Quote:
Originally Posted by WTF
Please explain when one ounce of uranium went go Russia.
Obama said he'd have more freedom. Do you understand the difference from what you posted to wtf wa ssd's actually said?
Care to name all the sanctions Trump imposed on Russia?
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wtf is actually correct. the Uranium One deal never gave any U.S. uranium to Russia. the oft quoted 20% figure referred to potential refining capacity not an actual amount of uranium.
in fact the U.S. based plants of the Canadian company hadn't been producing any uranium at the time of the sale for some years.
why Russia really wanted Uranium One was their huge holdings of uranium in their former republic Kazakhstan, which happens to be the largest producer of commercial uranium in the world.
there is a curious fact in this story, why the FBI/DOJ never disclosed to the Obama admin evidence of Russkies making bribes for influence before the deal. there were donations to the Clinton Foundation by a Canadian businessman who once had an interest in Uranium but not at the time of his donation.
this Forbes article nicely details the story.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesco...h=4b28da45526d
Russian Uranium One Deal And Hillary Clinton In The News Again
James ConcaContributor
Hillary Clinton and the 2010 Uranium One deal with Russia are back in the news.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R- Iowa)
wants the information obtained from a raid on the home of a former FBI contractor who provided watchdog documents related to former Secretary of State and the sale of Canadian mining company Uranium One to a Russian firm.
FBI agents raided the Maryland home of Dennis Nathan Cain just last month. Cain's lawyer
said that the agent who led the raid accused his client of possessing stolen federal property and ignored his claims of whistleblower protection. Cain's lawyer also claimed that Horowitz had transmitted his information to the House and Senate intelligence committees. So Senator Grassley should have access to it anyway.
Maybe Senator Grassley thinks it will be a lame duck Christmas present, but the issue hasn’t changed much in the eight years since it occurred.
The FBI had looked into the agreement and uncovered that some Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in nefarious dealings, which included extortion, bribery and kickbacks,
as reported in the Hill in 2017. Evidence of wrongdoing by Vadim Mikerin, the Russian official overseeing Putin’s nuclear expansion in the U.S. who was eventually sentenced to prison, was discovered by the FBI before the deal was approved.
That Russians were involved in nefarious dealings isn’t a surprise. That they gave away money to a charity and got the same results as if they hadn’t, is also not surprising. Many influence peddlers don’t succeed. But Clinton played no role in this decision so it’s unlikely they actually tried.
Besides, at the time there were no U.S. sanctions on Russia. Those began in
March of 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea and subsequently invaded Eastern Ukraine. So approving this deal wasn’t a big deal at that time.
The level of Russian interference in America, and globally, has only recently been appreciated and their attempts seem to be everywhere and to target everyone. If we had known then what we know now, we might not have approved the deal. But who knows?
To recap, in 2015, Breitbart News editor Peter Schweizer claimed that donations to the Clinton Foundation were behind the Obama Administration’s controversial 2010 deal that gave Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium interests.
And by large, we mean really, really small.
But any money going to the Clinton Foundation occurred
years before this deal surfaced, and came from a fellow philanthropist, Canadian Frank Guistra, who had divested himself from uranium years before this Uranium One deal.
The concern was that the FBI knew that Russian nuclear industry officials had engaged in
bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to help Russian President, and world’s richest man, Vladimir Putin, increase his commercial nuclear ambitions inside the United States, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
The State Department and several government agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States first unanimously approved the 2010 partial sale of Canadian mining company Uranium One to the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom, supposedly giving Moscow control of more than 20% of America’s uranium supply.
And by 20%, we really mean almost zero.
Those U.S. facilities obtained by Russia produced almost nothing for years before this sale. Uranium One couldn’t give these facilities away. But they do have good milling capacity to process ore, if anyone gives it to them, which hadn’t happened in years. Theoretically, they could process 20% of our ore, but that has never happened.
Besides, Russia can’t export any uranium they produce in the U.S. anyway. They do not possess a Nuclear Regulatory Commission export license. And never should. Any export would have to be approved on a case-by-case basis by the U.S. Government, as sometimes occurs.
That is not to say Uranium One has been idle since that time. They have been buying up mines and companies as fast as they can, especially outside the U.S., and their U.S. production has increased to about 5% of our total (see
Campbell et al., 2017).
The real reason Russia wanted this deal was to give Rosatom’s subsidiary the Uranium One’s very profitable uranium mines in
Kazakhstan - the single largest producer of commercial uranium in the world. Russia wanted this control over their former Soviet republic, like they are trying with all former satellites and now
they have it.
Then, in 2011 the Administration approved a Rosatom subsidiary to sell commercial uranium to U.S. nuclear power plants in partnership with the U.S. Enrichment Corporation. Up until then, Russia had been limited to selling our nuclear power plants uranium reprocessed from old Soviet nuclear weapons under the 1990s
Megatons to Megawatts peace program. Nothing strange here either.
In 2013, Russia obtained 100% interest in Uranium One and really started messing with Kazakhstan.
Rather than take action against this deal, the Department of Justice just continued investigating the matter for years, essentially leaving the American public, Congress, the Secretary of State and the Administration in the dark about more Russian meddling in the United States, this time involving nuclear.
Candidate Trump jumped on this issue during the 2016 campaign trail, but as Secretary, Clinton was not involved in the committee review, never intervened on the matter and there were so many other agencies involved in the recommendation that there was no there there.
It is still not clear why no one at the FBI alerted the Obama Administration to the Russian kickbacks, extortion threats and money laundering before these decisions were made. One theory is that the
United States was still seeking to reset its relationship with Russia and was also trying to get Putin on board with our
Iran Nuclear Deal.
As Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute, described it, Russia’s purchase of the company “had as much of an impact on national security as it would have if they set the money on fire.”
The key to this issue’s resurgence is that Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State at the time, Bill Clinton got a substantial speaking fee in Russia that year, and Russian money may have found its way to the Clinton Foundation, although
the latter turns out to be pretty small and through a convoluted route that may not have involved Russia at all.
However, even though there was
no wrongdoing on the part of the Administration or the Clintons, and no national security reason for anyone to oppose this deal, some still want to make it another Bengazhi.
As a scandal, this issue lacks relevance since Clinton is now a private citizen and Russian meddling in our 2016 election has become a bigger issue. In fact, this uranium deal now seems to have
more to do with Mueller’s present investigation than with Clinton.
In the end, this Russian deal just wasn’t that important and had no national security ramifications.
Why Won't the Putin Loving GOP STFU Until This Is Over?
