Part 1: Clinton Cash....The Lincoln Bedroom goes Global...The Transfer Bill's Excellent Kazakh Adventure

1

The Lincoln Bedroom goes Global

Ask Team Clinton about the flow of tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation (the formal name is the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, originally called the William J. Clinton Foundation) from foreign governments, corporations, and financiers and you typically get an interesting explanation: it’s a sign of love. “As president, he was beloved around the world, so it should come as no surprise that there has been an outpouring of financial support from around the world to sustain his post-presidential work.” 1 

Ask Bill about the tens of millions of dollars he has made in speaking fees around the world, paid for by the same cast of characters, and you will get an equally charitable explanation: it’s evidence of his desire to help people. By giving these highly paid speeches, Clinton says, “I try to help people think about what’s going on and organize their lives accordingly.” 2 

Millions of dollars as a sign of pure affection; millions more for helping people think about their lives. By this logic, politicians who raise millions of dollars a year must be the most beloved people in America—and the most charitable. 

The reality is that most of what happens in American politics is transactional. People look for ways to influence those in power by throwing money in their direction. Politicians are all too happy to vacuum up contributions from supporters and people who want access or something in return. After politicians leave office, they often trade on their relationships and previous positions to enrich themselves and their families. 

The law dictates how much politicians can collect in campaign contributions, limits their ability to make money on the side, and requires the disclosure of those contributors. Hopefully, politicians are also limited to some extent by their conscience. A sense of decency and good judgment ought to prevent politicians on both sides of the aisle from engaging in certain transactions—even if they think they can get away with it. 

But while there is ample debate about which transactions should be limited and how, there is near universal agreement that the game, however muddy, should be exclusively played by Americans. For this reason, it has long been illegal for foreigners to contribute to US political campaigns. In 2012 two foreign nationals challenged the constitutionality of that law. The US Supreme Court decided 9–0 declaring the law not only constitutional, but eminently reasonable. 3 

The Clintons, however, often take money from foreign entities. And that money, donated to the Clinton Foundation or paid in speaking fees, comes in amounts much larger than any campaign contribution. Indeed, the scope and extent of these payments are without precedent in American politics. As a result, the Clintons have become exceedingly wealthy. 

The big question is whether taking such money constitutes a transaction. The Clintons would undoubtedly argue that it does not. The evidence presented in this book suggests otherwise. 

Any serious journalist or investigator will tell you that proving corruption by a political figure is extremely difficult. Short of someone involved coming forward to give sworn testimony, we don’t know what might or might not have been said in private conversations, the exact nature of a transaction, or why people in power make the decisions they do. This is why the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sets up sting operations: to catch suspected malefactors in the act. 

That is also why investigators look primarily at patterns of behavior. Imagine, for example, that you are exploring whether a politician is doing favors for a major campaign contributor in a manner that might be illegal. If investigators were to find that the timing of major campaign contributions occurred immediately before the politician made a highly favorable decision for the donor, and that this pattern could be well established, such timing would certainly warrant further investigation. 

This was precisely the approach I took in my 2011 book, Throw Them All Out, concerning stock trades and members of Congress. Were members of Congress engaged in insider trading in the stock market? I looked at both their stock trades and their official activities, such as voting on certain bills. I discovered that politicians from both parties had curious patterns in their stock picks, often buying and selling at opportune times. During the 2008 financial crisis, for example, some politicians sold stocks or shorted the market (bet that it would go lower) shortly after receiving secret economic briefings from senior government officials. 

Was this proof that insider trading had taken place? No. As I pointed out in the book, we could not know precisely why the politicians were making these particular trades at those particular times. But the patterns were highly suspicious. Shortly after the release of the book and a 60 Minutes segment on my findings, politicians from both parties cooperated in passing the STOCK Act, which was designed to outlaw congressional insider trading. President Barack Obama condemned the practice during his 2012 State of the Union Address and later signed the STOCK Act into law. (The law was subsequently gutted by Congress and the White House, but that’s another story.) I can proudly say that my findings were attacked by both Republicans and Democrats. 

In a legal sense I could not prove that insider trading had taken place. I didn’t know precisely the motivations at work when stocks were being traded. But the pattern and timing of those trades raised questions so troubling that even members of Congress could not ignore it. 

In 2013 I published a follow-up called Extortion, which argued that members of Congress from both parties were in the habit of “extorting” campaign contributions and other favors from businesses and outside groups. Money flowing into politics was not just about outside interests trying to “bribe” politicians; politicians were knowingly putting outside interests in a position where they had to buy “protection” from them. I also released to the public for the first time the “party dues” lists whereby politicians were required to pay a certain amount of money to their party in order to obtain seats on certain congressional committees. The more important the committee, the more you were expected to pay. I further explained how politicians from both parties were using leadership PACs to feather their own nests, tapping those funds to pay for things that enhanced their own lifestyles. 

Was I able to prove intent or know why politicians were doing what they were doing? Of course not. But as before, the timing of these transactions was highly suspicious. Once again, 60 Minutes ran a segment about my findings which led to legislation being introduced that would restrict how leadership PAC funds were used. And once again, my findings were attacked by both Republicans and Democrats. 

Given my previous focus on bipartisan self-dealing and corruption, why am I now focused on one couple? Do I simply have it in for Bill and Hillary? Am I somehow trying to derail her prospects of being elected president in 2016? 

The answer is pretty straightforward: the global dealings of this political couple deserve bipartisan citizen attention as much as congressional insider trading or campaign contribution extortion did. No one has even come close in recent years to enriching themselves on the scale of the Clintons while they or a spouse continued to serve in public office. The ability of any other ex-politician, whether a former president, senator, or congressman, Republican or Democrat, to accumulate such large amounts of money in such a short period of time is unmatched. It’s not even close. 

To put an even finer point on it: I am focusing specifically on financial transactions involving foreign businesses, investors, and governments. Foreign interests can’t donate to political campaigns. But they can pay money for speeches. And they can donate to the Clinton Foundation. Are they doing so to buy influence? Does the timing of the payments coincide with key decisions made by US government officials? Are they successful in obtaining favorable outcomes? 

Using publicly available sources, including financial records, tax records, government documents, and more, my research team and I have uncovered a repeated pattern of financial transactions coinciding with official actions favorable to Clinton contributors that is troubling enough to warrant (in my opinion) further investigation by law enforcement officers. Just as I couldn’t prove that members of Congress were guilty of trading on inside information, I cannot say exactly why these financial transactions are taking place. But as we will see, their unprecedented scale, the often shady nature of the characters involved, their timing, and their frequently favorable outcomes are all, or ought to be, extremely troubling.

As Hillary famously noted, the Clintons were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001. This statement was immediately challenged as a gross exaggeration. 4,5 Still, their means were modest compared to those of other politicians, such as George W. Bush, whose net worth is $20 million, or John Kerry, whose net worth is well over $100 million. 

Because the Clintons’ financial public disclosures are given in ranges, it’s impossible to know their precise net worth. The Clintons’ confirmed income between 2001 and 2012 was at least $136.5 million, according to the Washington Post. USA Today estimates Bill Clinton’s personal net worth to be $55 million. That’s a very big jump from “dead broke” in a very short time. It is important to consider the fact that payments made to Bill Clinton for speeches or consulting fees benefit wife Hillary and their married net worth. 

Some of this income comes from book deals. The Clinton's have been paid handsomely to write their public memoirs. But the greater part of it by far comes from Bill’s speech making. According to financial disclosures, since leaving the White House, Bill has been paid an annual average of over $8 million for giving speeches around the world. The fees he collects are enormous and unprecedented, sometimes as much as $500,000 or even $750,000 per speech. It’s hard to imagine that Clinton’s pearls of wisdom are worth that much to even the most worshipful audience. 

But as this book will try to show, Bill’s speech making does not happen in a vacuum. It is part of a larger pattern of activity that has never before been exposed to public scrutiny. 

During Hillary’s years of public service, the Clinton's have conducted or facilitated hundreds of large transactions (either as private citizens or government officials) with foreign governments, corporations, and private financiers. Some of these transactions have put millions in their own pockets thanks to Bill’s lucrative lecture career. Others were part of US foreign policy. Others put millions into their legacy project, the Clinton Foundation. As we will see, the sums involved are nothing short of staggering. 

What’s more, many of these exchanges have taken place at a time when these outside interests had matters of importance sitting on Hillary’s desk, whether in the Senate office building or on the third floor of the State Department. The issues seemingly connected to these large transfers are arresting in their sweep and seriousness: the Russian government’s acquisition of American uranium assets; access to vital US nuclear technology; matters related to Middle East policy; the approval of controversial energy projects; the overseas allocation of billions in taxpayer funds; and US human rights policy, to name a few. 

Of even greater concern is that the foreign players giving money to the Clintons include foreign governments (and controversial politicians) in countries like Russia, India, and the United Arab Emirates, where there are major foreign policy issues at stake. In other cases, foreign businessmen appear to have benefited shortly before or after private meetings with foreign officials involving one or both Clintons. There is nothing clearly illegal about these payments. But their source, size, and timing raise serious questions deserving of deeper investigation. While some particular facts or instances have been reported on sporadically elsewhere, the convoluted methods, shady characters, and cumulative pattern of behavior will be described in this book for the first time. 

Also described for the first time is the role of the Clinton Foundation at the center of an elaborate system for generating large donations and fees. 

In June 1999, as his second term was winding down, Bill sat down with his chief fundraiser and forty business leaders at La Grenouille in midtown Manhattan to outline his future vision for a nonprofit organization. 6 The Clinton Foundation would become the centerpiece of his post-presidential work. And both the Clintons were engaged. Hillary played “an important role in shaping both the foundation’s organization and the scope of its work,” in the words of the New York Times. As the foundation’s first chief of staff, Karen Tramontano, put it, “She and I would speak frequently. She had a lot of ideas. All the papers that went to him went to her.” She even attended foundation planning sessions while she served in the US Senate. 7 

The foundation’s mission appeared as much as anything to protect President Clinton’s legacy as well as to bolster his philanthropic work around the world. Its method of operation would be to raise money from donations and regrant the funds or use them to finance its own philanthropic programs, including initiatives involving health care, the environment, and development in the third world. 

