Giustra fights back after U.S. campaign smears – by Don Cayo (Vancouver Sun – May 1, 2015)

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Vancouver mining magnate Frank Giustra finds himself caught up in the repeated mudslinging that surrounds Hillary Clinton’s campaign to become the next U.S. president. He doesn’t like it, and he’s fighting back.

His story has yielded big headlines in big-name media — The New York Times and The Washington Post, to name just two. And it has been playing out over the better part of a month as new angles are explored and old ones rehashed.

It’s a story made complex both by innuendo and by the muddying, glossing over or ignoring of timelines that might cast factual information in another light. And, of course, the Twitterverse and Internet are awash in vitriol from those who accept innuendo and suggestions as literal truth.

But the basic facts, neither damning nor exculpatory in themselves, are simple. They include:

• Billionaire Giustra and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, have become fast friends in the past decade. They travel the world together in Giustra’s jet to look in on philanthropic projects they jointly support. Giustra has given Clinton’s foundation many tens of millions of dollars, and he has raised many tens of millions more from rich acquaintances.

• Giustra has had business dealings in — among many places worldwide — both Kazakhstan and Colombia.

• Clinton’s wife, Hillary, was U.S. secretary of state at the time a couple of big business/political deals requiring State Department approval were sealed. The innuendo suggests Giustra profited from these. He has responded with not only denials, but also detailed timelines to show that, in some cases, news reports got it wrong and in other cases the sequence of events was such that he couldn’t have benefited.

“The whole thing revolves around the presidential contest. Otherwise there’d be zero interest in what I’m doing,” Giustra said in an interview with The Vancouver Sun.

“Every day is a different accusation. (The U.S. media) take one little thing and try to make a big deal of it. They try to glue together things over a number of years and draw this long case of what looks like conspiracy and misconduct. …

“It’s all about how I must have an ulterior motive. The people whose arms I twisted to donate must have had an ulterior motive. I must want something from the Clintons. I must have done something crooked.

“It just boggles my mind that there’s no fairness or accountability. I’ve spent literally hours in interviews, showing there was no agenda. There’s no reference to this (in stories published in the U.S.). Zero. All they focus on is some little thing they can twist or mislead with. And you can’t fight that.

“I’m almost at the point where I’m throwing my hands up. I can’t talk to these people. They don’t listen. They don’t care.”

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