$500,000 of Russian Cheese, Wasted?
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Once upon a time, Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and her husband Bill was a freewheelin’ ex-president of the U.S. of A., jetting here and there to collect huge sums for brief speeches. “I gotta pay our bills,” he told NBC News a few years ago in defending the practice. So he collected $1.5 million from the Swiss bank UBS for “a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann,” $600,000 to shoot the breeze with the guys at Goldman Sachs, $500,000 from the government of Abu Dhabi for a 20-minute talk on climate change. (For the record: I do a 30-minute talk on climate change, and I bet it’s smarter. Make me an offer, Abu Dhabi!)
And in 2010, our former U.S. president flew to Moscow, on hire for a single speech at a Russian investment bank, Renaissance Capital. Cha-ching! Another $500,000. Gotta pay those bills. (This is all cash to citizen Clinton, and is a separate matter from the larger sums donated to his charitable foundation.)
Ask yourself:
How is it that the Russian government — having supposedly decided at the highest levels to sink Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and sabotage our entire shining democracy — never made use of this $500,000 Russian payout?
Hillary Clinton is in the news again, arguing that everyone from Army Major Tulsi Gabbard to physician Jill Stein to real estate flim-flam man Donald Trump have all been secretly groomed over the years as Russian sleeper agents. It’s another vast conspiracy against her.
“I don’t know what Putin has on him,” she says of President Trump. She states that Putin might be blackmailing Trump with either personal or financial indiscretions, and says, “I assume” it is probably both.
Well.
We do know at least one thing that Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin have on the Clintons: He took a $500,000 paycheck for an hour’s work in Moscow, while she was secretary of state. Putin called Clinton afterwards to thank him.
For more than 3 years now, we’ve been told the Russian government has been engaged in an all-out, all-fronts covert operation to “hack our democracy.” At times, it was supposedly about tricking us into electing Donald Trump president; at other times, it was supposedly because the Russians hate our freedoms.
And so we have tied ourselves in knots, investigated and indicted, libeled and locked up. And eventually, all of the…