Lawmakers failed to seize on an alarming development in the Russia collusion story last week, one that should spark serious and immediate congressional inquiry.
But it didn’t involve President Trump or his administration.
During a heated
Fox Business interview with Maria Bartiromo, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chief John Podesta made a series of misleading statements when questioned about his involvement in a company that received $35 million from the Russian government while Clinton served as secretary of state.
On Jan. 18, 2011, a small green-energy company named Joule Unlimited announced Podesta’s appointment to its board. Months later, Rusnano, a Kremlin-backed investment fund founded by Vladimir Putin, pumped $35 million into Joule. Serving alongside Podesta on Joule’s board were senior Russian official Anatoly Chubais and oligarch Ruben Vardanyan, who has been appointed by Putin to a Russian economic modernization council.
Bartiromo asked Podesta why he failed to disclose his role in Joule as required by law when he entered the White House in January 2014 to serve as counselor to President Barack Obama.
“Maria, that’s not true. I fully disclosed and was completely compliant,” Podesta shot back.
But according to his own financial disclosure form, Podesta only listed two of the three entities that made up Joule Unlimited, failing to disclose his presence on the board of the Dutch-registered Stichting Joule Global Foundation.
When Bartiromo pressed Podesta on the whereabouts of his 75,000 shares of Joule stock, Podesta resorted to Clintonesque semantics: “I didn’t have any stock in any Russian company!”
Notice the rhetorical sleight of tongue there: Joule is based in Massachusetts, not Russia, making Podesta’s statement technically true. Podesta added: “And by the way, I divested before I went into the White House.”
The real reason Obama didn't take the Russia hacks more seriously
There’s also this inconvenient fact: In 2016, Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, where Joule board member Reuben Vardanyan formerly served as head of its investment banking division, had a $170,000 lobbying contract with the Podesta Group — which is owned by John Podesta’s brother, Tony Podesta.
In short, Clinton’s top campaign chief and a senior counselor to Obama sat on Joule’s board alongside top Russian officials as Putin’s Kremlin-backed investment fund funneled $35 million into Joule. No one looking at the Podesta fact pattern can claim to care about rooting out Russian collusion and not rigorously investigate the tangle of relationships.
Are US officials investigating the matter? We don’t know. When Bartiromo asked Podesta whether his closed-door session in front of the House Intelligence Committee included questions about his Russian ties and Joule, Podesta punted: “I have already told you that I was asked not to talk about specific questions, and I said I would respect that.”
After the slippery answers Podesta delivered during his explosive Fox Business interview, US officials have more reasons than ever to demand answers about John Podesta, Joule Unlimited and Putin’s Rusnano investment fund. If they weren’t investigating Podesta before, they should be now.
Peter Schweizer is the author of “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.”