Yet even before Clinton left office, the foundation found itself mired in controversy. The timing of certain contributions raised questions as to whether they were tied to official favors. On October 6, 1999, Anheuser-Busch Companies gave the first of five payments totaling $1 million for the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum (or Clinton Library for short), which was funded in part by donations given through the Clinton Foundation. As the New York Times reported, less than a month earlier “the Clinton administration’s Federal Trade Commission dropped a bid to regulate beer, wine, and liquor advertising” allegedly aimed at underage drinkers. 8 

In May 1999 a bankruptcy attorney from Chicago named William A. Brandt Jr. also pledged $1 million. At the time the Clinton Justice Department was investigating Brandt’s testimony to Congress to determine whether he had lied under oath concerning a Clinton fundraiser and the lobbying of federal officials. Three months later, in August, the Department of Justice dropped the investigation and determined that “prosecution is not warranted.” 9 

In 1999 Dr. Richard Machado Gonzalez and his lawyer, Miguel Lausell, were lobbying President Clinton to boost Puerto Rican hospital Medicare reimbursements. This would benefit, among others, Machado, who owned one of the eligible hospitals. Eight months prior to Clinton proposing increased Medicare payments, Lausell gave the Clinton Library a $1 million gift. Machado gave the foundation $100,000 six months after that. 

The controversies reached a fever pitch during Clinton’s final days in office, when he pardoned billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, an oil trader and financier who had been indicted on numerous charges by US prosecutors and had fled the country. Rich’s business ties included a “who’s who” of unsavory despots, including Fidel Castro, Muammar Qaddafi, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. (Rich had traded oil with the ayatollah in violation of US law while Iran held American hostages.) He owed $48 million in back taxes that he unlawfully tried to avoid and faced the possibility of 325 years in prison. As a result, he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. On his last day in office, President Clinton infamously pardoned Rich, sending shockwaves through Washington. The pardon came after his ex-wife, Denise Rich, donated $100,000 to Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign, $450,000 to the Clinton Library, and $1 million to the Democratic Party. 

Condemnation of the whole affair was immediate and nearly universal. Maureen Dowd labeled the Clintons as “grifters” and the New York Times bemoaned President Clinton’s “outrageous abuse of the pardoning power.” 10 Former president Jimmy Carter called it “disgraceful.” 11 Even longtime Clinton supporters, like James Carville and Terry McAuliffe, were critical. 12 The Washington Post wondered if the “defining characteristic” of Bill and Hillary Clinton was that “they have no capacity for embarrassment.” 

This last comment expresses a view of the Clintons frequently voiced by journalists and establishment figures over the years. Indeed, speculating on their motives has become something of a Washington parlor game. In this view, either the Clintons are utterly shameless, cynically assuming they will survive whatever scandal comes their way, or they are so convinced of their own virtue and benevolence that they are able to excuse whatever they have to do in the pursuit of their noble ends, no matter how low or unethical. We may never know the answer to this fascinating riddle.

Either way, the Clintons were just getting started. Once liberated from the White House, Bill hit the lecture circuit, collecting $105.5 million from 2001 through 2012 and raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation. Significantly, his biggest payments came not from sources in the United States but from foreign investors, businesses, and governments eager to please the former president—and probably hungry for access to the corridors of American power. Meanwhile, Hillary was quickly rising in the ranks of the US Senate, gaining influence and power, especially on matters concerning national security and foreign policy. When she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, her power prospects rocketed. While Barack Obama’s unexpected victory in the Democratic primaries apparently derailed this inexorable ascent, she still ended up in an even more powerful position than before. 

When President-elect Obama first floated Hillary Clinton’s name for secretary of state in late 2008, serious questions arose about the sources of funds donated to various Clinton interests. Many were troubled by the fact that so much of the Clintons’ newfound wealth was tied to foreign contributors. During her tenure as a senator, two-thirds of Bill’s enormous speaking fees had come from foreign sources. (As we will see, after she became secretary of state, Bill’s speaking fees and income from foreign speech making ballooned.) There was also the fact that tens of millions of dollars had flowed to the Clinton Foundation from the foreign governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as from dozens of foreign financiers. 

Would Hillary feel indebted to these foreign donors? Would these relationships influence her decisions on matters affecting US interests? 

Some foreign newspapers raised concerns about her “impartiality” because of the money funneled to her foundation from certain countries. 13 Some foreign observers viewed these donations not as acts of disinterested charity but as efforts to buy goodwill and influence from the incoming secretary of state. Donations from Indian billionaires and industrialists, wrote the Indian Express, were about “jockeying for access and influence. What else explains why [donors are] so keen to donate to the Clinton Foundation, when discharging its own commitments in India has been, at best, very reluctant?” 14 The late Christopher Hitchens, writing in 2009, wondered the same: why didn’t these third world oligarchs “just donate the money directly [to charities in their own country] rather than distributing it through the offices of an outfit run by a seasoned ex-presidential influence-peddler”? 15 

The Clintons dismissed such concerns. During Hillary’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, members from both parties openly worried about global influence peddling. Then senator Richard Lugar said it was a serious problem. Lugar is no bomb thrower but as Time magazine put it, “a paragon of bipartisan collegiality.” 16 He also happened to be a friend of the Clintons. 

Lugar’s words were direct: 

The core of the problem is that foreign governments and entities may perceive the Clinton Foundation as a means to gain favor with the Secretary of State. Although neither Senator Clinton, nor President Clinton has a personal financial stake in the Foundation, obviously its work benefits their legacy and their public service priorities. 17 

Lugar went on: 

But the Clinton Foundation exists as a temptation for any foreign entity or government that believes it could curry favor through a donation. It also sets up potential perception problems with any action taken by the Secretary of State in relation to foreign givers or their countries. 18 

Hillary’s job was all-encompassing and touched on many vital issues with life-and-death outcomes. As Lugar warned, 

The nature of the Secretary of State post makes recusal from specific policy decisions almost impossible, since even localized U.S. foreign policy activities can ripple across countries and continents. Every new foreign donation that is accepted by the Foundation comes with the risk it will be connected in the global media to a proximate State Department policy or decision. 19 

Lugar’s colleagues across the aisle shared his concerns. Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, echoed the general view. “I think it’s fair to say that Senator Lugar is not speaking from a partisan’s perspective, but I think he is really expressing a view of the Committee as a whole.” 

Politicians weren’t the only ones nervous about the Clintons’ flow of foreign funds. Mainstream media outlets like Time warned of “the danger that [foreign funds] might taint Hillary Clinton’s role as Secretary of State.” 20 

Hillary herself rejected the notion that a foreign government giving millions of dollars to her husband while she served as maestra of American foreign policy might present a problem. “Ultimately, there is no conflict between the foreign policy of the United States and the efforts of the Clinton Foundation seeking to reduce human suffering and increase opportunity for people in need,” she told the senators. 21 

But the Clintons’ attempts to downplay or dismiss the issue failed to quell concerns. 

Incoming president Obama and his transition team were nervous about the influence of foreign funds as well. Before announcing Hillary as his choice for secretary of state, Obama directed his aides to conduct detailed and extensive negotiations with the Clinton camp over the issue. Doug Band, a Clinton confidant and top aide at the foundation, negotiated at length with Cheryl Mills, a former Clinton White House attorney who represented the Obama team. (Mills simultaneously served on the Clinton Foundation board, and would shortly be appointed Hillary’s chief of staff at the State Department. Like other key Clinton retainers, she will appear several times in these pages.)

The two sides finally hammered out a memorandum of understanding (MOU). Bruce Lindsey, a longtime Clinton friend who ran the foundation, inked the deal between the Clinton Foundation and the incoming administration so Hillary’s nomination could go forward. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s hard-nosed confidante, signed for the incoming president. 

The MOU required the Clinton Foundation to submit to several conditions designed to address widespread concerns about possible foreign influence coming through donations and speaking fees. For one thing, the Clintons agreed to submit all future paid speeches to the State Department ethics office for review. They also committed to publicly disclose on an annual basis the names of any major donors to the Clinton Foundation and its initiatives. Finally, the Clintons said they would seek preapproval from the Obama administration on direct contributions to the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments or government-owned businesses. 

Both Bill and Hillary were unequivocal in stating that they would be transparent about the flow of foreign money. In her written answers to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Hillary promised that “the Foundation will publish annually the names of all contributors for that year.” 22 Bill went on CNN and said, “If she is going to be secretary of state, and I operate globally and I have people who contribute to these efforts globally, I think that it’s important to make it totally transparent.” Obama administration National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor agreed: “Going forward, all donors will be disclosed on an annual basis, and new donations from foreign governments will be scrutinized by government ethics officers.” 23 

Some Clinton loyalists found these requirements heavy handed; they believed Bill and Hillary were “forced to go above and beyond the bar that would have been set for anyone else.” 24 But who else in American politics would be so audacious as to have one spouse accept money from foreign governments and businesses while the other charted American foreign policy? Or would permit one spouse to conduct sensitive negotiations with foreign entities while in some instances the other collected large speaking fees from some of those same entities? 

For that very reason, the agreement was widely criticized for not going far enough. Senator Lugar was direct: “The only certain way to eliminate this risk going forward is for the Clinton Foundation to fore swear new foreign contributions when Senator Clinton becomes Secretary of State.” The Washington Post’s editorial page agreed, pointing out that “even if Ms. Clinton is not influenced by gifts to her husband’s charity, the appearance of conflict is unavoidable.” 25 The Post warned, “The new administration is buying itself a heap of potential trouble with this agreement.” 26 

Still, the agreement did the trick. The commitment to disclose and seek pre-approval for government-tied funds left the Senate, the press, and the public with the widespread impression that these issues had been fully addressed. Hillary was confirmed as secretary of state by a 94–2 margin. 

