Unit2Sucks said:It's a bit more complicated than that because that was during the "Russian Reset." As you know Obama eventually signed the Magnitsky Act into law. And of course, the quote you bolded from Lehrich was an intra campaign communication that doesn't speak to the underlying facts and isn't particularly persuasive in context, but if it weren't for cherry-picked out of context quotes, you wouldn't have anything to write about.Cal88 said:sycasey said:Blumenthal is definitely being paid by Putin.Cal88 said:Update just now via the White House Covid Response Team:
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 26, 2022
President Biden ate a big bowl of Spaghettios with meatballs, licked his plate clean, made a boom boom and took a big nap. He then sent another billion to Ukraine and got ready for bath time.
https://prospect.org/politics/my-adventures-with-rt-putin-russia/Quote:
This was the occasion at which RT famously paid Michael Flynn $45,000 to speak. I had never paid attention to RT before, and while I knew that Flynn had occupied important roles in the U.S. national-security bureaucracy, I was not yet up to speed on his role with Trump, whom I still had trouble taking seriously. I do, however, recall being shocked at how crazy Flynn sounded, especially on the topic of Hillary Clinton. Frequent RT guest and Flynn's fellow conspiracy theorist Max Blumenthal was also a paid speaker, as was the British cheerleader for Hamas and Saddam Hussein George Galloway. Julian Assange appeared by video. Green Party presidential candidate and 2016 election spoiler Jill Stein, who appears in the famous photo at dinner with Flynn and Putin, spoke as well.
As far as American political figures getting paid by the Kremlin, I believe that the record is $500,000 (in 2010 money), I wonder if Alterman (who objectively speaking is not the worst journo out there) wrote about this:
https://freebeacon.com/politics/bill-clinton-paid-500000-speak-russia-hillary-opposed-state-dept-sanctions/Quote:
Hillary Clinton sought to tamp down reports about her opposition to Russia sanctions that coincided with a speech her husband gave in Moscow that landed him half a million dollars.
Hillary Clinton opposed Russia sanctions in 2010 when her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was paid to give a speech at the Russian bank Renaissance Capital, Fox News reports.
The bank was connected to the fraud case that led to the sanctions posed by the Magnitsky Act, and after the former president gave the speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin called him to say thanks.
This story did not receive much attention while President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were pursuing their Russian "reset," but Hillary Clinton's campaign took pains to prevent the story of Bill's speech from getting out. In 2015, campaign operatives were able to prevent a mainstream media outlet from reporting on it.
"With the help of the research team, we killed a Bloomberg story trying to link HRC's opposition to the Magnitsky bill a $500,000 speech that WJC gave in Moscow," Jesse Lehrich, who was part of Hillary For America's Rapid Response Communications team, said on May 21, 2015.
The memo was released by WikiLeaks, with "HRC" and "WJC" referring to Hillary and Bill Clinton respectively.
The Magnitsky Act's namesake, Sergei Magnitsky, was jailed by the Russian government after he discovered a massive fraud scheme. Some of those who orchestrated the scheme were with Renaissance Capital, according to William Browder of Hermitage Capital Management, whose company was defrauded hundreds of millions of dollars.
Magnitsky died in 2009 while imprisoned in Russia, after discovering how Hermitage Capital Management's money was being stolen. Browder had hired Magnitsky to track down the money that had been lost through tax fraud.
The State Department under Hillary Clinton denied requests to sanction Russia in 2010, and weeks later Bill Clinton went to Moscow to deliver his $500,000 speech. Bloomberg was set to report on this timeline five years later as Hillary Clinton was getting her campaign started, but her campaign intervened and prevented it from publishing the story.
Clinton was against sanctioning Russia in 2010, although she reversed her position in 2011. That year her State Department stopped issuing visas to Russians connected to financial fraud, and in 2012 the Magnitsky Act was formally passed in Congress.
Snopes followed up on this:Quote:
We reached out to Lehrich and asked him to elaborate on the email. He told us digging up the old message was an attempt to shift focus away from the current president's ongoing Russia scandal:Quote:
The administration's line has devolved from "this Russia thing is a hoax" to "sure the President's son and top two advisers met with Kremlin-linked operatives in hopes of getting dirt on Hillary but one time her husband gave a speech in Moscow."
It's a ridiculous attempt to muddy the waters by an administration embroiled in scandal. The only new detail here seems to be a throwaway reference to a non-story in a nightly summary I compiled two years ago, which is only public because of the Kremlin's hacking operation. If there was evidence of anything inappropriate, it surely would've been widely reported, but there's not and I'd imagine that's why the piece was spiked.
Let's get to the real story. Do you disagree with the Russian Reset? Do you think Russia should have been sanctioned? If so, why? If not, why are you criticizing Clinton for doing something you agree with?
I'm criticizing Clinton for taking a half million dollar bribe, something I disagree with. But I guess it is par for the course for a career politician who spent $3 million on his daughter's wedding.