Read Online Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer - Free Book Online

director at the firm, served for thirty-two years as a KGB and SVR (the foreign intelligence arm of the Russian government) officer, retiring with the rank of general. 65 Yuri Sagaidak, the deputy general director at RenCap, was a colonel in the KGB. 66 Vladimir Dzhabarov served simultaneously as an officer in the FSB and first vice president at RenCap from 2006 to 2009. 67
    RenCap was also watching the Uranium One deal. Only three weeks before Clinton’s speech, on May 27, RenCap had been pushing Uranium One stock. “We believe the company is well positioned to provide impressive volume growth in the global sector and play the uranium spot price recovery,” RenCap wrote in a twenty-eight-page report on the company. It actively encouraged investors to buy the stock. 68
    Clinton’s hour-long, half-million-dollar speech on the theme of Russia “going global” was followed by a plenary session that included Renaissance Capital executives and senior Russian government officials.
    During his Moscow visit, Bill also met with Putin himself.
    Just days earlier the FBI had made a series of arrests, breaking up a Russian spy ring. Ten sleeper agents, using encrypted data transferred through digital images, invisible ink, and a sophisticated system for transferring information by switching bags at a train station in Queens, had been broken up. Among the spy ring’s targets: a leading fundraiser for Hillary who also happenedto be a Clinton friend. A Russian sleeper agent named “Cynthia Murphy” was instructed “to single out tidbits unknown publicly but revealed in private by sources close to State Department.” 69 According to the FBI, intercepted communications showed that the chief assignment of the ring would be “to search and develop ties in policy-making circles in U.S.” 70
    When Bill sat down with Putin, it didn’t take long for the subject of Russian espionage to come up. “You have come to Moscow at the exact right time,” Putin told the former president, according to the New York Times . Waving a finger at him, Putin continued, “Your police have gotten carried away, putting people in jail.” 71 In response, “Clinton appeared to chuckle.” 72
    Clinton and Putin had a close relationship. President Boris Yeltsin first appointed Putin prime minister in 1999, while Bill was still president, and they had remained in contact ever since. In January 2009, while at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bill had gone to Putin’s private party at the Sheraton, where he was greeted by the Russian leader as “our good friend” before cheering him with vodka shots. The pair then headed off to a private room where they “talked deep into the night.” 73 In September 2013, as the Ukrainian crisis built, Clinton offered what the Russian news agency RIA Novosti called “Rare U.S. Praise for Putin” on CNN. Clinton described the Russian leader as “very smart” and “brutally blunt.” When he was asked by CNN’s Piers Morgan if Putin ever reneged on a deal, Clinton responded: “He did not. He kept his word on all the deals we made.” 74
    Remember, for the Russian purchase of Uranium One to go through, it required approval by CFIUS, of which Hillary was a member. “We have provided all relevant information requested in the U.S., and elsewhere and we expect approval in due time,” said spokesman Dmitry Shulga. 75
    H illary Clintonhad long had a reputation as a CFIUS hawk, opposing the sale of US strategic assets to foreign governments. She had also been a consistent critic of lax reviews by that body in the past. After a Bush administration CFIUS review approved the 2005 purchase of several ports in the United States by the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates, then senator Clinton was quick to denounce it. When the Senate Armed Services Committee held hearings on the matter in early 2006, Hillary promptly assumed the role of chief prosecutor. She not only argued that the CFIUS decision was wrong,