But the claimed commitment to transparency was fleeting. The Clintons violated it almost immediately. As we will see, the Clinton Foundation failed to disclose gifts amounting to millions of dollars from foreign entities and businessmen who needed Hillary’s help as secretary of state to approve a transaction with serious national security implications. The Clinton Foundation also collected money from foreign government-owned businesses without getting prior Obama administration approval. And the pattern of taking money from businesses or individuals that owned entities that had matters before Hillary would continue unabated. 

Some might say it is unfair to connect Hillary’s public career as a US senator and secretary of state with her husband’s private commercial activities. After all, they both led active public lives and spent significant amounts of time apart. She seems to prefer their home in Northwest Washington, DC, while Bill spends much of his time in Chappaqua, New York. 

But by their own account, the two often work in tandem and are in regular communication. Hillary says, “[W]e have an endless conversation. We never get bored. We get deeply involved in all the work that we do, and we talk about it constantly.” 27 Journalists who have traveled with the Clintons confirm this. When Andrew Jack of the Financial Times traveled with Bill in Africa for seven days, he noted “his frequent calls with Hillary during the trip.” 28 

Spouses have long been seen as avenues for cronyism, corruption, and influence. That is why federal government ethics laws require politicians to disclose not just their own financial assets, holdings, and income, but those of their spouses as well. Enriching a politician’s spouse or family is one of the most common methods of political corruption. As secretary of state, Hillary pushed for international anti-corruption standards that addressed this very concern. 

Others might argue that this is simply a “Bill problem.” They would like to divide the Clintons into “good Clinton” and “bad Clinton.” Hillary is the “good” one, the devoted and tough-minded public servant. Bill is the “bad” one, ethically challenged, pursuing money and personal desires. One magazine headline explained it this way: “Hillary’s big ethical problem: Bill.” 29 

But as we will see, this is a crude caricature of their complex relationship. In a way, all that has really happened is that the Clintons have reversed roles. When Hillary entered the Senate, and then the State Department, she became the one who had real power, rather than Bill. 

How did the Clintons amass so much wealth in such a short period of time? The answer makes for fascinating reading. 

For one thing, the Clintons have operated at the fringes of the developed world, often appearing to assist in facilitating huge resource-extraction deals that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The era of globalization has opened up a Wild West bonanza where profits can be made on a scale not seen since the height of nineteenth-century colonialism. The Clintons’ most lucrative transactions originate not in places like Germany or Great Britain, where business and politics are kept separate by stringent ethical rules and procedures, but in despotic areas of the developing world where the rules are very different. Money also comes from foreign businessmen in Europe or Canada who have amassed their wealth in parts of the world where corruption and payoffs are simply a part of doing business. 

We will see a pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable US policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds. 

Here is how it worked: Bill flew around the world making speeches and burnishing his reputation as a global humanitarian and wise man. Very often on these trips he was accompanied by “close friends” or associates who happened to have business interests pending in these countries. Introductions were made, deals struck, and photo ops arranged before an admiring foreign press. Meanwhile, bureaucratic or legislative obstacles were mysteriously cleared or approvals granted within the purview of his wife, the powerful senator or secretary of state. Huge donations then flowed into the Clinton Foundation while Bill received enormous speaking fees underwritten by the very businessmen who benefited from these apparent interventions. 

Of course, it is perfectly possible that in some cases Hillary did nothing at all to ensure these favorable outcomes. Perhaps these foreign interests made large payments to Bill simply in the hope of influencing Hillary. Maybe they were mistaken in thinking that multimillion-dollar payments to Bill and the foundation would have the desired effect. We don’t know. Either way, though, the Clintons ended up with the money. 

I realize how shocking these allegations may appear. Are these activities illegal? That’s not for me to say. I’m not a lawyer. But as someone once said, the most troubling thing about Washington is not what’s illegal but what isn’t. The Clintons are lawyers themselves and they know very well what legal lines they may not cross. By using their legal finesse, the Clintons have often skirted the boundaries of ethical conduct. They have been frequently censured and criticized for their conduct, but have usually escaped serious legal consequences. In a way, what you are about to read is similar to what they have always done, from Little Rock to the Lincoln Bedroom. They are just doing it now on a truly global scale. 

Unsavory foreigners with an interest in climbing higher up the global status chain have clearly seen the Clintons as a path to respectability and influence. Take the case of Gulnora Karimova, the eldest daughter of the dictator of Uzbekistan. In a country dominated by organized crime, forced labor, and torture, Gulnora is loathed by her country’s citizenry. As one US diplomatic cable put it, “Most Uzbeks see Karimova as a greedy, power-hungry individual who uses her father to crush business people or anyone else who stands in her way. . . . She remains the single most hated person in the country.” 30 Being the most hated person in Uzbekistan is saying something. Her father, who still runs the country, is widely reported to have boiled his political opponents to death in the 1990s. 

Karimova is also glamorous and ambitious, and for a while she sported a fashion and jewelry line she tried to establish in Europe and the United States. According to a “secret/noforn” cable sent from the US embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to the CIA and other intelligence agencies in July 2009, she was “hoping that a connection with him [Bill] will allow her to establish good relations with the Secretary of State [Hillary].” 31 How to go about it? She started by cosponsoring a Clinton Foundation fundraiser in Monaco. She posed with Bill for a photo at the event and soon NBC’s Today Show reported that Bill Clinton was “among her friends.” 32 

Where it all might have led we will never know, because in 2013 Karimova had a falling out with her dictator father. As of this writing, she is thought to be under house arrest in Uzbekistan. 

Brash Gulnora Karimova was only expressing what so many foreign oligarchs and interested investors already know. And the Clinton's know it, too. Supporters and opponents have called the Clinton's many things over the years, but one word you never hear is naïve.

2

The Transfer 

BILL’S EXCELLENT KAZAKH ADVENTURE 

On September 6, 2005, former president Bill Clinton found himself, of all places, in Almaty, Kazakhstan. 1 A country with broad steppes and rugged mountains, Kazakhstan was a place where Genghis Khan once roamed. More recently, the comedy film Borat lampooned it as an impoverished country full of incompetents. In truth, however, the country sits atop a vast storehouse of minerals that includes an estimated $5 trillion worth of natural resources. 2 Highly prized are the country’s immense uranium deposits—the mineral used to fuel nuclear reactors and build nuclear bombs. 

Bill Clinton’s Kazakhstan sojourn was ostensibly an effort to help the country’s HIV/AIDS patients gain access to lower-priced antiretroviral therapies. Yet according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, at the time of Clinton’s visit, only an estimated fifteen hundred Kazakhs needed such treatments. In 2005 the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Kazakhstan accounted for between 0.1 and 0.3 percent of its 15.4 million citizens, low compared with African countries like Botswana (24.1 percent) and South Africa (18.8 percent of adults). 3 

All the more curious was the fact that Clinton had agreed to public and private meetings with the nation’s dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had ruled Kazakhstan as president since 1990. Having risen through the ranks of the Communist Party during the Soviet days, Nazarbayev dropped the working-class rhetoric after the collapse of the Soviet Union and reverted to a classic despot. Indeed, “president” was a selected title. Kazakhstan doesn’t have elections as we think of them in the West. Nazarbayev regularly wins reelection with more than 90 percent of the vote. (In the last election, the candidates running against Nazarbayev claimed they voted for him.) 4 

In short, Nazarbayev gets what he wants, one way or another. Despite a long marriage and an airline stewardess for a mistress, he was the father of only three daughters—no sons. Lacking a male heir, he arranged a relationship with the former Miss Kazakhstan Assel Issabayeva, and impregnated her via test tube. On April 2, 2005, she gave birth to his Sultanchik. Problem solved. 5 

According to the Huffington Post, “Nazarbayev himself is rumored to be one of the richest men in the world, although no one knows exactly how rich, since he is alleged to have hidden interests in a variety of businesses.” Kazakhstan’s five billionaires all have close ties to Nazarbayev. Two of them are his relatives. 6 

Nazarbayev craves acceptance from the West. But he has a nasty habit of throwing political opponents and journalists into jail. Torture is common. The list of Kazakh human rights violations, according to the US government, besides torture includes arbitrary detention; restrictions on freedom of speech, press, and assembly; pervasive corruption; and human trafficking. 

So why would former president Bill Clinton bestow an air of international respectability on a backwater billionaire dictator with a treacherous human rights record? And why would he do so on the eve of a national election in that country, when Clinton’s mere presence could be read as an endorsement of the dictator’s “candidacy”? 

It helps to look to Clinton’s traveling companion, Canadian mining tycoon Frank Giustra. Short,compact, and sporting a gray-haired Caesar haircut, Giustra is estimated to be worth several hundreds of millions of dollars. Bill flew on board the mining magnate’s private jet: a “luxurious MD-87, complete with a bedroom and shower, gold-plated bathroom fixtures, leather upholstered reclining seats, flat-panel TVs and original paintings on the cabin walls. The blankets are emblazoned with ‘Giustra Air.’” It features a boardroom and sleeps eighteen comfortably. 7 

“The plane is a business tool. No more, no less,” says Giustra bluntly. And one of its useful functions has been doing the Clintons favors. For some years, Giustra has made his jet available to Bill to travel the globe delivering big-money speeches, as well as to travel to campaign events for Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. As a Canadian citizen, Giustra couldn’t donate to Hillary’s campaign, but he could certainly offer use of his plane to Bill. He could also steer tens of millions to the Clintons and entities that they control. 8 

Giustra built his empire by cutting deals in some of the most dangerous parts of the world. At the time of his 2005 travels with Clinton, he lived in a palatial 12,000-square-foot home in western Vancouver. “Obsessively private,” according to Canadian media, he operated out of a thirty-first floor corner office on Burrard Street, a sloping boulevard with scenic views of Vancouver’s port. 

