Frank Giustra is claiming Stephen K. Bannon and Peter Schweizer helped frame the facts around former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s shady deals and Clinton Foundation transactions to cause “mainstream voters to doubt Hillary Clinton’s integrity.”
Giustra is a Canadian mining magnate and longtime Bill Clinton confidant who took to Twitter Tuesday to cite a Harvard study claiming Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon and editor-at-large Peter Schweizer turned voters against Hillary Clinton.
In his first tweet, Giustra tweeted a link to the Harvard study at billionaire Mark Cuban and Schweizer:
In another tweet, Giustra cited a section of the Harvard study:
The exhaustive study that Giustra cited was conducted by professors and data scientists at Harvard and M.I.T. and examined, in great detail, Breitbart News’s role in pushing stories about the Clinton Foundation into the mainstream American media and the psyche of millions of voters.
“The critical lesson of this chapter of the Clinton Foundation story is that the manipulation was not a result of Facebook fake news or of the fragmentation of public discourse,” the study reads:
Precisely because the majority of Americans do not get their news from Facebook or from the right-wing media ecosystem, it was necessary for the actors on the right—Bannon and Schweitzer through GAI, Breitbart, Fox, the Daily Caller, and Judicial Watch—to frame a story that was attractive enough for mainstream media to cover, and to cause mainstream voters to doubt Hillary Clinton’s integrity.
Giustra played a central role in much of the scandal surrounding the Clinton Foundation, as he is co-founder of the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (CGEP), the Canada-based charity that failed to reveal the identities of more than 1,100 of its donors — despite Hillary Clinton’s promise in an ethics agreement she signed before joining the Obama administration, a Memorandum of Understanding, agreeing to disclose all donations to the Clinton Foundation.
The billionaire was also key to the controversial sale of Uranium One to the Russian government, a deal approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Dept. as detailed in a 4,000-word front-page New York Times investigation.
The lack of transparency surrounding Giustra and the Clinton Foundation, as highlighted in Schweizer’s best-selling book, Clinton Cash, ultimately damaged Hillary Clinton’s standing among many voters – several of them giving the former Democratic presidential nominee blisteringly low marks for honesty and trustworthiness. She, of course, went on to lose the election to Donald Trump.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson