Posted on 07/17/2018 9:31:29 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Russian President Vladimir Putin offered a novel idea to advance the Russia investigation during a joint news conference with President Donald Trump in Helsinki.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team could come to his country, Putin said, if Russian investigators were allowed to go the United States to dig into alleged tax evasion by American-born financier Bill Browder and his associates.
"Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over 1.5 billion dollars in Russia," Putin said through a translator. "They never paid any taxes."
Putin continued.
"They sent a huge amount of money, over 400 million, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton," he said. "Well, that’s their personal case. It might have been legal, the contribution itself, but the way the money was earned was illegal."
Did Browder's associates send $400 million to Hillary Clinton's campaign?
No. We found $17,700 donated to Clinton and another $297,000 to the Democratic National Committee.
The Russians say that Browder and his partners at Ziff Brothers Investments, a New York venture capital firm, illegally syphoned billions of rubles out of the country. To add salt to the wound, Browder had led the charge to pass the 2012 Magnitsky Act, a law that penalizes Russian officials suspected of sanctioning the death of Browder’s lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison.
The Ziff brothers came up during the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr. and others, and Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign. According to transcripts from Senate Judiciary Committee interviews, Veselnitskaya’s materials described the Ziffs as Democratic donors, although Trump’s son said they gave both to Democrats and Republicans.
We reached out to the Russian Embassy and the Russian consulate in Washington to get details on the $400 million donation and had not heard back in time for our deadline.
Given that Veselnitskaya tied Browder and the Ziff brothers together, we researched their political donations.
Browder became a British citizen and can’t legally contribute to U.S. candidates. Ziff Brothers Investments through its executives can give freely, and they have.
Before we get into their political contributions, we also wondered if Putin could have been talking about money that went to the Clinton Foundation. In past years, Browder and Ziff Brothers Investments had given to the Clinton Global Initiative, a project of the Clinton Foundation, but the total was not more than $110,000, records show.
In the 2016 election cycle, Ziff Brothers Investments gave $1.7 million. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, nearly two-thirds, or about $1.1 million, went to Democratic committees, and the rest to Republicans.
The center listed the firm’s top recipients:
|
Recipient |
Amount |
|
DNC Services Corp |
$296,966 |
|
Senate Majority PAC |
$250,000 |
|
Defending Main Street |
$200,000 |
|
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte |
$40,000 |
|
Democratic State Central Cmte/Louisiana |
$35,412 |
|
National Republican Congressional Cmte |
$32,400 |
|
Democratic Party of Montana |
$28,622 |
|
Democratic Executive Cmte of Florida |
$27,287 |
|
Democratic Party of New Hampshire |
$27,287 |
|
Democratic Party of Virginia |
$27,287 |
|
Democratic Party of Wisconsin |
$27,287 |
|
Georgia Federal Elections Cmte |
$27,287 |
Federal law puts tighter limits on contributions to individual candidates. Here, the Ziffs mainly put their money into incumbents, and Republicans did better by a margin of about $145,000 to $46,000. Clinton’s campaign received $17,700.
Unless Putin had other Browder associates in mind, his figure of $400 million going to the Clinton campaign is a massive exaggeration. Between the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, the Ziffs gave about $315,000.
The Clinton campaign raised $563 million overall, so Putin's sum would account for nearly three-fourths of all donations. (PACs affiliated with Clinton's campaign raised an additional $231 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.)
Putin said associates of Bill Browder gave $400 million to the Clinton campaign. The associates appear to be the Ziff brothers. According to public data, Ziff Brothers Investments gave about $315,000 to Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
Overall, the firm gave about $1.1 million to Democratic committees around the country.
The exaggeration is so great, we rate this claim Pants on Fire.
Usual Media quote this cycle: “It’s not whether it is true or false, WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE CHARGE!”
The hypocricy of the communists and their media is stunnning.
DATA Sources: Clinton Foundation, CGEP (Canada);
Canadian tax records; compiled by Alberto Cuadra and
Rosalind Helderman May 3 at 8:11 PM
ARTICLE LINK http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/wealthy-canadian-helps-fund-the-clinton-foundation/2015/05/03/f855ea22-f1ea-11e4-90bc-afe06f530791_graphic.html
============================================
The NY Times reported the "Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership" collected about $33 million US tax dollars from Hillary's State Dept between 2008 and 2013.....$25 million of which was passed back across the border to the US-based Clinton Foundation.
Giustra then pledged $100 million to the Foundation after Clinton helped him clinch the mega-bucks uranium deal.
ITEM---millions of dollars and 1,100 donors are shrouded in mystery in the Canadian Giustra/Clinton operation. The Clinton Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding with the Obama White House agreeing to reveal its contributors every year. The agreement stipulates that the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative (as the charity was then-known) is part of the Clinton Foundation and must follow the same protocols.