Less a mining executive than a penny-stock speculator, Giustra made his money pumping and dumping mining stocks in the Canadian stock exchanges. 9 As the Globe and Mail, Canada’s most prestigious newspaper, put it in a generally sympathetic portrait, Giustra got rich “through a Byzantine system of shell companies, furtive share purchases and elaborate compensation schemes.” 10 In Kazakhstan he was looking to close a large deal. 

Giustra had done mining deals in sub-Saharan Africa and South America. He knew how to do business with autocrats. For an autocrat, the allure of doing a favor for an ex-American president, especially a former president with a powerful wife, likely held special value. As Giustra admitted in 2006 to the New Yorker in a rare moment of candor, “All of my chips, almost, are on Bill Clinton. He’s a brand, a worldwide brand, and he can do things and ask for things that no one else can.” 11 

According to Clinton and Giustra, they first met in 2005. 12 Technically, that might be correct. But their business ties actually go back decades earlier. 

Both men were involved with mining entrepreneur Jean-Raymond Boulle, whose company Diamond Fields invested in an Arkansas diamond mine that Clinton approved when he was governor. 13 At the time, Diamond Fields had its eye on an Arkansas state park known to have diamond deposits. So Boulle went to Little Rock and hooked up with Clinton pal Jim Blair. 14 (Blair made headlines in 1994 as the man who helped Hillary Clinton turn $1,000 into $100,000 in futures.) Blair took Boulle to see Governor Clinton and pitched a diamond mine in the Crater of Diamonds State Park. 15 Boulle claimed the mine could become “one of the world’s largest diamond producers.” 16 Governor Clinton signed off on the project and helped get the property green-lighted for mining in 1987. Clinton pal Bruce Lindsey (who went on to become a senior White House adviser and now serves as chairman of the board of the Clinton Foundation) provided legal services to the fledgling company. For good measure, Diamond Fields set up its corporate headquarters in Hope, Bill Clinton’s hometown. 17 

When Bill was elected president, Boulle was an invited guest at the inauguration in Washington, DC. That night, as the Clintons celebrated their victory at several inaugural balls around town, Hillary wore a 3.5-carat diamond ring that came from one of Boulle’s mines. 

Giustra, through a variety of domestic and offshore holding companies, had more than sixty thousand shares of stock in Diamond Fields in the early 1990s. 18 But by 2005 the public face of the Clinton-Giustra relationship was all about philanthropy. The two would establish something called the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative (CGSGI) as a project of the Clinton Foundation. CGSGI is supposed to foster economic growth in the developing world. Its activities are often sited near “natural resource industry” projects such as mines or oilfields in which Giustra is invested. 

Access to Kazakh mining concessions is highly competitive. Large mining companies from Australia to Russia vie for them. Giustra’s company, UrAsia Energy, was a new player with no background in the uranium business and was therefore far from the logical choice for Kazatomprom, the Kazakh atomic energy agency. Other companies with decades of experience in the field should have been first in line for this lucrative deal. “Everyone was asking Kazatomprom to the dance,” said Fadi Shadid, a senior uranium industry stock analyst. “A second-tier junior player like UrAsia—you’d need all the help you could get.” 19 UrAsia Energy was a mere shell company. But with Nazarbayev’s approval, that was about to change. 

Giustra had his eye on three mines several hundred miles from Almaty. The deal was obscure from the start: the mining concessions were transferred to mysterious offshore entities including Jeffcott Group Ltd., which was registered in the British Virgin Islands. Giustra and others involved in the venture later claimed they didn’t even know who actually owned the mysterious entity. “We dealt with corporations and entities that had title to the assets,” said Chris Sattler, executive vice president of corporate development and investor relations of Uranium One (of which UrAsia Energy would soon become part). “In fact, we dealt with their representatives. . . . Therefore, we have no knowledge of the beneficiaries or shareholders behind Jeffcott.” 20 On other occasions, Frank Giustra claims to have known precisely whom he was dealing with in the transaction. 

Clinton’s itinerary included a lavish private feast with the Kazakh dictator, as well as a public press conference. 21 For the former president it was a reunion of sorts. Clinton and Nazarbayev had first met back in 1994, when the Kazakh autocrat came to Washington to meet the new president. 22 The two discussed several topics and signed a Charter on Democratic Partnership, “which recognized Kazakhstan’s commitments to the rule of law, respect for human rights, and economic reform.” 23 Nazarbayev had a habit of signing documents he had no intention of honoring. Clinton and Nazarbayev met again in December 1999, when they discussed a number of issues, one of which likely included concerns involving two mining and metal companies that were having troubles in Kazakhstan. A Canadian firm, World Wide Minerals, and a London-based firm, Trans-World Metals, had seen property confiscated by the Kazakh government. 24 

The September 2005 visit had been organized in part by Sergei Kurzin, a round-faced Russian nuclear physicist from Siberia who had done business in Kazakhstan before. In addition to arranging the meeting in Almaty, he assisted Giustra in creating UrAsia Energy. 25 

It’s unclear if Kurzin and Clinton had met before, but they would have several more meetings in the years that followed. And they had something else in common: fugitive financier Marc Rich. Recall that in January 2001, on his last day in office, Clinton had issued a presidential pardon for Rich. Kurzin had previously worked for Rich traveling around Russia in search of suitable investment opportunities. 26 

Kurzin, in a 2008 interview with New York Times reporters Jo Becker and Don Van Natta, said about the visit, “timing was everything.” 27 After the Times piece ran, Kurzin reported getting an angry phone call from Giustra. The secretive Canadian “yelled like hell at me over the phone after he saw the piece,” Kurzin said later. “He was furious that I talked to a journalist.” 28 

What transpired at dinner with Clinton, Nazarbayev, and Giustra depends on whom you ask. It was by all accounts a lavish affair, with upward of seventy-five guests. 

Bill maintained that the entire visit was about dealing with HIV/AIDS in Kazakhstan. Giustra insisted that the mining deal he wanted to secure did not involve Nazarbayev or the Kazakh government. As he put it, “The mining agreements I reached in Kazakhstan were concluded after lengthy negotiations with private companies—not the Kazakhstan government.” 29 Bill has gone even further, claiming that “formal endorsement from the Kazakh government was not required to acquire the assets.” 30 He went on to make a technical legal argument: “Kazatomprom was not a signatory to either of the memorandums of understanding signed by Mr. Giustra’s company.” 31 

But these were, at best, elaborate evasions. Corporate executives for the uranium company later admitted to journalists and US diplomats that Kazakh officials absolutely needed to sign off on the deal. Jean Nortier, CEO of the company that would eventually control the assets, said, “When you do a transaction in Kazakhstan, you need the government’s approval. UrAsia got the approval, and when UrAsia merged with Uranium One, that approval was given again.” 32 

Leaked State Department cables from the US ambassador in Kazakhstan further refute Bill Clinton’s claim. Giustra acquired the assets in Kazakhstan through his shell company UrAsia Energy and then transferred those assets through a merger with a company called Uranium One. 33 According to a 2009 US diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks, Paul Lewis Clarke, senior vice president of Uranium One, claimed that Uranium One’s UrAsia acquisitions “were approved by many of the same people still in power,” including the then prime minister Danial Akhmetov (who later became minister of defense), and “Kazatomprom president [Vladimir] Shkolnik, then the Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources.” 34 Any asset transfer of uranium rights needed to be approved by Kazakh officials. 35 

A key Kazakh official involved in the deal was Mukhtar Dzhakishev, the president of Kazatomprom, the government agency that runs Kazakhstan’s uranium and nuclear energy industry. A technocrat with pro-Western sympathies, Dzhakishev was eager to do business with the United States and would later visit Clinton in 2007 at his home in New York. According to Dzhakishev, the uranium deal came up in discussions that night at the banquet. 36 Clinton and Giustra dispute this. 

But more than that, suggestions have been made that Dzhakishev and other Kazakh officials had already been under pressure for months to close the deal and grant the lucrative uranium concessions to Giustra. 37 For reasons that remain unclear, approval was being held up on the Kazakh end. Giustra was understandably anxious and may have asked Bill to intervene. 

In a 2009 video of a statement to authorities on an unrelated matter, Dzhakishev claimed that then senator Hillary Clinton pressured Kazakh officials to secure the deal for the Canadians. According to Dzhakishev, Kazakh prime minister Karim Massimov “was in America and needed to meet with Hillary Clinton but this meeting was cancelled. And they said that those investors connected with the Clintons who were working in Kazakhstan have problems. Until Kazakhstan solved those problems, there would be no meeting, and all manner of measures would be taken.” Massimov returned to his country and called Dzhakishev and told him to work it out. 38 Dzhakishev then claims he was contacted by Tim Phillips, an adviser to Bill. According to Dzhakishev, Phillips told him that there would be no further meetings with Hillary until Kazakh officials approved Giustra’s uranium deal. 39 

Dzhakishev was certainly in a position to know. He played a central role in the Giustra uranium deal. He was among the first Giustra met in Kazakhstan to discuss it. Some time later he met with Bill Clinton at his home in Chappaqua, New York, to discuss the broader uranium market in Kazakhstan. 40 

The alleged threat to withhold American aid would not have been perceived as an idle one. The Kazakhs received large sums of money from the US government as part of a post–Cold War nonproliferation program. (In 2011, for example, they received $110 million for “combating weapons of mass destruction.”) At that time, Hillary sat on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee. More specifically, she sat on the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. Hillary’s subcommittee had responsibility for oversight of nonproliferation programs. 41 

Dzhakishev also claimed that Phillips “began to scream” at him that it was important to get the deal done for “Democrats” involved in it. 42 Dzhakishev says he took Phillips to see Kazakh officials, including assistant to the president Karim Massimov, who later became prime minister. When Phillips was asked by the Washington Post about Dzhakishev’s account, he didn’t respond. He has, however, changed his online résumé and has removed any references to having been a Clinton Foundation fundraiser. 43 

Meanwhile, Bill gave Nazarbayev the international credibility he craved. Standing before the gathered media in front of a large gold-inlaid national seal of Kazakhstan, Bill Clinton took the podium with a grinning Nazarbayev at his side. 44 Bill talked about his global AIDS work before praising Nazarbayev for “opening up the social and political life of your country.” Clinton’s glowing assessment was not shared by anyone in the human rights community. Indeed, Robert Herman, who worked for the Clinton State Department in the 1990s and later joined the nonprofit Freedom House, called the statement “patently absurd.” 45 Certainly the US State Department would not agree with Clinton’s fawning praise. For years, it had categorically stated that Kazakhstan had “failed to significantly improve its human rights record.” 46 

As the international media recorded his words, Bill also came out publicly in support of Nazarbayev’s bid to have his country head the prestigious Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). “I think it’s time for that to happen, it’s an important step, and I’m glad you’re willing to undertake it,” he said. Nazarbayev quickly issued a press release proudly claiming support from Clinton. The ex-president neither refuted nor challenged Nazarbayev’s public relations victory lap. 

