Putin's Pants-on-Fire claim about $400 million donation to Clinton from Bill Browder partners

Russian President Vladimir Putin offered a novel idea to advance the Russia investigation during a joint news conference with President Donald Trump in Helsinki.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team could come to his country, Putin said, if Russian investigators were allowed to go the United States to dig into alleged tax evasion by American-born financier Bill Browder and his associates.

"Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over 1.5 billion dollars in Russia," Putin said through a translator. "They never paid any taxes."

Putin continued.

"They sent a huge amount of money, over 400 million, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton," he said. "Well, that’s their personal case. It might have been legal, the contribution itself, but the way the money was earned was illegal."

Did Browder's associates send $400 million to Hillary Clinton's campaign?

No. We found $17,700 donated to Clinton and another $297,000 to the Democratic National Committee.

A little background

The Russians say that Browder and his partners at Ziff Brothers Investments, a New York venture capital firm, illegally syphoned billions of rubles out of the country. To add salt to the wound, Browder had led the charge to pass the 2012 Magnitsky Act, a law that penalizes Russian officials suspected of sanctioning the death of Browder’s lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison.

The Ziff brothers came up during the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr. and others, and Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign. According to transcripts from Senate Judiciary Committee interviews, Veselnitskaya’s materials described the Ziffs as Democratic donors, although Trump’s son said they gave both to Democrats and Republicans.

Follow the money

We reached out to the Russian Embassy and the Russian consulate in Washington to get details on the $400 million donation and had not heard back in time for our deadline.

Given that Veselnitskaya tied Browder and the Ziff brothers together, we researched their political donations.

Browder became a British citizen and can’t legally contribute to U.S. candidates. Ziff Brothers Investments through its executives can give freely, and they have.

Before we get into their political contributions, we also wondered if Putin could have been talking about money that went to the Clinton Foundation. In past years, Browder and Ziff Brothers Investments had given to the Clinton Global Initiative, a project of the Clinton Foundation, but the total was not more than $110,000, records show.

In the 2016 election cycle, Ziff Brothers Investments gave $1.7 million. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, nearly two-thirds, or about $1.1 million, went to Democratic committees, and the rest to Republicans.

The center listed the firm’s top recipients:

Recipient	Amount
DNC Services Corp	$296,966
Senate Majority PAC	$250,000
Defending Main Street	$200,000
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte	$40,000
Democratic State Central Cmte/Louisiana	$35,412
National Republican Congressional Cmte	$32,400
Democratic Party of Montana	$28,622
Democratic Executive Cmte of Florida	$27,287
Democratic Party of New Hampshire	$27,287
Democratic Party of Virginia	$27,287
Democratic Party of Wisconsin	$27,287
Georgia Federal Elections Cmte	$27,287

Federal law puts tighter limits on contributions to individual candidates. Here, the Ziffs mainly put their money into incumbents, and Republicans did better by a margin of about $145,000 to $46,000. Clinton’s campaign received $17,700.

Unless Putin had other Browder associates in mind, his figure of $400 million going to the Clinton campaign is a massive exaggeration. Between the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, the Ziffs gave about $315,000.

The Clinton campaign raised $563 million overall, so Putin's sum would account for nearly three-fourths of all donations. (PACs affiliated with Clinton's campaign raised an additional $231 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.)

Our ruling

Putin said associates of Bill Browder gave $400 million to the Clinton campaign. The associates appear to be the Ziff brothers. According to public data, Ziff Brothers Investments gave about $315,000 to Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

Overall, the firm gave about $1.1 million to Democratic committees around the country.

The exaggeration is so great, we rate this claim Pants on Fire.

CIRCA 2016—Who’s in Putin’s Pocket — Clinton or Trump?
The New American ^ | 8/3/2016 | William F. Jasper / FR Posted by HomerBohn

While serving as secretary of state to President Obama, Hillary Clinton delivered one fifth of America’s uranium deposits to Russia. So charge investigators who have been delving into the murky — and very alarming — dealings of Secretary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation with a company known as Uranium One, and various “private” Russian companies and official Russian agencies. Moreover, her critics accuse Hillary and Bill Clinton of raking in a huge fortune (over $130 million) from the American, Canadian, and Russian investors who helped arrange for these Russian companies — under the control, ultimately, of Vladimir Putin — to take control of 20 percent of our strategic uranium assets. Indeed, according to some calculations, the Uranium One deal, involving top Clinton donors Frank Guistra and Ian Telfer, has transferred as much as 50 percent of projected American uranium production to Kremlin control.

This incredible story, with enormously important implications for our nation’s security, has been percolating for over a year, since Peter Schweizer’s bestselling exposé Clinton Cash — The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, brought it to light. (See also here, here, here, and here.)

