Man, actual journalism executed well by a non-smarmy person who didn’t resort to shouting over someone? Since when is that legal?
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This tells a different story than Joy did on the show. What’s the overlap here?
It doesn’t, really. That timeline is long on vague insinuation and short on concrete connection.
Take the very first item: “Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining financier, wins a major uranium deal in Kazakhstan for his company, UrAsia, days after visiting the country with former President Bill Clinton.”
This is straight up Chewbacca defense stuff.
I mean what does that even mean? What decision-making involvement does Bill Clinton have with awarding Kazakhstani mining contracts? Is the implication that he was moonlighting as Kazakhstan’s Minister of the Interior back in 2006? And since when do mining contracts take mere days to bid on and be awarded? Putting these two things in the same sentence does not actually make them causally connected events.
A more plausible – and benign – interpretation is that an industrialist and philanthropist with lots of interests in Central Asia (his company is called “UrAsia” for pity’s sake, this was probably not his first trip to Kazakhstan - site of Asia’s largest uranium supplies) was giving and/or being given a tour of charitable projects in the country, in the company of the figurehead of a charitable foundation. After the trip, the wealthy man makes a donation to said foundation, as you do.
Unrelatedly, a contract the company had been bidding on (a process that likely had been in the works for months if not years, as these things go) happened to be awarded ‘days’ later. (Presumably it is Kazakhstani authorities who do this, not minions of the Clinton Global Hegemony and Uranium Emporium.)
At worst, I guess you could interpret Giustra’s donations to charitable projects as simply a ploy to ingratiate himself to Kazakhstani authorities in general. Which it may well be. But if you even want to call that corruption, it’s a fairly mild form. And it’s almost impossible to see how to Bill Clinton’s involvement in that transaction is particularly sinister.
The rest of the items on that timeline are similar inveigly nonsense.
Now, it may be that these aren’t all of the relevant facts. It’s possible that there was indeed some shady dealing there that (the) Clinton(s) w(as/ere) somehow integral to. Anything’s possible. But this timeline thing doesn’t even remotely begin to establish such a connection. Calling it ships passing in the night is charitable, frankly. This is more like low fog banks drifting around in the dark.
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Is it wrong of me to comment on my impression of Jen Kerns? She looks like the perfect storm of mean, stupid and stubborn.
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I doubt that she’s stupid. Most of the partisan talking heads aren’t stupid. They understand how facts and logic work. They just don’t care. It’s their job to spew propaganda that makes the other side look evil, regardless of reality. And they do a frighteningly good job.
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Thanks! This is helpful.
Agree. It’s funny that because you lean one way or the other, people assume that you see all of the individuals of that side as saints, and the other side as sinners.
Something I heard a lot from left-leaning folks IRL is that Clinton was a, “Normal amount of corrupt”.
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I would say that is probably the most accurate description.
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Considering how much they’ve been investigated by people with a vested interest in finding any improprieties they could blow up into a scandal, I’d say Clintons are pretty definitely less corrupt than most politicians.
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