Clinton’s endorsement was remarkably audacious. The OSCE was primarily a human rights organization, formed as a result of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The international body held little power, but it was an honor Nazarbayev sought. Putting Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan at the helm of the OSCE was like putting Iran in charge of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It made no sense. Still, it would be a prestigious appointment for the dictator. 

Hillary was at the time a legislative branch commissioner for the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, one of only nine US senators on the panel. In 2004 Hillary had cosigned a letter to the State Department stating that Kazakhstan’s bid to head up the OSCE “would not be acceptable” because of widespread corruption and human rights problems. In July 2008 when the commission held hearings titled “Promises to Keep: Kazakhstan’s 2010 OSCE Chairmanship,” Senator Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland and the cochair of the commission, said Kazakhstan’s “record on human rights and democratization does indeed raise concerns. The State Department’s yearly reports, as well as those by numerous human rights groups inside and outside of Kazakhstan, lay out in detail the problem areas.” 47 

According to the official transcript, Hillary didn’t show up for the hearings. 

Clinton and Giustra left Kazakhstan the day after the banquet. Within forty-eight hours, Giustra’s company UrAsia signed two memoranda of understanding outlining the transfer of uranium mining assets, which Kazakh authorities later approved: buying a 30 percent stake in the Kharassan uranium project and 70 percent in another project—the Betpak-Dala joint venture. 48 The deal stunned longtime mining observers. Choosing UrAsia to buy into those mines was a “mystery” said Gene Clark, the chief executive of Trade Tech , an industry newsletter. “UrAsia was able to jump-start the whole process somehow,” he said. The company was now a “major uranium producer when it didn’t even exist before.” 49 

In the months that followed, Giustra gave the Clinton Foundation $31.3 million. 50 It was the first of several large donations he would make as he went on to secure other lucrative natural resources deals in developing countries around the world. We will see him again in other chapters. 

As mentioned earlier, at the time of Clinton’s visit, Kazakhstan was on the verge of a national election. Days after Clinton departed, the opposition party’s campaign headquarters were ravaged by fire in an arson attack. On October 12 heavily armed police temporarily arrested the opposition party’s leader. The OSCE said the election “was marred by an ‘atmosphere of intimidation’ and ‘ballot-box stuffing.’” 51 

In December 2005 Nazarbayev won reelection with more than 90 percent of the vote. Bill sent him a note of congratulations. “Recognizing that your work has received an excellent grade is one of the most important rewards in life,” he wrote. “At the start of your new term as president, I would like to express confidence that you will continue to live up to the expectations of your people.” 52 The Kazakh dictator promptly released Clinton’s congratulatory note to the public. 

With the Kazakh concession in hand, UrAsia Energy Ltd. significantly expanded its assets. UrAsia quickly went about directing shares of the company’s stock to friends in Canada. Giustra took 3 million shares. He gave half a million more to Robert Cross, a former brokerage colleague, whom he also placed on the board. According to the Globe and Mail, his friend and fellow investment dealmaker, Ian Telfer, received 2.2 million shares of his own. 53 

Telfer, like Giustra, had been kicking around in the mining business for decades, involved in several high-profile penny-stock mining deals. 54 “I’m more of an opportunist than a visionary,” he admitted. 55 But this deal was special. And he would provide the Clinton Foundation with funds of his own. 

With the shares doled out, UrAsia went public and was “among the largest [offerings] on record” to be brokered on Canada’s Venture Exchange. 56 Canadian firms BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc., Canaccord Adams, and GMP Securities Ltd. handled the placement of the shares, and became supporters of the Clinton Foundation as well, as we will see. 57 

Then phase two began. In February 2007 UrAsia Energy announced that it would merge with Uranium One, a uranium company based out of South Africa and Canada. 58 

Like all transactions involving uranium in Kazakhstan, the merger required approval by the Kazakh government. That same month, Dzhakishev, the head of Kazatomprom, went to Chappaqua for a private meeting with Bill Clinton. 59 Frank Giustra allegedly arranged the meeting. 60 According to Dzhakishev, they discussed uranium markets and the future of nuclear power. Just as Giustra needed Kazakh government approval, the Kazakhs might need US government approval for their aspirations to purchase a stake in Westinghouse, a major US manufacturer of nuclear power plant components. 61 

Yet pressure was mounting in Washington about Nazarbayev’s human rights record and Kazakhstan’s fitness to head an international human rights body like the OSCE. Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, fired off a letter on March 13, 2007, to President Nazarbayev, making it clear he wanted Kazakhstan to clean up its act or he would not support their bid. “Unless visible progress is attained quickly, I will not be able to support Kazakhstan in its quest to assume chairmanship of the OSCE.” 62 

The Clintons, however, took a different tack. Hillary, who had expressed concerns about Kazakhstan heading up the OSCE prior to the deal, now was strangely silent. 63 Bill was emboldened: he invited Nazarbayev to attend the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) as his guest. The Kazakh dictator was happy to make the trip, and on September 25, 2007, he was a featured attendee at an exclusive CGI meeting in New York. 64 

Two months later Nazarbayev was awarded the OSCE chair, a post he took in 2010. 65 

Meanwhile, in February 2007 shareholders approved the merger between UrAsia and Uranium One. 66 Although Giustra tried to characterize the transaction as a Uranium One takeover of his company, UrAsia Energy Ltd., it was actually a reverse merger. Giustra, his friends, and other shareholders wound up controlling 60 percent of the new company. 67 And in the months that followed, they began acquiring uranium assets in the United States itself. 68 Within the next year, they began negotiations with the Russian State Nuclear Agency, which, in 2009, bought a stake in the company, as described in the next chapter. 69 

Following the lucrative merger, many of the deal’s largest shareholders wrote multimillion-dollar checks to the Clinton Foundation and its project, the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative. In addition to his $31.3 million donation, Giustra announced a multiyear commitment to donate $100 million, and half of his future profits, to the Clinton Foundation. 70 Giustra’s commitments made the Canadian mining investor one of the largest individual contributors to the Clinton Foundation, rivaling those far wealthier than himself, like Bill Gates, who has given more than $25 million to the Clinton Foundation. 71 

As we will see, Bill Clinton would show up at critical times in other developing countries where Giustra had business. As Canada’s Globe and Mail put it, “it just so happens that Bill Clinton keeps popping up in places where Giustra is buying resource assets.” 72 

The collective commitments and donations from investors who profited from the deal would ultimately exceed $145 million. 73 (The Clinton Foundation only reports ranges, not exact amounts.) These investors include the following business associates of Giustra: 

• Frank Holmes, another major shareholder in the deal, wrote a check to the Clinton Foundation for between $250,000 and $500,000. 74 Holmes also lists himself as an adviser to the Clinton Foundation. 

• Neil Woodyer, Giustra’s colleague who founded Endeavour Financial, pledged $500,000 and committed to providing “ongoing financial support.” 75 

• Robert Disbrow, a broker at Haywood Securities, which provided $58 million in capital to float shares of UrAsia’s private placement, sent between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation a few months later. 76 

• Paul Reynolds, an executive at Canaccord Capital, Inc., donated in the same range, between $1 million and $5 million. 77 The UrAsia deal was the largest in Canaccord’s history. 

• GMP Securities Ltd., another large shareholder in UrAsia Energy, committed to donating a portion of its profits to the CGSGI. GMP made great money on the private placement of shares and as an underwriter on UrAsia Energy deals. 78 

• Robert Cross, who was a major shareholder and serves as director of UrAsia Energy, committed a portion of his future income to the Clinton Foundation. 79 

• Egizio Bianchini, the Capital Markets vice chair and Global cohead of BMO’s Global Metals and Mining group, had also been an underwriter on the mining deals. 80 BMO paid $600,000 for two tables at the CGSGI’s March 2008 benefit. 81 

• Sergei Kurzin, a Russian dealmaker involved in the Kazakhstan uranium deal and a shareholder in UrAsia Energy, also made the CGSGI a $1 million pledge. 82 

• Ian Telfer, the chairman of UrAsia Energy, who would become the new chairman of Uranium One, committed $3 million. 83

Bill Clinton hailed the windfall as a selfless philanthropic gesture that would support economic growth and health care in the developing world. “I’m proud of the coalition in the natural resources industry that has come together,” he said. 84 A group of Canadian mining investors just happened to become conspicuously large contributors in the Clinton Foundation over a very short period of time. 

Giustra went even further in bringing in funds for the foundation. In 2006, he hosted a birthday party/fundraiser for Bill Clinton at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto that featured an impressive guest list. The event was headlined by Kevin Spacey and included Billy Crystal and Bon Jovi. 85 In March 2008 there was another superstar fundraising gala including Tom Cruise and Robin Williams in Toronto. 86 In Vancouver on October 17, 2008, Giustra and Clinton addressed the British Columbia Business Council on corporate social responsibility. 87 

Any actions the Clintons may have taken to support Canadian Giustra in the uranium deals could not be justified on the grounds that they were creating jobs for Americans or helping American companies be more competitive overseas, the explanation politicians often give to justify doing favors for companies or donors. 

