I’m surprised that this story isn’t getting a little more play today. Huffington Post linked to it, but that’s about it. Nothing on Kevin Drum or on DailyKos. Yet.

I think it’s going to be big — here’s the nut stuff. The “two men” are Bill Clinton and Frank Giustra, a well-heeled mining executive who’s become buddies with the former president since he began donating to the Clinton Global Initiative:

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.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

As usual, TalkingPointsMemo is the exception. They’ve got a long piece on the NYTimes story and on another one from ABC News that I didn’t even know about. (Honestly, why do I bother reading any political blog other than TPM?)

I can’t see how the Clinton campaign isn’t going to be hurt by stuff like this. As has been said over and over by various pundits watching this race: lots of people remember the 1990s with fondness. But not too many people have much love for the rolling scandals, side-deals and over-wrought prevarication we had to listen to as part of having Bill Clinton as president. My prediction is that he’s going to turn out to be more and more of a liability as Hillary’s campaign moves on.