited all foreign government donations while she served as the nation’s top diplomat.

Read more

You owe it to yourself to read the rest of this article by The Times as there is much more to the story, as I'm sure will be revealed in the coming days. Fox News breaks open the possibilities of a criminal investigation.

With a sitting Democratic senator recently indicted on federal bribery and corruption charges, top criminal defense lawyers in the nation’s capital say Democratic presidential front runner Hillary Clinton could conceivably face similar scrutiny, amid mounting disclosures about the tangled finances of her family’s philanthropic foundation.

The new book “Clinton Cash” by Peter Schweizer, an investigative reporter affiliated with the right-leaning Hoover Institution, has unleashed a torrent of conflict-of-interest allegations relating to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s own conduct during her tenure, from 2009 to 2013, as secretary of state.

Particular scrutiny – by Fox News, the Washington Post, and the New York Times – has focused on why the State Department, under Clinton’s leadership, green-lighted a foreign transaction that enriched major donors to the foundation while placing an estimated 20 percent of America’s stockpile of uranium - the fissile material that can be used to make nuclear weapons -under the control of a Kremlin-backed Russian firm.

It was, moreover, shortly after the uranium deal went through that former President Bill Clinton nailed down a $500,000 fee for a speaking event in Moscow.

“There’s certainly smoke there,” said Caleb Burns, a partner at the Washington law firm Wiley Rein LLC, who has long experience handling financial and public integrity cases. “The question’s going to be whether or not she took any official action in exchange for those donations. If she did, I think there is going to be a high, high likelihood of additional scrutiny, either from Capitol Hill or from the Department of Justice itself.”

... “If the facts suggest that there was a linkage between what Secretary Clinton did in her official capacity and the money that was coming into the Clinton Foundation,” Burns said, “this would fall under 18 U.S.C. 201 as a potential bribery violation.”

That statute provides that a bribe has occurred, among other circumstances, whenever “a public official directly or indirectly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally for or because of any official act performed or to be performed by such official.”

C. Boyden Gray, who served as White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush, told Fox News the money that linked the uranium deal to the Clintons and their foundation “is very hard to dissect from the personal,” and creates, at a minimum, the appearance of a conflict of interest, particularly “when one of them is in office and money is coming in, in connection with issues over which that person in office has jurisdiction and responsibility.” Read more

They probably will escape justice yet again, and anyone who says they are anything but "innocent" will be deemed a "right wing conspiracy theorist". Saturday Night Live recently opened an episode with this rich parody of the designed to look like everyday announcement of Hillary's latest run for our Nation's highest office on Twitter and YouTube.

I find myself wondering how the Clintons have dodged justice and controvesy for decades, and the only conclusion I can draw is something their supporters throw up in the faces of Clinton opposition, that of White Priviledge. Or have I been eating paint chips again?