But the international scope of the deals would expand beyond Kazakhstan, Canada, Washington, and Chappaqua to include some of the most powerful government officials in Russia. The flow of money would only increase.

next

Hillary's Reset

notes

CHAPTER 1: THE LINCOLN BEDROOM GOES GLOBAL 

1. Solomon, John, and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, “Clinton Library Got Funds from Abroad,” Washington Post, December 15, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/14/AR2007121402124.html. 

2. Storace, Patricia, “Q&: How Bill Clinton Is Changing the World,” Condé Nast Traveler, August 15, 2007, http://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2007-08-15/q-a-how-bill-clinton-is-changing-the-world. 

3. “Bluman v. Federal Election Commission Case Files,” SCOTUSblog, http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/bluman-v-federalelection-commission/. 

4. Von Oldershausen, Sasha, “Are the Clintons Trying to Duck Property Taxes in New York?” The Real Deal, June 17, 2014, http://therealdeal.com/blog/2014/06/17/are-the-clintons-trying-to-duck-property-tax-payments/. 

5. Marquis, Christopher, “Clintons Buy $2.85 Million Washington Home,” New York Times , December 29, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/30/us/clintons-buy-2.85-million-washington-home.html. 

6. Van Natta, Don, Jr., Jo Becker, and Mike Mcintire, “In His Charity and Her Politics, Many Clinton Donors Overlap,” New York Times, December 19, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/us/politics/20clinton.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&. 

7. Ibid. 

8. Ibid. 

9. Ibid. 

10. “Sorting Out the Pardon Mess,” New York Times , February 22, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/23/opinion/sorting-out-thepardon-mess.html. 

11. “Carter: Rich Pardon ‘Disgraceful,’” CBSNews, February 21, 2001, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/carter-rich-pardon-disgraceful/. 

12. Berke, Richard L., “The Clinton Pardons: The Democrats; This Time, the Clintons Find Their Support Buckling from the Weight of New Woes,” New York Times , February 23, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/23/us/clinton-pardons-democrats-this-timeclintons-find-their-support-buckling-weight.html. 

13. Reid, Tim, “Donors List Raises Fears over Hillary Clinton Role as Secretary of State,” The Times (London), December 19, 2008, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/americas/article1998893.ece. 

14. Mehta, Pratap Bhanu, “Charity at Home?” Indian Express, October 18, 2010, http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/charity-athome-/699359/. 

15. Hitchens, Christopher, “Why Are So Many Oligarchs, Royal Families, and Special-interest Groups Giving Money to the Clinton F o u n d a t i o n ? ” Slate, January 12, 2009, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2009/01/more_than_a_good_feeling.html. 

16. Calabresi, Massimo, “A Blip in Hillary Clinton’s Senate Lovefest: Bill’s Donations,” Time, January 14, 2009, http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1871526,00.html. 

17. US Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Nomination of Hillary R. Clinton to be Secretary of State (2009), 8 (testimony of Richard Lugar). 

18. Ibid., 11. 

19. Ibid. 

20. Calabresi, “A Blip in Hillary Clinton’s Senate Lovefest.” 

21. US Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Nomination of Hillary R. Clinton to be Secretary of State (2009), 156 (testimony of Hillary Clinton). 

22. Ibid., 286. 

23. “Saudis, Indians among Clinton Foundation Donors,” Economic Times, India Times, December 18, 2008, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2008-12-18/news/27709369_1_annual-charitable-conference-income-and-speecheswilliam-j-clinton-foundation. 

24. Allen, Jonathan, and Amie Parnes, HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (New York: Crown Publishing Group, Random House, 2014), 81. 

25. “The Clinton Foundation,” Washington Post, December 21, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/12/20/AR2008122001647.html. 

26. Ibid. 

27. Ghattas, Kim, The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power (New York: Picador, 2013), 40–41. 

28. Jack, Andrew, “Charm Offensive Five Years after Leaving Office, Bill Clinton Is Applying His Famous Drive and Charisma to Talk AIDS in Africa,” Financial Times, August 19, 2006. 

29. Wiener, Jon, “Hillary’s Big Ethics Problem: Bill,” The Nation, November 22, 2008, http://www.thenation.com/blog/hillarys-big- ethics-problem-bill. 

30. Leigh, David, “WikiLeaks Cables: US Keeps Uzbekistan President Onside to Protect Supply Line,” The Guardian, December 12, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/12/wikileaks-us-conflict-over-uzbekistan. 

31. US Department of State, Embassy in Tashkent, “Uzbekistan: Rumors of Succession Planning, Government Reshuffling,” WikiLeaks, July 31, 2009, http://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09TASHKENT1357_a.html. 

32. Stump, Scott, “Fashion Week Cancels Show from Dictator’s Daughter,” Today.com, September 9, 2011, http://www.today.com/id/44452554/ns/today-style/t/fashion-week-cancels-show-dictators-daughter/#.U_ZBSf3DdBM. 

CHAPTER 2: THE TRANSFER 

1. Becker, Jo, and Don Van Natta Jr., “After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton,” New York Times , January 31, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 

2. “How to Make Money in Kazakhstan,” TheNewswire.ca, October 14, 2011, http://www.metalinvestmentnews.com/how-to-makemoney-in-kazakhstan/. 

3. World Health Organization, “Summary Country Profile For HIV/AIDS Treatment Scale-Up,” December 2005, http://www.who.int/hiv/HIVCP_KAZ.pdf. UNAIDS Sub-Saharan Africa Fact Sheet, report, May 25, 2006, http://data.unaids.org/pub/GlobalReport/2006/200605-fs_subsaharanafrica_en.pdf. 

4. Nichol, Jim, “Kazakhstan: Recent Developments and U.S. Interests,” Congressional Research Service, June 20, 2008, http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/97-1058_20080620.pdf. Foust, Joshua, “The Gilded Age of Asia,” Foreign Policy, April 11, 2013, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/11/the_gilded_cage_of_asia. Watt, Nicholas, “Kazakhstan’s Autocratic President Tells David Cameron: I Would Vote for You,” The Guardian, July 1, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/01/kazakhstanpresident-david-cameron-vote. 

5. Mayr, Walter, “Ex-Stepson Talks in Family Feud: Tapping Kazakstan’s Natural Resources,” Spiegel, May 19, 2009, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/ex-stepson-talks-in-family-feud-the-long-arm-of-kazakhstan-s-president-a-625720-2.html. 

6. Love, James, “The Well-Connected Dictator,” Huffington Post, May 25, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/thewellconnected-dictato_b_67423.html. Kilner, James, “Copper Tycoon Tops Kazakhstan’s Rich List,” The Telegraph, May 15, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/kazakhstan/9268133/Copper-tycoon-tops-Kazakhstans-rich-list.html. Buckley, Neil, “ENRC Founders Made Good in Kazakhstan,” Financial Times, May 3, 2013, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/71a13774-b3e0-11e2- ace9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz351P7vNvu. 

7. Hoffman, Andy, “Renaissance Man,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), June 27, 2008, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-onbusiness/renaissance-man/article17988489/?page=all. Humphreys, Tommy, “Stop Taking Yourself so Seriously, Says Tycoon Frank Giustra,” Mining.com, June 28, 2013, http://www.mining.com/web/stop-taking-yourself-so-seriously-says-tycoon-frank-giustra/. 

8. Cernetig, Miro, “Frank Giustra: A Man of Many Hats,” BC Business, November 5, 2011, http://www.bcbusiness.ca/people/frankgiustra-a-man-of-many-hats. Smith, Elliot Blair, “Clinton Used Giustra’s Plane, Opened Doors for Deals (Correct),” Bloomberg.com, February 22, 2008, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aa2b8Mj3NEWQ. 

9. Canada’s Globe and Mail explained Giustra’s approach this way: “A mining promoter will buy a cheap ‘shell’ company already listed on the stock exchange, gather some friends to help fund the acquisition, and then, some time down the road, load it up with mining assets (remember the shuffle?) and do another share offering. These deals can be very lucrative, especially if you’re in the promoter’s ‘circle of trust.’” Hoffman, Andy, and Sinclair Stewart, “How to (Still) Get Rich in Mining,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), globeadvisor.com, May 19, 2007, https://secure.globeadvisor.com/newscentre/article.html?/servlet/GIS.Servlets.WireFeedRedirect? cf=sglobeadvisor/config_blank&vg=BigAdVariableGenerator&date=20070519&archive=gam&slug=RCOVER19. 

10. Hoffman, “Renaissance Man.” 

11. Remnick, David, “The Wanderer: Bill Clinton’s Quest to Save the World, Reclaim His Legacy—and Elect His Wife,” The New Yorker, September 18, 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/09/18/the-wanderer-3. 

12. Becker and Van Natta, “After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton.” 

13. Jenkins, Iain, “Fun and Games with Penny Stocks,” New York Times , March 9, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/09/yourmoney/09iht-penns.t.html. McNish, Jacquie, The Big Score: Robert Friedland and the Voisey’s Bay Hustle (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1998), ix, 45. 

14. “Corporate Info,” Diamond Fields International Ltd., http://www.diamondfields.com/s/Management.asp (accessed 2014). Morais, Richard C., “Friends in High Places,” Forbes, August 10, 1998, http://www.forbes.com/global/1998/0810/0109038a.html. 

15. Morais, “Friends in High Places.” 

16. McNish, The Big Score, ix, 40. 

17. Morais, “Friends in High Places.” 

18. McNish, The Big Score, ix, 45. 

19. Becker and Van Natta, “After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton.” 

20. Hoffman, Andy, “Who Sold Key Asset to Uranium One?” Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 29, 2009, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/who-sold-key-asset-to-uranium-one/article4274871/. 

21. Becker and Van Natta, “After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton.” 

22. Clinton, William J., “President’s News Conference with President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan,” American Presidency Project, February 14, 1994, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=49652. 

