by Michael Bastasch • Daily Caller
Sen. Tim Kaine conveniently left out Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s ties to a Russian state-owned energy company when attacking his Republican opponent at Tuesday night’s debate.
“It is clear he has business dealings with Russia and is very connected to Putin,” Kaine said of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s business dealings, according to the debate transcript. “The Trump campaign management team had to be fired a month or so ago because of those shadowy connections.”
Kaine repeatedly attacked Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Mike Pence for calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “better leader than president Obama.”
But Kaine left out an inconvenient fact about his running mate. Specifically, reports Clinton’s non-profit took money from a Canadian businessman looking to cut a deal with Rosatom — Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy company.
The Clinton Foundation got millions from people associated with Uranium One, a uranium mining company, after Clinton helped approve the company’s selling shares to Rosatom in 2010.
Clinton was one of the voices on the Committee on Foreign Investment to approve the deal, but she didn’t disclose people associated with the Uranium One deal donated $8.65 million to the Clinton Foundation between 2008 and 2010.
“Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors,” The New York Times reported in April 2015.
“And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, [former President Bill Clinton] received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock,” the Times reported.
Rosatom’s takeover of Uranium One was approved by the U.S. government in October 2010, just five months after former President Bill Clinton was paid for his speech in Moscow.
Kaine neglected to mention this.
The whole reason Rosatom wanted to gain majority control of Uranium One was because of a mining deal orchestrated by President Bill Clinton in 2005 on behalf of Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, according to the NYTimes.
Giustra won a “major uranium deal in Kazakhstan for his company, UrAsia, days after visiting the country with former President Bill Clinton,” the Times reported. Giustra gave $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation in 2006.