{"id":87867,"date":"2017-10-28T14:13:38","date_gmt":"2017-10-28T18:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=87867"},"modified":"2017-10-28T14:55:01","modified_gmt":"2017-10-28T18:55:01","slug":"uranium-one-fiasco-is-obamas-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=87867","title":{"rendered":"Uranium One Fiasco is Obama’s Scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Obama Administration\u2019s Uranium One Scandal<\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Secretary of State Clinton with President Obama at a Cabinet meeting in 2012. (Reuters photo: Larry Downing)<\/p><\/div>\n

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
\nNational Review<\/p>\n

Not only the Clintons are implicated in a uranium deal with the Russians that compromised national-security interests.<\/h3>\n

L<\/span>et\u2019s put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: The cool half-million bucks the Putin regime funneled to Bill Clinton was\u00a0five times the amount<\/em>\u00a0it spent on those Facebook ads \u2014 the ones the media-Democrat complex ludicrously suggests swung the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

The Facebook-ad buy, which started in June 2015 \u2014 before Donald Trump entered the race \u2014 was more left-wing agitprop (ads pushing hysteria on racism, immigration, guns, etc.) than electioneering. The Clintons\u2019 own long-time political strategist\u00a0Mark Penn estimates<\/a>\u00a0that just $6,500 went to actual electioneering. (You read that right: 65\u00a0hundred<\/em>\u00a0dollars.) By contrast, the staggering $500,000 payday from a Kremlin-tied Russian bank for a single speech was part of a multi-million-dollar influence-peddling scheme to enrich the former president and his wife, then\u2013secretary of state Hillary Clinton. At the time, Russia was plotting \u2014 successfully \u2014 to secure U.S. government approval for its acquisition of Uranium One, and with it, tens of billions of dollars in U.S. uranium reserves.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the kicker: The Uranium One scandal is not only, or even principally, a Clinton scandal.\u00a0It is an Obama-administration scandal.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Clintons were just doing what the Clintons do: cashing in on their \u201cpublic service.\u201d The Obama administration, with Secretary Clinton at the forefront but hardly alone, was knowingly compromising American national-security interests. The administration green-lighted the transfer of control over one-fifth of American uranium-mining capacity to Russia, a hostile regime \u2014 and specifically to Russia\u2019s state-controlled nuclear-energy conglomerate, Rosatom. Worse, at the time the administration approved the transfer, it knew that Rosatom\u2019s American subsidiary was engaged in a lucrative racketeering enterprise that had already committed felony\u00a0extortion, fraud, and money-laundering offenses.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

The Obama administration also knew that congressional Republicans were trying to stop the transfer. Consequently, the Justice Department concealed what it knew. DOJ allowed the racketeering enterprise to continue compromising the American uranium industry rather than commencing a prosecution that would have scotched the transfer. Prosecutors waited four years before quietly pleading the case out for a song, in violation of Justice Department charging guidelines. Meanwhile, the administration stonewalled Congress, reportedly threatening an informant who wanted to go public.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s \u2018Reset\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

To understand what happened here, we need to go back to the beginning.<\/p>\n

The first-tier military arsenal of Putin\u2019s Russia belies its status as a\u00a0third-rate economic power<\/a>. For well over a decade, the regime has thus sought to develop and exploit its capacity as a nuclear-energy producer. Na\u00efvely viewing Russia as a \u201cstrategic partner<\/a>\u201d rather than a malevolent competitor, the Bush administration made a nuclear-cooperation agreement with the Kremlin in May 2008. That blunder, however, was tabled before Congress could consider it. That is because Russia, being Russia, invaded Georgia.<\/p>\n

In 2009, notwithstanding this aggression (which continues to this day with Russia\u2019s occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia), President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton signaled the new administration\u2019s determination to \u201creset\u201d relations with Moscow. In this reset, renewed cooperation and commerce in nuclear energy would be central.<\/p>\n

There had been such cooperation and commerce since the Soviet Union imploded. In 1992, the administration of President George H. W. Bush agreed with the nascent Russian federation that U.S. nuclear providers would be permitted to purchase uranium from Russia\u2019s disassembled nuclear warheads (after it had been down-blended from its highly enriched weapons-grade level). The Russian commercial agent responsible for the sale and transportation of this uranium to the U.S. is the Kremlin-controlled company \u201cTenex\u201d (formally, JSC Techsnabexport). Tenex is a subsidiary of Rosatom.<\/p>\n

