A new book critical of the Clintons won’t be released until today, but already the partisans have dug in.

Clinton critics see in Peter Schweizer’s “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich” confirmation of nefarious practices. (Mitt Romney: “It looks like bribery”; Newt Gingrich: “It’s clearly against U.S. law.”) But to Clinton supporters, Schweizer is but the latest in a long line of Clinton bashers. (David Brock: “I think this is a political put-up job.”)

As detailed by Politico, the Clinton campaign’s written talking points call for dismissing the book on the grounds that it was “backed by a Koch brothers-linked organization and a billionaire family that is bankrolling Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.” Maybe so. But that would speak to Schweizer’s motivation, not necessarily his accuracy.

So when I received an advance copy of “Clinton Cash” last week, I resolved to actually read it before forming an opinion. The first thing that struck me was its brevity — 184 pages followed by 56 pages of notes. The prose is readable, notwithstanding the many players it introduces, and while the author’s suspicions regarding the Clintons are abundant, they are not strident. Schweizer’s view is that the Clintons’ finances warrant a serious investigation, a belief that has been bolstered by the fact that the New York Times and Washington Post have each already built upon his reporting.

The premise is that the Clintons have been able to skirt the long-standing legal prohibition against foreign participation in American politics. The Clinton confidants about whom Schweizer writes are mostly citizens of the world’s rogue nations, “with cultures where bribery and corruption are common and occur on a massive scale.” Stymied by U.S. campaign laws, they instead seek to curry favor by engaging Bill Clinton to speak for unprecedented amounts and making contributions to the Clinton Foundation. Schweizer writes:

“Here is how it worked: Bill flew around the world making speeches and burnishing his reputation as a global humanitarian and wise man. Very often on these trips, he was accompanied by ‘close friends’ or associates who happened to have business interests pending in these countries. Introductions were made, deals were struck, and photo ops arranged before an admiring foreign press. Meanwhile, bureaucratic or legislative obstacles were mysteriously cleared or approvals granted within the purview of his wife, the powerful senator or secretary of state. Huge donations then flowed into the Clinton Foundation, while Bill received enormous speaking fees underwritten by the very businessmen who benefited from these apparent interventions.”

One example, according to Schweizer, is this timeline regarding U.S. uranium:

In 2005, Bill Clinton accompanied Canadian (therefore not permitted to donate to Hillary) mining tycoon Frank Giustra on his MD-87 aircraft (which sleeps 18 comfortably) to Kazakhstan at a time when Giustra was in pursuit of a mining opportunity there that bore fruit shortly after his trip. Months later, he made a $31.3 million donation to the Clinton Foundation.

In 2007, Giustra’s company merged with Uranium One, which in 2009 sold a stake to Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corp. Beginning that same year, Uranium One chairman Ian Telfer started funneling what would become $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation through a Canadian entity he controlled.

For the Russians to control Uranium One required the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a group that included the State Department, then headed by Hillary Clinton. When that approval was granted in 2010, it gave control of one-fifth of uranium-mining production in America to Russia.

In 2011, Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 to speak at an event in Moscow (where he hadn’t spoken in five years and where he’d last commanded a fee of $195,000) by an investment bank with ties to the deal and Vladimir Putin.

All told, shareholders involved in this series of deals transferred $145 million to the Clinton Foundation or its initiatives.

“False inferences,” responded Lanny Davis, when faced with these types of allegations in an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “It sounds like if two events occur side by side, like the rooster crows and then the sun rises, it’s a coincidence that the sun rises after the rooster crows. The rooster doesn’t cause the sun to rise.”

That the book contains no smoking gun is evident from the title and the punctuation of the final chapter: “Chapter 11: Quid Pro Quo?” Nowhere does it provide confirmation that Bill was paid to speak, or a donation was paid to the foundation, in return for favorable treatment being afforded by Hillary to a foreign player.

But it does seem an unlikely coincidence that so many foreign businessmen took a sudden liking to Clinton charitable endeavors at a time when they had significant business deals in the pipeline. Of course, whether the revelations in Clinton Cash “warrant further investigation by law enforcement officers,” as Schweizer writes, will probably depend more upon partisan lenses than on the merits of what he has uncovered.

Michael Smerconish writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and is host of “Smerconish” on CNN.