Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (67 page)

The new rule would hold at least for the duration of the presidential campaign. And the foundation would also renew its suspension of any conferences scheduled abroad.

Partisan critics still found it all too easy to represent a minor error as a sinister deception, and a generous gift as an attempt to purchase
influence. Improvements in transparency and appearances were not their objective. No evidence of actual wrongdoing would be necessary to create an appearance of conflict or worse, as the Clintons were about to learn once more.

Few American authors would dare to imagine the publicity bonanza that the editors of the
New York Times
bestowed on Peter Schweizer’s
Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich
. During the weeks leading up to its publication in early May—and only days after Hillary announced her presidential candidacy—the
Times
published not one but two articles promoting and implicitly endorsing the book—which, as its title indicated, purported to expose the Clintons’ enrichment by foreign interests.

It was the kind of publicity that money literally could never buy.

On April 19, the paper led its politics section with a story by Amy Chozick that described
Clinton Cash
as “the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy.” The author’s background as a Republican partisan and former speechwriter for George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, wrote Chozick, would be used by Clinton supporters to discredit him as yet another in a long line of biased critics—but that might be more difficult, she added, because Schweizer “writes mainly in the voice of a neutral journalist and meticulously documents his sources . . . while leaving little doubt about his view of the Clintons.”

Beyond that affirmation of his methods, Chozick reported that both the
Times
and the
Washington Post
—as well as Fox News Channel—had entered into “exclusive” deals with Schweizer to pursue “story lines” in his book. To anyone in the Clinton camp who remembered the Whitewater “scandal,” which began with investigative stories in the
Times
and the
Post
, this collaboration between the two leading print outposts of the “liberal media” and hostile Republican sources looked all too familiar.

Scores of readers noticed the incongruous arrangement in Chozick’s story and protested to Margaret Sullivan, the
Times
public editor. Sullivan posted a column four days later, expressing her distaste for the “exclusive”
deal with Schweizer, while expressing complete faith in the paper’s editors to handle such material properly.

But that same day, Sullivan’s mild demurral was overshadowed as the
Times
presented the fruit of its collaboration with Schweizer on the front page of its print edition and in the top spot on its website—a 4,400-word story vaguely headlined “
Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,”
by investigative reporters Jo Becker and Mike McIntire, which explored the disposition of uranium mining rights in Kazakhstan and the United States by a group of Canadian investors that had once included foundation donor Frank Giustra—and that left those strategic reserves in Russian hands.

Before joining the
Times
staff, Becker had shared a Pulitzer Prize at the
Washington Post
. She also had shared a byline on the January 2008
Times
investigation of Giustra’s uranium deal in the Central Asian nation and his connections with Clinton. Whatever other motives might have inspired the paper’s deal with Schweizer seven years later, the
Times
editors leapt at a chance to revisit that story—which had provoked an embarrassing public correction in
Forbes
magazine.

The April 23 story revisited the first
Times
investigation in detail, even repeating one of its most easily checked errors: the claim that Giustra and Clinton had flown together on Giustra’s jet to Almaty, the Kazakh capital. (Actually, Clinton and his staff had arrived four days later on another friend’s plane.)

But the new story hinted at a more serious accusation: Through a complicated series of deals, Russia had gained control of a portion of U.S. uranium reserves through a Vancouver-based firm called Uranium One, while the Canadian investors who profited had given millions to the Clinton Foundation. The Russian acquisition of those American mines had been approved by the Clinton-led State Department, while those Canadian donations “flowed.”

The story noted that any such deal required the approval of “a number of United States government agencies.” It mentioned that some of the story’s information had been “unearthed” by Schweizer, “a former fellow at the right-leaning Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming book
Clinton Cash
,” who had “provided a preview of material in the book to the
Times
,” which added its own extensive reporting.

“Whether the donations played any role in the approval of the ura
nium deal is unknown,” the reporters acknowledged. But on the pages of the
Times
, even the suggestion that donations from Giustra or other investors influenced Hillary amplified Schweizer’s theme. They also reported that Bill Clinton had received $500,000 for a speech delivered in Moscow to a bank connected with Uranium One.

The story’s insinuation was bolstered by the reporters’ discovery that $2.3 million from the Uranium One investors had not been disclosed on the foundation’s website, but made public only in Canadian tax records. A
Times
editorial the same day complained about the “messiness” of Hillary’s connection with her husband’s foundation, and urged her to impose tighter restrictions on its fundraising.

The question that the
Times
failed to raise, let alone answer, is why anyone interested in the Russian uranium deal would have sought to influence the secretary of state—when her department had only one vote out of nine on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States that had to approve the deal.

While
Clinton Cash
attributed a “central role” to Hillary, she hadn’t participated at all in the Uranium One deliberations. According to the assistant secretary of state who represented her on the panel, “Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter.” Knowledgeable observers of CFIUS believe its decisions are dominated by the Pentagon and the Treasury Department, which chairs the committee, not State. And the nine agencies on CFIUS had unanimously approved the sale of the remainder of Uranium One to the Russians in 2013, several months after Hillary had left the government. That sale also required additional approvals from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Canadian regulators.

In short, cultivating the Clintons would have guaranteed nothing for the Uranium One investors. They had given well over $2 million during a period of several years, but a foundation spokesman—and Giustra—insisted that Canadian and provincial tax laws forbade disclosure of their names without their specific consent.

As for Giustra, the Uranium One investors were his friends and former partners, and he was assuredly a very big Clinton donor. But he had divested all of his Uranium One stock almost three years before the Russian sale went through.

