John Solomon - Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties

Advance Praise for
Fallout

This book very effectively details how a Russian domination strategy was deployed in the United States with the very willing support and cooperation of the Obama administration. These were very important and serious events that every American should fully understand. As the title suggests, the fallout from this unchecked assertion of power and greed, still lingers largely in todays current affairs.

Scott Melbye , thirty-five-year veteran of the uranium and nuclear energy industry and former Executive Vice President of Marketing at Uranium One, Inc.

Putin despises Democrats and Republicans alike. What scares him the most is democracy. He wants us all to be sick from the Kremlins discoverable influence operations.

Daniel Hoffman , former CIA officer and Moscow station chief

The full Uranium One saga is one of the most important untold stories in American politics and these authors have captured it and turned it into a fascinating thriller. Anyone who still thinks the Uranium One story has been debunked must read this book.

James G. Rickards , former advisor to the CFIUS Support Group of the Director of National Intelligence and New York Times bestselling author of Aftermath , The Road to Ruin , and Currency Wars

More than three years ago, John Solomon and I talked about how the Russia scandal was a big onion of deceit that needed to be peeled layer by layer. He and I and a small ensemble of journalists did just that, exposing the greatest political scandal of our generation. Fallout is the extraordinary last chapter in Johns and Seamuss mission to give the American people the truth.

Sean Hannity , Fox News host

A BOMBARDIER BOOKS BOOK

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

Fallout:

Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties

2020 by John Solomon and Seamus Bruner

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-64293-571-4

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-572-1

Putin Cover photo credit: Kremlin.ru

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the real whistleblowers
the men and women who risk their careers, their reputations,
their liberties, and their lives to speak the truth.

Thank you.

Contents

By Peter Schweizer

U ranium One is a story about powerful politicians seeking money and rich people buying power. It is about reformers who fall into corruption, and about journalists who are too lazy to challenge the lies and spin they get from the powerful, the rich, the corrupted.

I have been writing books about cronyism in politics for more than fifteen years. It is, Im sorry to tell you, very fertile ground. Where political power is great, the temptation to use it to help oneself and ones friends becomes greater still. Even in societies like ours, where we hate this kind of self-dealing and pass laws to prevent graft and bribery, the ingenuity of the truly corrupt still seems to find a way.

In the United States today, this means that exposing corruption or cronyism is a complicated task, buried under layers of connections and transactions that politicians are careful to mask, lest they become obvious. It rarely shows up as a single, highlighted line in a tax return or an eye-popping entry on a financial disclosure form. Rarely is a politician as careless as former U.S. Representative William Jefferson (D-LA), whoinfamouslywas caught by the FBI with $90,000 in cash bribes neatly wrapped in foil and placed in the back of his freezer.

But such frozen treats are the exception, not the rule. As a journalist, I can tell you that it takes months of hard work to connect the dots that sneaky politicians take pains to obfuscate. There is no smoking gun to sniff out, only a shadowy trail of money and coincidence. That trail is a little different every time; it might start with finding an investment here that might lead to a brother-in-law there who has a company somewhere that got a no-bid contract from a government agency that just happens to be overseen by that politician you began with. Oh, and maybe the original investment at the top of this trail is actually held by the politicians spouse, or by his or her children. Certainly not by him or herthe deceit is rarely clear and often legal.

I founded the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) eight years ago because I realized I couldnt do this kind of work on my own. Based in Florida and with a very small staff, we began investigating these kinds of stories because we noticed how rarely the mainstream media, which no longer seemed to have the appetite to look into them deeply, covered them. We noticed that because of Watergate and various other *-gate scandals, the public understood the need to expose these misdeeds. Congress and the rest of official Washington have passed many laws designed to make it harder to cheat, to get rich through their positions, and to steer political and financial favors to their biggest donorsall in exchange for large campaign contributions to scare off serious challengers. And the laws they passed certainly have helped. At least, up to a point.

Maybe they really did mean well, but what was supposed to force them to declare their earnings and confess their conflicts of interest has instead created a market where corruption is brokered through third parties. The standard for identifying these sorts of pay-to-play schemes has long been to look for the straight line, the quid pro quo like frozen cash in a congressmans freezer. Todays corruption is rarely this simple. The gun no longer smokes.

Instead, we are left with a question: How do you prevent this when the quid happens in broad daylight, almost untraceable to the quo that lies behind shell companies, international banking secrets, the children of politicians, cronies, foreign business partners, and various charitable organizations set up by the politicians themselves?

The sale of Uranium One to a Russian government-controlled company called Rosatom is that kind of story.

Our 2015 book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich focused on the connections between the people who wanted that sale to happen and the Clinton Foundation, the multibillion-dollar charitable organization set up by the former president and his wife. Hillary Clinton, while Secretary of State, was in a position to make sure that it did. Uranium One, and its connections to the Clintons, comprised just two chapters of that bookone example of many that showed how the Clintons used the power of their office and the cover of their philanthropy to enrich themselves and their friends through many different pay-to-play schemes.