Even Americans jaded by the Trump administration’s gaudy pageant of sleaze and self-dealing may have been stunned by the latest episode of nepotistic corruption. As the New York Times reported this week, both of the president’s elder sons are profiting from a tungsten mining deal between the United States and Kazakhstan personally negotiated by their father. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons are also getting a cut of the proceeds, along with assorted other White House cronies.

Beyond the unsavory arrangements designed to cram still more billions into Trump family accounts, what this investigation exposed once again is that every Republican accusation is really a confession – even if the proof emeges a decade later. The deal revealed by the Times eerily echoes a pseudo-scandal fabricated by Trump crony Steve Bannon to smear Hillary Clinton, which theTimes dutifully promoted on its front page. Bannon was beyond delighted, of course, and the damage to the nation has been incalculable, including the latest Kazakh scam.

Tungsten is a rare metal of critical importance to US defense and technology industries whose export was restricted last year by China, a major source of reserves. An enormous deposit exists in Kazakhstan, however -- and the US effort to exploit that lode promises multi-billion-dollar paydays for the Trump and Lutnick families, as at least 14 companies connected with one or both families are actively working with the federal government on critical mineral extraction deals.

The agreement between the US and Kazakh governments quietly signed last November 6 -- with no disclosure of the Trump or Lutnick grifts -- involves a company called Kaz Resources. The federal government is also subsidizing that firm, and the Trump sons' investment, with at least $1.6 billlion in government funding. As the Times investigation noted, the Trump and Lutnick gang was “doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history."

But the precedent for this Kazakhstan ripoff is the fake 2015 story, that originated in a "strange journalistic partnership between Bannon and theTimes. Bannon's conspiracy theory, advanced in a scurrilous book by his then-employee Peter Schweizer, claimed that Hillary Clinton had overseen the sale of US uranium assets to a Russian company, as secretary of state, in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation by a Canadian donor. This far-fetched notion -- which ought to have been shot down by any competentTimes editor -- ran aground on a simple fact: Neither Clinton nor the foundation exercised any control over the uranium decision. She couldn't have been bribed because she had nothing to sell.

With the imprimatur of the Times, that flimsy tale nevertheless spread far and wide, inflicting permanent harm on Clinton's reputation, her ensuing campaign for president, and the good name of her family's highly successful charity. It was an entirely fraudulent canard for which the paper of record has yet to offer an appropriate correcton or apology. Perhaps someone on the editorial board or Op-Ed page will draw the comparison noted here -- and thus redeem at least a fraction of the ruin that its pages are now recording.