Yet somehow all those exculpatory details were ignored in the
subsequent coverage on cable TV and talk radio, where Clinton’s opponents talked loosely of “bribery”—often during interviews with Schweizer, whose book debuted on May 24 as the number two
Times
nonfiction bestseller and stayed on the list for several weeks.

The
Times
’s promotion of Schweizer encouraged a seemingly endless series of attacks on the Clinton Foundation from almost every direction. Journalists who had paid only fleeting attention to the foundation’s work over more than a decade proclaimed their concern about its finances, transparency, and efficiency.

Commentators with very little knowledge of any of the foundation’s programs, still unable to distinguish the Clinton Global Initiative from the Clinton Health Access Initiative, confidently denounced the entire operation as dubious. Others glancingly recognized the good achieved by the foundation before moving on to denounce the Clintons’ “greed.” And media stars who had eagerly participated in Clinton Global Initiative events, broadcasting gushy interviews with Bill Clinton, suddenly voiced angry suspicions, unproven accusations, and inventive theories.

On April 27, for example, Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s
Morning Joe,
held forth about a 2010 donation to the Clinton Foundation from the government of Algeria, which had been earmarked for Haiti relief. That donation mistakenly went unreported as a pass-through, because it never accrued to the foundation balance sheet.

But to Scarborough, who had conducted a very friendly interview with Clinton from a set at CGI in September 2010, the Algerian money smacked of corruption. He had a theory, too: Algeria’s government wanted to be taken off the State Department’s list of nations that support terrorism.

“I think it was Algeria, maybe, that had given a donation that went unreported at a time when they wanted to be taken off of the terror list in the State Department,” he mused. “They write the check, they get taken off the terror list. . . . At the same time, and then it goes unreported by the Clinton Foundation. . . . Is there a quid pro quo there? I don’t know, that’s really hard to tell.” Scarborough continued in that vein for several minutes.

The facts were considerably less exciting. Algeria had never been
on the State Department’s terror list, which only included four nations; in fact, the Algerian government routinely fought terrorists within its borders and had long been a valued ally of the United States against terrorist organizations operating in North Africa.

Not at all chastened by this blunder, however, Scarborough continued to savage the Clintons the following morning when he interviewed Peter Schweizer. Having once represented a Florida congressional district, Scarborough compared the Clintons unfavorably to several former congressional colleagues and a recent governor of Virginia who all had been convicted of bribery. The proven criminal behavior of the elected officials, he insisted, “pales in comparison to [what is in] this book.”

Much of the most damning material in
Clinton Cash
, however, turned out to be either factually inaccurate, melodramatically exaggerated, or both. Within weeks after publication, major media outlets reported significant errors discovered in its pages.

Time
magazine debunked Schweizer’s chapter on the Uranium One deal, noting that his book had mustered “little evidence” of outside influence on government decision-making, and offered “no indication of Hillary Clinton’s personal involvement in, or even knowledge of, the [CFIUS] deliberations.”

According to ABC News’ investigative team, its “independent review of source material . . . uncovered errors in the book, including an instance where paid and unpaid speaking appearances were conflated,” although “those same records supported the premise that former President Clinton accepted speaking fees from numerous companies and individuals with interests pending before the State Department.” Yet ABC also found that the book “offers no proof that Hillary Clinton took any direct action to benefit the groups and interests that were paying her husband [for speeches].”

NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell poked gaping holes in a section that implied Hillary had promoted Boeing’s multibillion-dollar sale of aircraft to Russia, in exchange for the company’s $900,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation two months later.

As Mitchell pointed out, the aviation giant had donated to the foundation’s Haiti projects for years, and the State Department had been promoting Boeing interests abroad long before Hillary took over. On camera, the Sunlight Foundation’s Bill Allison said, “There’s no—there’s
no evidence that she changed the policy based on, you know, the donations to the foundation.”

BuzzFeed found five major errors in a chapter on Haiti, which purported to show that Digicel entrepreneur Denis O’Brien had received a large State Department contract after arranging hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees for Bill Clinton. But the dates were wrong, the State Department project had been funded mostly by the Gates Foundation, and it turned out that Clinton had delivered most of the listed speeches for free—except one that earned a donation to the foundation.

Yahoo News derided as “circumstantial” a chapter claiming that the mobile phone manufacturer Ericsson had been exempted from Iran sanctions by the State Department, after paying Clinton $750,000 to deliver a speech at a Hong Kong telecom conference. The Obama White House, not State, had made the sanctions decision.

Perhaps the ugliest distortion involved Schweizer’s misuse of two truncated quotes from Clinton’s own colleagues to minimize the role he had played in combating the AIDS pandemic. To suggest slyly that Clinton “may take a little more credit than he is due,” the author plucked that phrase out of a much longer quote from former State Department official Princeton Lyman, who had praised Clinton effusively and felt outraged by the misrepresentation of his words.

Schweizer played a similar trick with a quote he lifted from a long statement by World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, a founder of Partners in Health. His aim was to portray Clinton as a mere “middleman”—when in fact Kim declared the former president “absolutely one of the most important people in the global response to HIV/AIDS.”

Beyond the most hostile political circles, the verdict on
Clinton Cash
was that Schweizer had failed to prove the corrupting influence of speaking fees or foundation contributions on Hillary’s decisions as secretary of state. “We cannot ultimately know what goes on in their minds and ultimately prove the links between the money they took in and the benefits that subsequently accrued to themselves, their friends, and their associates,” his book conceded in the end. Instead, he urged authorities with more investigative power than a mere journalist could muster to bring the Clintons to justice. But no prosecutor, and not even a Republican-led congressional committee, showed any inclination to accept that challenge.