Why does the explosive Clinton-Uranium Ore story — which has been buried (naturally) by the pro-Hillary establishment media for the past year — now take on new meaning and urgency? Well, for one thing, for the past several days Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has been trying to make hay with the charge that recent comments by her Republican rival, Donald Trump, show “a very troubling willingness” to support Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In an interview with Fox News Sunday on July 31, Clinton reiterated the narrative that her campaign and her media allies had been flogging since the Democratic National Convention the previous week: that Trump’s off-the-cuff comments about her e-mail scandal amounted to Trump calling on a foreign adversary (Putin and Russia’s intel agencies) to meddle in a U.S. election and engage in cyberespionage against this country. Russia’s alleged hacking of her e-mail accounts, she said, “raises serious issues about Russian influence in our election.”

“And for Mr. 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,” she charged. In the interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace, Clinton charged that Trump’s remarks on this issue show he is not “temperamentally fit” to be president. “If you take the encouragement that Russians hack into email accounts, if you take his quite excessive praise for Putin, his absolute allegiance to a lot of Russian wish-list foreign policy issues,” she said, it suggests that “he is not temperamentally fit to be president and commander-in-chief.”

Is that not rich? Hillary and Bill take massive bribes from Putin cronies to transfer ownership and control over the fuel for our nation’s nuclear power plants (which provide one fifth of our national electrical energy) and our nuclear weapons to Putin & Company — and then accuse her opponent of being in bed with Putin! Like the brazen thief who makes his getaway by pointing at a random passerby and yelling “Stop! Thief!,” Hillary is hoping to distract the American electorate from her own corruption, criminality, and treason by accusing her opponent of the very thing of which she herself is most guilty. That is hardly surprising considering the crime wave that has followed Team Clinton all the way from the governor’s mansion in Little Rock to the White House, to the Senate, to the Clinton Foundation, and on to Foggy Bottom — and beyond. Remember the Clintons and Whitewatergate, Chinagate, Filegate, Fostergate, Travelgate, Troopergate, Lincoln Bedroomgate, Bimbogate, Pardongate, Wacogate, etc., etc., ad nauseum? The Clintons’ penchant for criminality virtually saturated our political vocabulary with new “gate”-suffixed scandals.

However, with the help of their “mainstream media” JournoLista friends, the Clintons have always managed to escape justice in this temporal sphere. For the past 15 months or so, these same media pals have shielded Hillary from having to face hard questions about her central role in the uranium-for-cash deal with Putin’s minions. However, that could still be forced to the surface as a major stumbling block before the elections.

But wait — the Uranium One deal, as important and stunningly corrupt as it may be, is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. As we have been reporting here for years, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been one of Putin’s biggest enablers, facilitating enormous transfers of advanced technology to the Russian regime she now sees as a threat. It was Secretary Clinton, please recall, who, in May 2009, presented Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a red “reset” button, and then mugged with Lavrov in a giggly photo-fest celebrating the U.S.-Russian “convergence” agenda. Clinton and Lavrov then served as joint coordinators of the U.S.-Russian Bilateral Presidential Commission established in July of that year by President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The annual reports of the Bilateral Presidential Commission are replete with chummy photos of Clinton-Lavrov, Obama-Medvedev, Biden-Putin, etc., as well as details of the many deals worked out to give technology, knowhow, capital, and other resources to Moscow.

Among the many important projects of this type promoted by the Clinton-Lavrov team is the huge Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, which we warned about repeatedly in The New American as far back as 2010 (see, for instance, “’Breathing Pixie Dust’ Investing in Russia,” August 5, 2010). Putin’s new Skolkovo research and innovation center on the outskirts of Moscow, heralded as “Russia’s Silicon Valley,” is benefiting from billions of dollars of investment and prime technology from Cisco Systems, Boeing, Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and other U.S. tech giants, thanks to support and promotion by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Then there is the case of billionaire Russian playboy Mikhail Prokhorov (see here and here), who, during Clinton’s reign at State, was allowed not only to buy up the New Jersey Nets (now the Brooklyn Nets) NBA franchise and the Barclays Center in New York City, but also to play a major role through his control of the Russian investment companies ONEXIM Group and Renaissance Capital, both of which played key roles in the Clintons’ aforementioned Uranium One scandal.

Yes, Mr. Trump has made statements that may give security-conscious Americans cause for concern, but deeds speak louder than words. And Hillary Clinton’s deeds speak in 5,000 decibel thunderclaps, declaring to all (except her willfully deaf devotees) that she belongs not sitting behind the president’s desk in the White House, but serving time behind bars in the Big House.

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