5 ‘Clinton Cash’ Revelations That Have Leftists Steaming

Breitbart Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash has the Hillary Clinton campaign so riled up that they have now posted an entire webpage attempting to debunk claims in the book via obfuscation and misdirection.

Thus far, the so-called Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has apparently hijacked The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other leftist outlets, all of whom are tracking the claims Schweizer makes. But it’s not just the nouveau VRWC concerned about corruption in the Clinton camp. The entire left should be furious with the Clintons – not merely over their corruption, which the left routinely excuses, but over their capitulation to some of the worst human rights abusers and environmental exploiters on the planet. Here are the top five new Clinton Cash revelations that should spark ire between Hillary Clinton and her leftist base:

Mowing Down Rainforests. According to Clinton Cash, just after Hillary and Bill Clinton spent an evening with the president of Colombia, the government of Colombia promptly granted exclusive approval to Prima Colombia Properties. That company was owned by longtime Clinton Foundation donor Frank Giustra, As Schweizer writes:

Days after Hillary left Bogotá, Prima Colombia Properties, which Frank Giustra has ownership interest in through a shell company called Flagship Industries, announced that it had acquired the right to cut timber in a biologically diverse forest on the pristine Colombian shoreline.

Giustra has a long history with the Clintons, giving the foundation over $100 million and allowing Bill to use his plane some 26 times. Giustra allegedly used his connection with Bill to gain connections to the Kazakh government, benefitting his companies. Giustra was also a major shareholder in Uranium One, and his former partners allegedly benefited heavily from the relationship between Uranium One leadership and the Clintons when Hillary’s State Department looked the other way on Russia’s buy-up of the uranium company.

Fostering More Oil Drilling. Schweizer reports that in June 2010, just after Hillary and Bill spent a charming evening with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, Pacific Rubiales, another company associated with Giustra, won a lucrative drilling lease including six plots from the Colombian government. These were controversial plots, including acreage in the Putumayo Basin and the Llanos Basin near the Andes Mountains, as well as the Ciusiana-Cupiagua.

Protecting an African Warlord. It wasn’t just Kazakh dictators to whom the Clintons lent a helping hand. Hillary Clinton, as senator from New York, had cosponsored the 2006 Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act, which endangered the business of Lukas Lundin, a major Swedish mining investor. In 2007, the Clinton Foundation received $100 million from Lundin for Africa. The Lundin Group was already in hot water for drilling for oil in Sudan, which was under international sanctions; at the time, the Lundin Group was “under investigation by the International Prosecution Chamber in Stockholm for complicity in ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity,’” according to Clinton Cash. Once Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, she stopped implementing “any of the key provisions in the law that she had strongly advocated only a few years earlier – before Lundin made his contribution.” That allowed Lundin to keep reaping enormous profits.

Open Pit Coal Mining. In June 2009, the Clinton Giustra initiative took two millions shares of Polo Resources. Within two months, the US ambassador to Bangladesh helped facilitate open pit mining in that country via the energy advisor to the prime minister of Bangladesh, a move that benefitted – you guessed it – Polo Resources, which had a stake in the Phulbari Mines. In February 2012, the United Nations announced, “The construction of an open-pit coal mine in Bangladesh could displace hundreds of thousands of people and jeopardize their access to basic needs.” The UN recommended that the Phulbari coal mine not be allowed to proceed.

Nuclear Development. Leaving aside the allegations regarding Uranium One, in 2014, Sant Chatwal, a longtime Clinton friend and donor, pleaded guilty to funneling over $180,000 to candidates including Hillary Clinton. He said openly that he “spent tons of money, time and effort to make sure that the [Indian-US] nuclear deal goes through.” As senator, Hillary Clinton remained “remarkably silent” as the United States began to make moves to loosen nuclear provisions of international agreements with regard to India. Over time, the Clintons became close with one Amar Singh, an Indian politician who gave somewhere between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. In the end, Schweizer writes, then-Senator Clinton ended up backing “the passage of the Indian nuclear deal, despite the public opposition of her closest advisers and the fact that it was a clear reversal of her previous policy positions.”

Hillary’s troubles with corruption allegations aren’t going to end anytime soon. She’s been able to avoid total blowback from the left thus far, despite those allegations. But should the left latch on to any of her violations of basic human rights and environmentalist core principles, that immunity could disappear quickly.

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.