SURPRISE: It hasnt.
Caught w/ his pants down, Giustra/s backtracking like crazy---saying Canadas federal privacy law forbids the Canadian-registered Clinton charity, from revealing its donors.
A memo he provided news organs cites fiduciary obligations to its contributors and Canada’s Personal Information Privacy and Electronic Disclosure Act. “We are not allowed to disclose even to the Clinton Foundation the names of our donors,” Giustra says.
However, Canadian tax and privacy law experts were dubious of the Clinton/Giustra claims. A former director knowledgeable about tax policy at Canada's Department of Finance, said he wasnt aware of any tax laws that would prevent the Clinton charity from releasing its donor names. " There's nothing that would preclude them from releasing donor names. It's entirely up to them."
I’d be ready to believe Putin before Browder, Hillary, Jon Greenberg or anything from Politifact.
Putin to Trump in the secret part of the meeting:
“Here’s the document Hillary’s courier delivered with the instructions on how to break into her closet server, the DNC server and Huma’s laptop and make it look like a hacking. I cost $400M and it was worth every ruble.”
Uranium One Company 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.
============================================
The NYT report noted that these uranium investors
also donated to the Clinton Foundation, as follows:
<><> Canadian Frank Giustra—globe-trotting pal of Bill-—donated $31.3 million and a pledge for $100 million more to the Clinton Foundation. Giustra built a company that later merged with Uranium One. Seems to have facilitated the uranium sell-off.
<><> Canadian Ian Telfer—donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. Mining investor who was chairman of Uranium One when an arm of the Russian government, Rosatom, acquired it.
<><>Paul Reynolds—donated $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation Adviser on 2007 UrAsia-Uranium One merger. Later helped raise $260 million for the company.
<><>Frank Holmes-—donated $250,000 to $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Chief Executive of U.S. Global Investors Inc., which held $4.7 million in Uranium One shares in the first quarter of 2011.
<><> Canadian Neil Woodyer-—Founded Endeavour Mining with Giustra—donated $50,000 to $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Adviser to Uranium One.
<><> GMP Securities Ltd.-—Donating portion of profits to the Clinton Foundation. Worked on debt issue that raised $260 million for Uranium One. (could also be part of the money-laundering apparat---aided and abetted under cover of the "do-good foundations.")
I don’t think Putin was claiming that he found this informationn on the internet search site for political contributions.
As if money funneled through intelligence channels would be on the books...
It would be illegal for him to make a $400 million donation. That there is no documented record is utterly meaningless.
400,000,000.00 rubles comes to $6.4 MM dollars.
(HAT TIP THE NEW AMRICAN-—FR POSTED)
EXCERPT-—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been one of Putin’s biggest enablers, facilitating enormous transfers of advanced technology to the Russian regime she now sees as a threat. It was Secretary Clinton, please recall, who, in May 2009, presented Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a red “reset” button, and then mugged with Lavrov in a giggly photo-fest celebrating the U.S.-Russian “convergence” agenda.
Clinton and Lavrov then served as joint coordinators of the U.S.-Russian Bilateral Presidential Commission established in July of that year by President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The annual reports of the Bilateral Presidential Commission are replete with chummy photos of Clinton-Lavrov, Obama-Medvedev, Biden-Putin, etc., as well as details of the many deals worked out to give technology, knowhow, capital, and other resources to Moscow.
Among the many important projects of this type promoted by the Clinton-Lavrov team is the huge Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, which we warned about repeatedly in The New American as far back as 2010 (see, for instance, “’Breathing Pixie Dust’ Investing in Russia,” August 5, 2010).
Putin’s new Skolkovo research and innovation center on the outskirts of Moscow, heralded as “Russia’s Silicon Valley,” is benefiting from billions of dollars of investment and prime technology from Cisco Systems, Boeing, Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and other U.S. tech giants, thanks to support and promotion by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Then there is the case of billionaire Russian playboy Mikhail Prokhorov (see here and here), who, during Clinton’s reign at State, was allowed not only to buy up the New Jersey Nets (now the Brooklyn Nets) NBA franchise and the Barclays Center in New York City, but also to play a major role through his control of the Russian investment companies ONEXIM Group and Renaissance Capital, both of which played key roles in the Clintons’ aforementioned Uranium One scandal.
Yes, Mr. Trump has made statements that may give security-conscious Americans cause for concern, but deeds speak louder than words. And Hillary Clinton’s deeds speak in 5,000 decibel thunderclaps, declaring to all (except her willfully deaf devotees) that she belongs not sitting behind the president’s desk in the White House, but serving time behind bars in the Big House.
Interesting, cause we heard that Hillary was going to spend about a billion on her campaign.
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