Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, some bro named Robby Mook, recently accused Donald Trump of being “a puppet for the Kremlin.”
Donald Trump certainly has a bromance with Vladimir Putin. The Russian president called him a genius once, and Trump thought he was being sincere. Trump also hired a campaign manger who may have violated federal law by failing to disclose his ties to a pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarch.
But criticizing Trump’s alleged ties to foreign dictators might be one of the least effective tactics for Hillary Clinton, given her own ties to some of the world’s sketchiest strongmen.
For example, the Clinton Foundation has collected millions of dollars from authoritarian regimes—in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—that Hillary Clinton has accused of turning a blind eye to terror funding. Bill Clinton is a personal friend and (with Hillary) a law school classmate of former Saudi intelligence minister Prince Turki bin Feisal.
The lobbying firm founded by Hillary mega-bundler Tony Podesta, brother of Hillary’s campaign manager John Podesta, was recently implicated in a potentially illegal lobbying deal with the aforementioned ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and a non-profit group tied to ousted Ukrainian president and Putin ally Victor Yanukovych, who’s on Interpol’s wanted list. Tony Podesta’s lobbying firm routinely represents sketchy foreign actors, such as the Russian banking giant Sberbank, which was recently exposed for shady financial dealings in the Panama Papers leak.
While Hillary was serving as secretary of state, Bill Clinton was paid $625,000 to give two speeches sponsored by Russian entities that also donated money to the Clinton Foundation. A host of other Russian firms with ties to the government also gave to the Clinton Foundation. During that time, Bill Clinton also gave speeches sponsored by groups with ties to the authoritarian governments of China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates.
Bill Clinton has also helped arrange meetings between foreign dictators and foundation super donor Frank Giustra, a mining magnate who runs his own Canadian offshoot of the Clinton Foundation that, for convenient legal reasons, is unable to disclose its donors. In 2005, Bill Clinton, for example, accompanied Giustra to Kazakhstan for a meeting with the country’s notorious strongman president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Shortly after the meeting took place, Giustra’s companies were awarded lucrative mining contracts in the former Soviet republic.
The Clinton Foundation recently held a conference in Morocco — with has a poor human rights record — sponsored by the King of Morocco and a government-owned phosphate conglomerate that has donated millions to the foundation. Bill Clinton spoke at the event, which took place at a “lavish palm-tree-lined golf resort with a cocktail reception featuring Moroccan hors d’oeuvres and a saxophonist serenading about 50 donors, non-profit leaders and dignitaries including Saudi Prince Turki Al Faisal.”
The foundation has also accepted millions of dollars from the government of Brunei, whose corrupt strongman leader, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, imposed sharia law on the country in 2014 (homosexuality in Brunei can be punishable by death).
This is merely a partial account of the Clintons’ ties to shady foreign leaders, but it should be clear by now that they don’t have much credibility when it comes to attacking others for palling around with strongmen.
