Friday, April 24, 2015

Another day, another scandal

Every once in a while, the New York Times remembers that it was once a great newspaper and not just a media auxiliary to the Democratic National Committee. This it did yesterday with a nice bit of reporting on the latest Clinton scandal, in which they lubricated a deal in which Canadian tycoons got in bed with Russian uranium merchants—while Mrs Clinton was the American Secretary of State! The headline tells it all:

Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation as Russians Pressed for Control of Uranium Company


And it wasn’t just the phony philanthropy, which would be more accurately described as a 401K retirement fund crossed with a political-action committee. Bill Clinton was paid half a million dollars for a speech in Moscow, thus putting his wife's $300,000 speaking fee to shame. (The fees of course go to the Clinton Foundation, so nobody has to pay tax on them.)

Like other of the family’s convoluted schemes, the details are mind-numbing. They involve Canadian mining interests, $2,350,000 in donations that should have been reported to the State Department but weren't, uranium mines in Kazakhstan and the United States, and finally a wave-through by no less an institution than the U.S. State Department, whose chief was … well, you know. Vladimir Putin regarded the deal as such a triumph that the Pravda website trumpeted: RUSSIAN NUCLEAR ENERGY CONQUERS THE WORLD.

It would have been nice to troll through Mrs. Clinton’s personal emails using the keyword “uranium.” But those records of course have been destroyed.



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