Hillary’s Hotline to Moscow
As Democrats try to link Trump to Putin, new Clinton connections to Kremlin emerge
by Kathryn Blackhurst | Updated 01 Aug 2016 at 12:39 PM
http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/hillarys-hotline-moscow/
QUOTE:
Just as the Democrats closed out their convention week by painting Donald Trump as firmly intertwined with Russian President Vladimir Putin, new details emerged exposing Hillary Clinton’s actual cozy Russian relationship.
During her tenure as secretary of state, Clinton was charged with helping to oversee a major “reset” of relations with Russia, primarily by exchanging technological information.
The highly trumpeted shift in policy was manifest in the creation of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission in 2009 that made Clinton the chief American representative, alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The commission’s mission was to identify “areas of cooperation and [pursue] joint projects” between Silicon Valley and its Russian counterpart in Skolkovo.
“Soon, dozens of U.S. tech firms, including top Clinton Foundation donors like Google, Intel, and Cisco, made major financial contributions to Skolkovo, with Cisco committing a cool $1 billion,” Peter Schweizer, the author of “Clinton Cash,” wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. “By 2012 the vice president of the Skolkovo Foundation, Conor Lenihan — who had previously partnered with the Clinton Foundation — recorded that Skolkovo had assembled 28 Russian, American, and European ‘Key Partners.’ Of the 28 ‘partners,’ 17, or 60 percent, have made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation, totaling tens of millions of dollars, or sponsored speeches by Bill Clinton.”
But it wasn’t only U.S. firms who benefited from the official policy that contributed to the Clinton Foundation.
Russians involved in the Skolkovo thaw also sent in whopping donations to the Clinton catch-all depository for wealth and influence.
Security experts raised alarms that the transfer jeopardized national security in favor of temporary global financial interests.
Research from the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Program at For Leavenworth stated Skolkovo is a "vehicle for worldwide technology transfer to Russia in the areas of information technology, biomedicine, energy, satellite and space technology, and nuclear technology."
"The FBI believes the true motives of the Russian partners, who are often funded by their government, is to gain access to classified, sensitive, and emerging technology from the companies," Lucia Ziobro, an assistant special agent at the FBI's Boston office, wrote in an op-ed in 2014. "The [Skolkovo] foundation may be a means for the Russian government to access our nation's sensitive or classified research development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial application."
The takeaway is Clinton intentionally opened up access to U.S. technology and secrets to Russian actors and made herself the fulcrum of the transaction — while American-based global corporations and the Russians contributed to her family's foundation. Yet the media has allowed her allies to link unknown hackers, possibly of Russian nationality, to some myth that Donald Trump is Putin's pick for president.
Of course the self-preserving spin isn't surprising from the Democrats since so much damning material was contained in the over 19,000 emails leaked from the Democratic National Committee.
"We know that Russian intelligence services, which is part of the Russian government which is under the firm control of Vladimir Putin, hacked into the DNC. And we know that he arranged for a lot of those emails to be released," Clinton told "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace over the weekend, adding that "we know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin."
When Wallace pressed Clinton over whether or not she thought Putin and the Russians theoretically acted on behalf of Trump's presidential campaign, the former secretary of state balked a bit – but only a tiny bit.
"Well, I'm not going to jump to that conclusion, but I think laying out the facts raises issues about Russian interference in our elections, in our democracy," Clinton responded. "And for Trump to both encourage that and to praise Putin despite what appears to be a deliberate effort to try to affect the election I think raises national security issues."
