Clinton Guru Podesta’s Brother Lobbied for Scandal-ridden Uranium One

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

If you love the team that put together the Clinton Foundation and all of its various corrupt dealings with foreign nations, you’ll love the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign. It now turns out that John Podesta, chair of Hillary’s presidential campaign – and the same man who called the allegations of Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cashconspiracy theories” – has a brother who runs a company, The Podesta Group, that lobbied the State Department on behalf of Uranium One while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and beyond.

Uranium One is, of course, the uranium firm that sent a “flow of cash” to the Clinton Foundation as the Russian government gained increasing ownership of the company; the State Department had to sign off on the Russians’ encroachment into the American uranium market. The Clinton Foundation did disclose its relationship with Uranium One in Hillary’s State Department disclosures. According to the Daily Caller, Uranium One “paid the Podesta Group $40,000 to lobby the State Department, the Senate, the National Park Service and the National Security Council for ‘international mining projects,’ according to a July 20, 2012 filing.”

Hillary’s relationship with John Podesta goes back to the first Clinton administration. During Bill Clinton’s second term, Podesta acted as chief of staff. After leaving, he created the Center for American Progress, a Clinton-backed leftist think tank designed to forward the political goals of the Clintons. As the Christian Science Monitor reported when Podesta joined Hillary Clinton’s campaign back in January:

Podesta is the guy people call on when the going gets tough: He served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff from 1998 to 2001, helping control a series of crises including Clinton’s impeachment trial. The Obama administration brought him on to help the President steer a path through Congressional impasses and to avert embarrassments like the Affordable Care Act’s botched rollout.

Podesta’s relationship with the Clintons didn’t waver during Hillary’s time in the White House; his own ties with the Obama administration grew stronger when he became a senior advisor to the Obama administration in late 2013, before resigning this year to join Hillary’s campaign.

Podesta isn’t the only member of the Clinton team embroiled in Clinton Foundation corruption. Hillary’s new top fundraiser is Dennis Cheng, the former chief development officer for the Clinton Foundation, which means he did all the fundraising for that organization. Cheng has not been asked any questions thus far about his relationship with the Clinton Foundation or the new Clinton 2016 campaign.

Just as President Obama magically transformed his campaign organization, Obama for America, into a political action group, Organizing for Action, to lobby for his preferred governmental policies, Hillary Clinton has transformed the Clinton Foundation and its constellation of allies into her 2016 campaign.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.

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