The Clinton Foundation was hit by another bombshell report this week, reporting that the controversial organization’s donor disclosure site understates support that the Clinton Global Initiative took from a firm linked to the Russian energy giant that bought Uranium One.
The Hill reports that the Foundation’s disclosure site shows APCO Worldwide gave between $25,000 and $50,000 over the last decade. However, the outlet reports that APCO “provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in pro-bono services and in-kind contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) between 2008 and 2016.”
Strikingly, the outlet reports a “significant increase” in contributions, as APCO was paid $3 million to work for Rosatom subsidiary Tenex in 2010 and 2011. This was at the time the sale of Uranium One — including a third of U.S. uranium stocks — was being approved by the Obama administration, including by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer broke the Uranium One scandal in his 2015 book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. In the book, he reported that Clinton’s State Department, along with other federal agencies, approved the transfer of 20 percent of all U.S. uranium to Russia and that nine foreign investors in the deal gave $145 million to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s personal charity, the Clinton Foundation.
The New York Times confirmed Schweizer’s Uranium One revelations in a 4,000-word front-page story. The scandal hurt Clinton throughout her doomed presidential campaign and hit the headlines this year again in October, when The Hill reported that ahead of the deal, the FBI had uncovered “substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering” to expand Russia’s nuclear footprint in the U.S. as early as 2009.
According to The Hill, the agency also found that Russian nuclear officials had routed “millions of dollars” to the U.S. to benefit the Clinton Foundation, once again raising the specter of “pay-to-play.”
Clinton has furiously denied such claims, but multiple congressional committees are now looking into the Uranium One issue, and such calls are likely to be fueled by the Hill’s latest reporting, which found that APCO estimated its total cash support totaled $45,600 and in-kind support exceeded $1 million since 2008.
The outlet reports:
APCO officials said they were hired to clear the way for progress around Obama administration decisions that included restoring the civilian cooperation agreement and freeing the Russian state-controlled company from Cold War-era export restrictions. They were also to allay concerns inside Congress about Russia growing its uranium business inside the United States.
While the firm told the Hill that the firm’s pro-bono work “increased significantly” when they started working for Tenex, it claimed there was no connection between professional and pro-bono work as the units were separate.
“APCO Worldwide’s activities involving client work on behalf of Tenex and The Clinton Global Initiative were totally separate and unconnected in any way,” Executive Chairwoman and Founder Margery Kraus wrote in a statement to The Hill. “All activities on these two unconnected activities were appropriate, publicly documented from the outset and consistent with regulations and the law. Any assertion otherwise is false, unfounded and a lie.”
The firm also said it had nothing to do with the Uranium One deal and was instead focused on making it easier for Tenex to win commercial deals with American utilities to buy Russian uranium.
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill also told the Hill that Clinton never met with APCO officials during her time as secretary of state, and donations to CGI did not affect policy decisions.
Foundation officials told the outlet that the site — set up as part of a special agreement when Clinton became secretary of state — did not include in-kind and pro-bono donations and only cash contributions were reported.
The Hill notes that the lack of transparency raises questions about “the thoroughness of Hillary and Bill Clinton’s conflicts disclosures as well as the attractiveness of their foundation and of CGI to special interests seeking to curry favor with the State Department.”
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.
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