23. Nichol, “Kazakhstan: Recent Developments and U.S. Interests.” 

24. US Department of State, “Visits to the U.S. by Foreign Heads of State and Government—1999,” http://2001- 2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/15730.htm. “Kazakh President, Clinton to Meet,” American Metal Market, December 21, 1999. Kazakhstan Goldfields Corp., “Open Letter to President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan,” December 20, 1999, http://www.infomine.com/index/pr/Pa034388.PDF. 

25. Sidorov, Dmitry, “An Interview with Sergei Kurzin,” Forbes, April 20, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/17/clinton-sergeikurzin-opinions-contributors-sidorov.html. 26. “A Russian’s Underground Route to the Stock Market,” The Telegraph (UK), February 15, 2004. 

27. Becker and Van Natta, “After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton.” 

28. Sidorov, “An Interview with Sergei Kurzin.” 

29. “Wall Street Journal Publishes Letter from Frank Giustra that Corrects Misinformation,” Reuters, May 01, 2008, http://webcache.googleusercontent.cohttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search? q=cache:UsTisocqOKUJ:www.reuters.com/article/2008/05/01/idUS188740+01-May2008+PRN20080501&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us. 

30. Clinton Foundation, “Statement on Frank Giustra from President Clinton,” January 15, 2009, http://www.clintonfoundation.org/main/news-and-media/statements/statement-on-frank-giustra-from-president-clinton.html. 

31. Clinton Foundation, “Statement on Frank Giustra from President Clinton.” After “Borat-gate” broke, certain points of fact and interpretation were vigorously disputed by both Frank Giustra and the Clintons. Their objections can be summarized into two categories. First, the agreement struck by Giustra and his partners was with private parties in Kazakhstan and not with the government in general or Kazatomprom in particular. Second, as Giustra and his partners had been working on the transaction for over a year inside Kazakhstan, they did not need President Clinton to complete the deal. The first objection is misleading in that it uses the answer to one question—did Giustra and his partners pay a private party for the right to mine uranium in Kazakhstan? While the answer is technically yes, this obscures two much more pertinent questions. First, did UrAsia enter into a commercial relationship with the Kazakh government through its state nuclear agency, Kazatomprom? And second, was the deal in its entirety contingent upon Kazakh government approval? The answer to those two questions is an unequivocal yes. What Giustra secured in 2005 were two joint ventures encompassing three uranium mining sites, each of which featured Kazatomprom as a commercial partner by UrAsia’s own corporate filings. For at least one of the sites, the Kazakh government transferred the rights a mere five days after Clinton’s trip. Giustra et al. paid $350 million for the rights to that site and one other (to the Betpak Dala LLP). Without that transfer of rights, Giustra would have had nothing to buy. The objection is more straightforwardly wrong for three other reasons. First, accounts of the deal given either before or without reference to its controversy treat it as a deal with the Kazakh government—and Kazatomprom in particular—from start to finish. This is true not only of Giustra et al.’s early 2006 victory lap in Canada’s Financial Post, but also a mining trade publication’s interview with Sergey Kurzin, with whom Giustra had done business in Kazakhstan, off and on, since the mid-1990s. Kurzin recounts that the deal started with a meeting he arranged for himself, Giustra, and other figures crucial to the deal with Mukhtar Dzhakishev, head of Kazatomprom. Second, in late May 2009 Dzhakishev was arrested and brought up on criminal charges related to the UrAsia deal. By this time UrAsia’s successor company, Uranium One, had taken over the disputed holdings. Anxious to calm investors, Uranium One’s then president Jean Nortier stated in no uncertain terms that both UrAsia’s and Uranium One’s mining rights enjoyed explicit governmental approval: “UrAsia’s acquisition of these assets, as well as Uranium One’s subsequent acquisition of UrAsia, were completed in accordance with the requirements of Kazakh law, and both transactions were approved by the Kazakh authorities.” Third, UrAsia and Uranium One’s own corporate filings unequivocally demonstrate that any transfer of subsurface mineral rights in Kazakhstan must be approved by Kazkhstan’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Rights (MEMR). Incidentally, MEMR’s head in 2005, Vladimir Shkolnik, later became head of Kazatomprom after Dzhakishev was arrested. Not long after, his son-in-law, Vadim Jivov, ascended to the board of Uranium One (he eventually became its president) while Giustra’s good friend and Clinton Foundation donor Ian Telfer was chairman of the board. In any case, the key fact revealed by the evidence is not so much Kazatomprom’s commercial participation with UrAsia, but the Kazakhstan government’s complete authority over the company’s acquisition of mining rights and its subsequent operations within the country. There would have been no deal had Kazakh authorities failed to sign off on it. As to whether President Clinton’s participation was necessary to close the deal, consider the words of Gordon Keep, longtime Giustra associate and officer for UrAsia: “we had only six weeks to complete a fourteen-week deal.” By the time Clinton joined Giustra in Kazakhstan his friends at Canaccord and GMP Securities had raised $504 million Canadian and put it on the line to capitalize the venture, a figure cited in the Canadian financial press as a first for such an enterprise. Stipulating Giustra’s commitment to global charity, it beggars credulity that an investor so experienced and shrewd with $504 million worth of credibility on the line, would have introduced President Clinton, a politician legendary for his ability to strike a deal, into the delicate negotiation’s closing moments if his presence was not integral to it. Kazakhstan’s dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, obviously had the power to kill the venture at whim, nor were Nazarbayev and Kazakhstan lacking for other prospective investors in uranium. Nazarbayev’s eagerness for bribes was well known, including, allegedly, from multibillion-dollar Western companies such as Chevron. What would he have expected from an effective, but comparatively small-time player such as Giustra? Furthermore, as discussed below, Clinton had something very real to offer Nazarbayev: an endorsement for the OSCE chairmanship, an honor that would have opened diplomatic and commercial doors in Europe otherwise closed to him. The Kazakh embassy posted notice of the endorsement online the same day, a fact that speaks for itself. 

32. Stewart, Sinclair, and Andy Hoffman, “Uranium One Ensnared in Kazakh Scandal,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 27, 2009, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/uranium-one-ensnared-in-kazakh-scandal/article4211504/. 

33. Chapman, David, “Glowing Prospects for 6 Uranium Miners,” Moneyshow.com, April 17, 2012, http://www.moneyshow.com/articles.asp?aid=Global-27436. Becker and Van Natta, “After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton.” 

34. US Department of State, “Kazakhstan: Business as Usual in the Uranium Mining Sector,” WikiLeaks, June 17, 2009, https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09ASTANA1033_a.html. 

35. Seccombe, Allan, “Kazakh Move Stuns Uranium One,” MiningMx, May 27, 2009, http://www.miningmx.com/news/energy/kazakhmove-stuns-uranium-one.htm. See note 51. 

36. Becker and Van Natta, “After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton.” 

37. Pan, Philip P., “Clinton Adviser Intervened with Uranium Deal, Ex-Kazakh Official Says,” Washington Post, February 24, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/24/AR2010022403290.html. 

38. In 2008 Dzhakishev was arrested by Kazakh security forces along with three other top Kazatomprom officials. It was part of a broader purge that included the head of the state-owned rail and energy companies. According to a leaked State Department cable, the arrests were “denounced as politically motivated” by nongovernment observers. As with so much in Kazakh politics, the events were imbedded with intrigue. Allegations were made that President Nazarbayev’s family actually owned part of Kazatomprom and was profiting from the deals. The arrests were allegedly designed to cover it up. Dzhakishev was also a longtime friend of Nazarbayev’s estranged son-in-law Rakhat Aliyev. In exile in Europe, Aliyev called Dzhakishev “a political detainee of Nazarbayev’s regime.” US Department of State, “Kazakhstan: Changes and Charges at Kazatomprom,” WikiLeaks, June 3, 2009, https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09ASTANA943_a.html. Pan, “Clinton Adviser Intervened to Help with Uranium Deal.” 

39. Ibid., and videos of Dzhakishev: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9Ze93MxqaQKPVHLkKmVpeQ; translation by Dr. David Meyer. 

40. Lenzner, Robert, “Clinton Commits No Foul in Kazakhstan Uranium Deal,” Forbes, January 12, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/12/giustra-clinton-kazakhstan-pf-ii-in_rl_0912croesus_inl.html. 

41. Bronson, Lisa, “Testimony on Cooperative Threat Reduction Program before the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities,” March 10, 2004, http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/congress/2004_h/040310-bronson.pdf. 

42. Pan, “Clinton Adviser Intervened with Uranium Deal.” 

43. Ibid. Tufts University, “Board Members: Tim Phillips,” http://www.tuftsgloballeadership.org/about/boards-and-staff/tim-phillips. “About Us,” Beyond Conflict, http://www.beyondconflictint.org/about-us/staff/timothy-phillips/. 

44. Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, “Weekly News Bulletin,” September 7, 2005, http://prositeskazakhembus.homestead.com/090705.html. 

45. Becker and Van Natta, “After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton.” 

46. Nichol, “Kazakhstan: Recent Developments and U.S. Interests.” 

47. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, “Promises to Keep: Kazakhstan’s 2010 OSCE Chairmanship,” official transcript, July 22, 2008, http://csce.gov/index.cfm? FuseAction=Content-Records.ViewDetail&ContentRecord_id=434&Region_id=0&Issue_id=0&ContentType=H,B&ContentRecordType=H&CFID=13299032&CFTOKEN=93551824. 

48. Signature Resources Ltd., “Signature Enters into Acquisition Agreement with UrAsia Energy Ltd,” September 20, 2005, http://www.infomine.com/index/pr/Pa299684.PDF. 

