As part of just-inaugurated President Obama’s new foreign policy to improve relations between the United States and Russia, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in March 2009. Meeting in her hotel’s Salon Panorama in Geneva, she presented him with a small gift box containing a bright red button symbolizing the Obama administration’s desire to “reset” the relationship between the two governments.
Thus began an effort to transfer American technology to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own “Silicon Valley,” called Skolkovo. In a report released in late July by the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) entitled From Russia With Money, authors Stephen Bannon and Peter Schweitzer reviewed the long sordid history of the technology transfer from companies such as Google, Intel, and Cisco of hi-tech technology with useful military applications. The report quoted warnings from the FBI and the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Program at Fort Leavenworth that the transfer would work against American interests. Warned the U.S. Army:
[The “reset” would serve as] a vehicle for world-wide technology transfers to Russia in the areas of information technology, biomedicine, energy, satellite and space technology, and nuclear technology.
It was clearly a “quid pro quo” arrangement: 17 of the 28 companies involved in the technology transfer gave millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation or to Bill Clinton for giving some speeches.
When those authors, both of whom are affiliated with Breitbart News, summed up their conclusions, one question remained: “The GAI investigative report says it’s unclear how much, if any, money [John] Podesta made.” Podesta, having served the Clintons for years, first as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and then as counselor to President Obama and finally as Hillary’s campaign chairman, deserved a payoff.
But it wasn’t clear until the latest batch of e-mails provided by WikiLeaks went public last week that Americans now know. For his efforts Podesta received thousands of shares of common and preferred stock in one of the companies involved in the transfer. The fact came to light when WikiLeaks published e-mails Podesta sent to the company ordering it to transfer his shares to a shell corporation he had created a month earlier. The e-mails included a letter Podesta wrote to the corporate secretary of that company instructing him to retitle 33,693 shares of preferred stock to Leonidio Holdings, LLC, a corporation that Podesta (or one of his staff) created using a Corporation Service Company to hide the shares from public view.
The company that gave Podesta the stock shares, Joule Unlimited, claims to be a producer of “alternative” energy technology that will eventually be able to produce energy that will be competitive with oil priced at $50 a barrel. It was a recipient of millions of Putin’s rubles as one of the gang of companies working to transfer American technology to Russia, one of America’s enemies.
As Schweizer told the New York Post in an interview in July:
The Clintons, they get their donations and speaking fees in the millions of dollars. The Russians get access to advanced US technology. The tech companies get special access to the Russian market and workforce….
All I ask is that people look at the money. Who made the deals, who benefited from the deals?
Thanks to WikiLeaks the “people” now know the name of at least one of those who participated in the deals and how he benefited from them: John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign manager.
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
