Bill Clinton couldn’t be cozier, or more richly rewarded, in what he calls “the dictator’s club.”
In Bill Clinton’s infamously unhinged speech last week in Michigan, he said that Jews had been living in Judea and Samaria before Islam existed, that anyone upset by the Gaza genocide should understand how Israelis feel, and that Kamala Harris’s promise to work for a ceasefire should be enough to make them vote for her. Those statements were so tone deaf that they dominated the outraged response.
The rest of the speech was also rife with brutal lies and hypocrisy. One was a particularly glaring instance of the Democratic argument that Trump is a would-be dictator who consorts with dictators and would do away with all our democratic institutions. Clinton said that Trump wants to join “the dictator’s club,” and accused him of cozying up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
These allegations are based on the fact that as president, Trump actually sat down and talked to these heads of state of two of the world’s nuclear powers. In 2018 he met President Putin, in a two-hour, one-on-one conference in Helsinki. The same year he met with North Korea’s head of state Kim Jong Un in Singapore. God forbid that an American president should talk to either about how to avoid Armageddon instead of threatening to bring it on.
Bill’s Own Dictators’ Club
In 2009 Bill Clinton presented a Clinton Global Citizen Award to Paul Kagame, one of the worst dictators and war criminals in the world and a longtime favorite of his poverty pimping Clinton Foundation.
Clinton was in office during the final two years of the Rwandan Civil War, which he received daily briefings about. The US had selected Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) Army to represent US corporate interests in the African Great Lakes Region, making Kagame’s victory in the war a foregone conclusion.
Kagame and other RPF leaders had met with US officials years before the war began, and Kagame had trained at Fort Leavenworth. The RPF had a steady supply of advanced weaponry and intelligence that the existing government lacked.
When the last horrific 90 days of the war began, the UN Security Council proposed an emergency expansion of the UN peacekeeping operation in Rwanda, but Clinton sent his UN Ambassador, Madeleine Albright, to veto it.
Kagame seized power at the end of the slaughter and has held an iron grip on it since. The West’s constant complaint against the defeated government had been that it was not a multi-party democracy, but it has since heaped praise on Kagame even as he brutally repressed opposition, refused to allow any real challengers to run against him, and even imprisoned those who, like Victoire Ingabire, tried. Ingabire served eight years in prison after attempting to run in the 2010 presidential election and has since been confined to Rwanda, unable to travel to The Netherlands to visit her family, including her gravely ill husband.
Rwandan gospel singer Kizito Mihigo, who dared to dissent from the legally codified and enforced history of the genocide, died in jail several days after being apprehended trying to cross the Rwandan/Burundian border. He is just one of many murdered, missing, or exiled dissidents and journalists.
In February, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that the Kagame regime is guilty of transnational repression that ranges from spying, intimidation, killings, kidnappings, beatings, and enforced disappearances to manipulated extradition requests, arbitrary detention, and attempted or successful renditions.
In October, HRW reported that torture has been widespread in Rwandan prisons for decades.
Kagame’s former advisor, development economist David
Himbara, describes Rwanda as a totalitarian state like that Hannah Arendt described in her classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Ever since seizing power, Kagame has “won” staged elections by laughably implausible percentages in the high 90s, most recently, in 2024, by 99.18%.
In 1996 his army joined Uganda’s in invading the Democratic Republic of the Congo, initiating a brutal war and occupation that has cost millions of lives and continues to this day. University of Antwerp Emeritus Professor Filip Reyntjens, speaking in the BBC documentary “Rwanda’s Untold Story,” called Kagame “the greatest war criminal in office today.”
Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev and the Uranium One deal
Bill Clinton also befriended and burnished the reputation of infamous dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former president of Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev, a former prime minister of Kazakhstan under Soviet rule, became president after the collapse of the Soviet Union and ruled from 1991 to 2019. His regime was characterized by unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, political imprisonment, restrictions on speech and press, restrictions on internet freedom, religious persecution, interference with the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, political repression, government corruption, and restrictions on workers' freedom to associate and organize.
In 2015, Nazarbayev won re-election with 98% of the vote.
His extensive human rights violations were documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the US State Department. In 2021, however, State reported that “the law grants former president Nursultan Nazarbayev broad, lifetime authority over a range of government functions.”
In September 2005 Bill Clinton traveled to Kazakhstan, where he praised its economic progress under Nazarbayev. During the same trip, Nazarbayev pledged an undisclosed sum to a charitable fund created by Clinton and former President George W. Bush to respond to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the US Gulf Coast.
One month later, Clinton traveled to Kazakhstan again, this time with Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra on his luxurious private jet. While there he held a press conference praising Nazarbayev for “opening up the social and political life of your country.” According to The Nation, Clinton even recommended that Nazarbayev be named head of the very international election-monitoring organization that had ruled his own most recent election fraudulent.
On the same trip, Giustra somehow managed to secure a lease to mine Kazakhstan’s considerable uranium reserves for his shell company, Uranium One, which then immediately ballooned in value. Giustra then donated $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation, following it up with at least $100 million more in 2007.
The deal raised eyebrows at the time, but even more so after Giustra’s company sold Uranium One’s assets to the Russian nuclear corporation Rosatom, in three transactions that Hillary Clinton’s State Department had to sign off on, from 2009 to 2013, because uranium is a strategic mineral. This episode was detailed by the New York Times, which also noted that Uranium One chairman Ian Telfer used his family foundation to make four donations totalling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation during the years in question. “And,” the Times wrote, “shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.
Trump is of course also guilty of profiting on cozy relationships with dictators. During his presidency, his son-in-law Jared Kushner worked on Middle East affairs, despite having no demonstrated expertise, and developed a personal relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). Upon his return to private life, Kushner established a private equity firm which received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund.
Kagame, Nazarbayev, MBS, the Clintons, and the Trumps are all part of an international network of autocrats and kleptocrats. Bill Clinton and the rest of the Democratic Party’s phony pieties about standing against tyranny are just more galling.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected]. You can help support her work on Patreon.
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