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On 18 July 2017, Fox News published a story reporting that former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had sided with Russia against a U.S. sanctions law known as the Magnitsky Act because her husband, former President Bill Clinton, received $500,000 in speaking fees in 2010 from a Russian investment bank. The story, authored by the same Fox reporter who wrote a debunked and retracted May 2017 story claiming the Clintons were behind a murder conspiracy that took the life of DNC staffer Seth Rich, relies only on innuendo and a portion of a 2015 email written by a Clinton campaign aide that was published by document-dumping site WikiLeaks. This sole piece of supposed evidence from the 21 May 2015 email was one sentence in an evening run-down of news stories in the works about then-candidate Clinton. Former communications staffer Jesse Lehrich sent the email to Clinton's rapid response team: Based on the subject line of the email, May 21st Nightly Press Traffic Summary, it's clear the email was a routine intra-campaign communication. It describes multiple articles reporters were working on, both positive and negative, including a Politico piece about Clinton's campaign inspiring female donors and fundraisers and an Associated Press story alleging that [Bill Clinton] pushed laws granting tax breaks for charitable donations to help with fundraising for his library. We reached out to Lehrich and asked him to elaborate on the email. He told us digging up the old message was an attempt to shift focus away from the current president's ongoing Russia scandal: We reached out to Bloomberg and were told by a representative that the organization doesn't comment on internal editorial decisions. But Kathleen Culver, the James E. Burgess Ethics in Journalism chair at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, told us it's not surprising that a campaign staffer doing strategic communications would claim credit for killing a negative story because the job involves seeking favorable, or at least balanced, press coverage. Claiming credit for killing a negative story doesn't mean they actually asserted undue influence over a news organization. Further she told us, Bloomberg's chief currency is its stature and credibility as a major news organization: The Magnitsky Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2012, but it followed a rocky and ultimately failed attempt by the administration to reset relations with Russia after a longstanding adversarial relationship. It is named for Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who while working for American investor Bill Browder uncovered $230 million in tax fraud -- and was the arrested when he reported the fraud to Russian authorities. Magnitsky died in prison in 2009 at the age of 37. Browder said he was beaten to death. Passage of the law, which spotlights corruption and human rights abuses in Russia, reportedly infuriated Russian President Vladimir Putin and was a catalyst for U.S.-Russia relations progressively souring. Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer, has since been crusading to overturn the law. Veselnitskaya has come front and center after the New York Times revealed on 9 July 2017 that President Trump's eldest son met with her and several other operatives in hopes of obtaining deleterious information about Clinton during the presidential race. It is against this backdrop in mid-July 2017 that Fox News other outlets published stories attempting to link Bill Clinton's speaking fee with Hillary Clinton's stance on Russia. They resurrect a round of scrutiny Hillary Clinton received after announcing in April 2015 her bid for the presidency -- she was, at the time, considered the front runner. At least two major news outlets, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, published articles in 2015 that juxtaposed Clinton's role as Secretary of State and her husband's paid speeches during her tenure. Both stopped short of reporting conclusive evidence that the payments influenced Clinton's stance on the Magnitsky Act in her State Department role. On 30 December 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that more than two dozen companies and one foreign government (Abu Dhabi) paid Bill Clinton a combined $8 million in speaking fees while they had matters before the State Department: The article goes on to note Bill Clinton spoke in Moscow and was paid by a bank that had officials implicated in the fraud scheme uncovered by Magnitsky: In preceding years, the Obama administration, with Clinton as Secretary of State, was actively trying to normalize relations with Russia, hoping Putin's predecessor Dmitry Medvedev would serve as a moderating force. Part of that effort included hesitation by the administration to pass the Magnitsky Act. Although in hindsight it's clear the effort was doomed to fail, it seemed to start optimistically (despite prescient warnings from Russian critics of Putin, like chess champion Gary Kasparov). Medvedev and Obama hammered out an arms agreement in 2010. The Russians allowed the Americans to fly through their airspace to reach Afghanistan. During this time, the Obama administration was criticized for its inaction on the Magnitsky Act -- a move they feared would scuttle reset efforts. Writing for Foreign Policy in June 2012, Jamison Firestone, a co-founder of the law firm Firestone Duncan that employed Sergei Magnitsky, expressed frustration at the policy: By 2011, any specter of friendship between Russia and the U.S. had faded. Putin won the presidential election -- a result that was greeted by large popular protests accusing him of rigging the result. Putin believed that Clinton, as Secretary of State, had undermined his power when she questioned the veracity of the election outcome, thus placing his leadership in peril. On 20 March 2017, former FBI director James Comey testified that Putin hated Clinton: We haven't found evidence that supports the claim that Clinton's posture on the Magnitsky Act was influenced by her husband's speaking fee. Instead, it appears the position was one adopted by the Obama administration as a whole in a wider foreign policy effort to shift Russia relations to a friendlier footing. A single email message from a campaign staffer claiming to have killed a story at Bloomberg doesn't prove the claim.
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