TheHill | Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010
giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had
gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials
were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering
designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the
United States, according to government documents and interviews.
Federal
agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian
nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret
recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had
compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks
in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court
documents show.
They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed
by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions
of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.
The
racketeering scheme was conducted “with the consent of higher level
officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, one
agent declared in an affidavit years later.
Rather than bring
immediate charges in 2010, however, the Department of Justice (DOJ)
continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years,
essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about
Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama
administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial
nuclear ambitions.
The first decision occurred in October 2010, when
the State Department and government agencies on the Committee on Foreign
Investment in the United States unanimously approved the partial sale
of Canadian mining company Uranium One to the Russian nuclear giant
Rosatom, giving Moscow control of more than 20 percent of America’s
uranium supply.
When this sale was used by Trump on the campaign
trail last year, Hillary Clinton’s spokesman said she was not involved
in the committee review and noted the State Department official who
handled it said she “never intervened ... on any [Committee on Foreign
Investment in the United States] matter.”
In 2011, the
administration gave approval for Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary to sell
commercial uranium to U.S. nuclear power plants in a partnership with
the United States Enrichment Corp. Before then, Tenex had been limited
to selling U.S. nuclear power plants reprocessed uranium recovered from
dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons under the 1990s Megatons to Megawatts
peace program.
“The Russians were compromising American
contractors in the nuclear industry with kickbacks and extortion
threats, all of which raised legitimate national security concerns. And
none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made
those decisions,” a person who worked on the case told The Hill,
speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by U.S. or
Russian officials.
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