49. Becker and Van Natta, “After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton.” 

50. Ibid. 

51. Ibid. 

52. “Kazakhstan Timeline,” Knowledge Ecology International, July 30, 2007, http://keionline.org/content/view/110/1. Kazakhstan News Bulletin, www.kazakhembus.com, 5, no. 52, December 7, 2005, http://prosites-kazakhembus.homestead.com/December_7.pdf. 53. Canadian System of Electronic Disclosures (SEDI), http://www.sedi.ca: “Access Public Filings,” “View Summary Reports,” “Insider Transaction Detail,” “Select ‘Insider Family Name,’” “Search ‘Ian Telfer,’” “Select ‘Date of Transaction,’” “Search ‘January 1, 2000-present day,’” “Urasia Energy.” Hoffman and Stewart, “How to (Still) Get Rich in Mining.” 

54. Moriarty, Bob, “Girls and Peak Gold: Wheaton River Jr.,” 321gold.com, October 7, 2007, http://www.321gold.com/editorials/moriarty/moriarty103007.html (accessed November 2, 2014). 

55. Hoffman, Andy, “Ian Telfer: ‘I’m More of an Opportunist than a Visionary,’” Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 27, 2011, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/careers-leadership/ian-telfer-im-more-of-an-opportunist-than-avisionary/article582085/?page=all. 

56. Kirby, Jason, “Uranium Blockbuster,” National Post (Canada), January 31, 2006, http://www.canada.com/story.html?id=c8c388e6- ba0b-4ed3-bc67-21a05ec652c2.=. 

57. “Coming Soon! A New Uranium Stock,” Stocks, Uranium, Exchange, Symbol, November 7, 2005, http://socialize.morningstar.com/NewSocialize/forums/p/158426/2044148.aspx#2044148 (accessed November 2, 2014). “Uranium Mining and Exploration Post #2119,” Investors Hub, November 7, 2005, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx? message_id=8398619 (Accessed November 02, 2014). See also “Uranium Blockbuster: Canaccord Adams-led IPO Financing of Uranium Producer UrAsia Energy Faced Language Barriers, a 14-hour Time Difference and a Drop in the Equity Markets. But the Deal Was Done,” Financial Post (Canada), January 31, 2006. 

58. Uranium One, “Uranium One and UrAsia Energy Announce Combination to Create Emerging Senior Uranium Company,” news release, February 12, 2007, Uranium1.com, http://www.uranium1.com/index.php/en/component/docman/doc_download/256-uraniumone-and-urasia-energy-announce-combination-to-create-emerging-senior-uranium-company. 

59. Lenzner, Robert, “Clinton Commits No Foul in Kazakhstan Uranium Deal,” Forbes, January 12, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/12/giustra-clinton-kazakhstan-pf-ii-in_rl_0912croesus_inl.html. 

60. Becker, Jo, and Don Van Natta, Jr., “Ex-President, Mining Deal and a Donor,” New York Times , January 30, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&. 

61. Despite initially denying the meeting, Giustra later recanted and “his aides explain that the manner in which the Times’ fact-checking questions were asked was misleading and did not prompt them to recall the Chappaqua meeting.” Lenzner, “Clinton Commits No Foul in Kazakhstan Uranium Deal.” Becker, and Van Natta, “Ex-President, Mining Deal and a Donor.” 

62. Hamm, Nathan, “Joe Biden’s Letter to Nursultan Nazarbayev,” Registannet RSS, March 23, 2007, http://registan.net/2007/03/23/joe-bidens-letter-to-nursultan-nazarbayev/. 

63. Becker and Van Natta, “Ex-President, Mining Deal and a Donor.” Cooper, Helene, and Peter Baker, “Clinton Vetting Includes Look at Mr. Clinton,” New York Times , November 16, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/us/politics/17memo.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0. 

64. Love, James, “The Well-Connected Dictator,” Huffington Post, October 6, 2007, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/thewellconnected-dictato_b_67423.html. “Featured Attendees,” Clinton Global Initiative, http://re.clintonfoundation.org/page.aspx? pid=1263. Official Site of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, September 26, 2007, http://www.akorda.kz/en/page/page_president-nursultan-nazarbayev-takes-part-in-the-clinton-global-initiative-forum_1348723422. 

65. Smith, “Clinton Used Giustra’s Plane, Opened Doors for Deals (Correct).” 

66. Uranium One, “Uranium One and UrAsia Energy Announce Combination to Create Emerging Senior Uranium Company.” Although reported by some as a buyout, it was actually a reverse merger. Frank Giustra and any other shareholders didn’t get bought out; they actually took control of the new company named Uranium One. Hill, Liezel, “Uranium One Wraps Up UrAsia Acquisition, Eyes London Listing,” Engineering News, April 23, 2007, http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/uranium-onewraps-up-urasia-acquisition-eyes-london-listing-2007-04-23. “Immediately following the completion of the arrangement, Uranium One was owned approximately 60% by the former UrAsia shareholders and approximately 40% by the then-existing Uranium One shareholders.” Uranium One Inc., Annual Information Form 2007, report, March 31, 2008, http://www.uranium1.com/index.php/en/component/docman/doc_download/69- 2008-annual-information-form. 

67. As Platts Nucleonics Week reports, “For accounting purposes, UrAsia Energy became a subsidiary of what was now called Uranium One, but in fact, it was UrAsia Energy shareholders who took control of the new company, according to documents filed with Canadian securities regulators.” Stellfox, David, “Uranium One’s Russian Deals Pushes Kazakh Probes to the Background,” Platts Nucleonics Week , June 18, 2009. As the London Stock Exchange reported, “each UrAsia common share will be exchanged for .45 Uranium One common shares. After the completion of the transaction, it is expected that current Uranium One shareholders will own approximately 40 percent of the combined company and current UrAsia shareholders will own approximately 60 percent.” “UrAsia Energy Ltd Plans Merger with SXR Uranium,” London Stock Exchange Aggregated Regulatory News Service, February 17, 2007. “UrAsia Energy Ltd (UUU),” FE Investegate/UrAsia Energy Ltd Announcements, February 12, 2007, http://www.investegate.co.uk/article.aspx?id=200702120726400752R. 68. Uranium One, “Uranium One Completes Acquisition of Energy Metals,” press release, August 10, 2007, http://www.uranium1.com/index.php/en/component/docman/doc_download/239-uranium-one-completes-acquisition-of-energy-metals. 

69. “Vadim Zhivov: ‘We Can Be Faced by a Deficit of Uranium,’” Rosatom, December 2, 2010, http://www.rosatom.ru/en/presscentre/interviews/4eafad80432eea76ab83eb539abab8a1. Rosatom Corp., “Russia to Acquire 17% Stake in Canada’s Uranium One (Update1),” news release, June 19, 2009, ARMZ Uranium Holding Co., http://www.armz.ru/media/File/facts/ARMZ-U1/Bloomberg.pdf. 

70. Wright, Lisa, “Clintons’ Canadian Buddy,” Toronto Star , February 3, 2008, http://www.thestar.com/business/2008/02/03/clintons_canadian_buddy.html. 

71. “Contributor Information,” Clinton Foundation, https://www.clintonfoundation.org/contributors. 

72. Hoffman, “Renaissance Man.” 

73. Becker and Van Natta, “Ex-President, Mining Deal and a Donor.” Hoffman, “Renaissance Man.” 

74. “Contributor Information,” Clinton Foundation, https://www.clintonfoundation.org/contributors? category=%24250%2C001+to+%24500%2C000 (accessed 2014). “Frank Edward Holmes,” Investing.businessweek.com, http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=310588&ticker=GROW. 

75. Hoffman, “Renaissance Man.” “President Clinton and Business Leaders Launch Sustainable Development Initiative in the Developing World,” press release, Clinton Foundation, June 21, 2007, https://www.clintonfoundation.org/main/news-and-media/pressreleases-and-statements/press-release-president-clinton-and-business-leaders-launch-sustainable-developm.html. “Management,” Endeavour Mining Corporation, http://www.endeavourmining.com/s/Management.asp. 

76. “Clinton Foundation Donors,” Wall Street Journal , December 18, 2008, http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/st_clintondonor_20081218.html. “Transactions (Page 2),” Haywood Securities Inc., http://www.haywood.com/investmentbanking/searchtransactions.aspx?view=tombstone&field=year&year=2005# (accessed 2014). 

77. “Clinton Foundation Donors,” Wall Street Journal . “Paul D. Reynolds,” Investing.businessweek.com, http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=1467569&ticker=CF:CN. 

78. “President Clinton and Business Leaders Launch Sustainable Development Initiative in the Developing World.” Hoffman, “Renaissance Man.” Kirby, “Uranium Blockbuster.” 

79. “President Clinton and Business Leaders Launch Sustainable Development Initiative in the Developing World.” “Robert Melvin Douglas Cross MBA,” Investing.businessweek.com, http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp? personId=8052452&ticker=BNK:CN&previousCapId=35511785&previousTitle=B2GOLD%20CORP. 

80. “Global Metals & Mining Biographies,” BMO Capital Markets, http://www.bmocm.com/industry-expertise/mining/bio/ (accessed 2014). Uranium One, “Uranium One and UrAsia Energy Announce Combination to Create Emerging Senior Uranium Company.” 

81. Hoffman, “Renaissance Man.” Kirby, “Uranium Blockbuster.” 

82. Hoffman, “Renaissance Man.” “Sergey Vladimirovich Kurzin Ph.D.,” Investors.businessweek.com, http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=13061746&ticker=OSU:CN. Sidorov, “An Interview with Sergei Kurzin.” 

83. Hoffman, “Renaissance Man.” “Board of Directors,” Uranium One, http://www.uranium1.com/index.php/en/about-uraniumone/board-of-directors (accessed 2014).

84. Clinton Foundation, “President Clinton and Business Leaders Launch Sustainable Development Initiative in the Developing World.” 

85. Wright, “Clintons’ Canadian Buddy.” 

86. Todd, Douglas, “Frank Giustra: Rescuing Global Capitalism from Itself,” Vancouver Sun , September 13, 2008, http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2008/09/13/frank-giustra-rescuing-global-capitalism-from-itself/?__federated=1. 

87. Ibid.

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