The New York Times:

  • Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

    Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

    Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

    Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader's bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton's public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan's poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton's wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.


To make a long story short, less than 48 hours later, Giustra's company signed a deal giving it the rights to buy into three Kazakh uranium projects. Months later, Giustra secretly donated $31.3 million to Mr. Clinton's charitable foundations.

And it looks like the Times may be pursuing this story further. Acccording to the American Spectator:
  • New York Times sources say that if Sen. Hillary Clinton loses the Democratic nomination or a general election for President, it will largely be due to the efforts of their investigative and political reporter Jo Becker

    Becker, who formerly worked for the Washington Post, has been put on the Bill Clinton beat for the foreseeable future, and has been digging around the Clinton Foundation for months, according to Clinton campaign sources, one of whom has been assigned to track Becker's activities.

    The campaign has been trying to keep tabs on sources Becker has been talking to for several months now, attempting to figure out which lines of inquiry she is undertaking. As reported several months ago, the Clinton campaign attempted some time ago to "oppo" the former President's post-White House time, trying to anticipate potential thorny issues that might arise for Senator Clinton.

    Becker's work has focused almost exclusively on the Clinton Foundation, and the ways in which Clinton has used the entity to further his own personal wealth, as well as those who support him and his philanthropic activities.

    Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton was negotiating terms to exit a partnerships and consulting deal with longtime supporter Ron Burkle. Clinton was able to attract large sums of investment money to Burkle's operation from several sources, the biggest being the royal family of Dubai. "Everyone assumes that if he separates from Burkle that the relationship with Dubai is severed, too," says a source with ties to the Clinton Foundation. "But the Dubai ties aren't the result of Burkle. That's a personal relationship with ties to the foundation, and those aren't going to end."