Tenex (and by extension, Rosatom) have an American arm called \u201cTenam USA.\u201d Tenam is based in Bethesda, Md. Around the time President Obama came to power, the Russian official in charge of Tenam was Vadim Mikerin.<\/p>\n

The Obama administration reportedly issued a visa for Mikerin in 2010, but a racketeering investigation led by the FBI determined that he was already operating here in 2009.<\/p>\n

The Racketeering Scheme<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Tenam\u2019s general director, Mikerin was responsible for arranging and managing Rosatom\/Tenex\u2019s contracts with American uranium purchasers. This gave him tremendous leverage over the U.S. companies. With the assistance of several confederates, Mikerin used this leverage to extort and defraud the U.S. contractors into paying inflated prices for uranium. They then laundered the proceeds through shell companies and secret bank accounts in Latvia, Cyprus, Switzerland, and the Seychelle Islands \u2014 though sometimes transactions were handled in cash, with the skim divided into envelopes stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash.<\/p>\n

The inflated payments served two purposes: They enriched Kremlin-connected energy officials in the U.S. and in Russia to the tune of millions of dollars; and they compromised the American companies that paid the bribes, rendering players in U.S. nuclear energy \u2014 a sector critical to national security \u2014 vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.<\/p>\n

But Mikerin had a problem. To further the Kremlin\u2019s push for nuclear-energy expansion, he had been seeking to retain a lobbyist \u2014 from whom he planned to extort kickbacks, just as he did with the U.S. energy companies. With the help of an associate connected to Russian organized-crime groups, Mikerin found his lobbyist. The man\u2019s name has not been disclosed, but we know he is now represented by Victoria Toensing, a well-respected Washington lawyer, formerly a federal prosecutor and counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee.<\/p>\n

When Mikerin solicited him in 2009, the lobbyist was uncomfortable, worried that the proposal would land him on the wrong side of the law. So he contacted the FBI and revealed what he knew. From then on, the Bureau and Justice Department permitted him to participate in the Russian racketeering scheme as a \u201cconfidential source\u201d \u2014 and he is thus known as \u201cCS-1\u201d in affidavits the government, years later, presented to federal court in order to obtain search and arrest warrants.<\/p>\n

At the time this unidentified man became an informant, the FBI was led by director Robert Mueller, who is now the special counsel investigating whether\u00a0Trump<\/em>\u00a0colluded with Russia. The investigation was centered in Maryland (Tenam\u2019s home base). There, the U.S. attorney was Obama appointee Rod Rosenstein \u2014 now President Trump\u2019s deputy attorney general, and the man who appointed Mueller as special counsel to investigate Trump.<\/p>\n

Because of CS-1, the FBI was able to understand and monitor the racketeering enterprise almost from the start. By mid-May 2010, it could already prove the scheme and three separate extortionate payments Mikerin had squeezed out of the informant. Equally important: According to\u00a0reporting by John Solomon and Alison Spann in the\u00a0Hill<\/em><\/a>, the informant learned through conversations with Mikerin and others that Russian nuclear officials were trying to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons.<\/p>\n

Uranium One, Russia, and the Clintons<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is no doubt that this extraordinarily gainful ingratiation took place.\u00a0I outlined some of it<\/a>\u00a0a year ago in suggesting that the Justice Department should be investigating the Clinton Foundation, and its exploitation of Hillary Clinton\u2019s influence as secretary of state, as a potential racketeering case.<\/p>\n

In 2005, former President Clinton helped his Canadian billionaire friend and benefactor, Frank Giustra, obtain coveted uranium-mining rights from Kazakhstan\u2019s dictator. The Kazakh deal enabled Giustra\u2019s company (Ur-Asia Energy) to merge into Uranium One (a South African company), a $3.5 billion windfall. Giustra and his partners thereafter contributed tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. Besides the valuable Kazakh reserves, Uranium One also controlled about a fifth of the uranium stock in the United States.<\/p>\n

Alas, Putin, the neighborhood bully, also wanted the Kazakh uranium. He leaned on Kazakhstan\u2019s dictator, who promptly arrested the official responsible for selling the uranium-mining rights to Giustra\u2019s company. This put Uranium One\u2019s stake in jeopardy of being seized by the Kazakh government.<\/p>\n

As Uranium One\u2019s stock plunged, its panicked executives turned to the State Department, where their friend Hillary Clinton was now in charge. State sprung into action, convening emergency meetings with the Kazakh regime. A few days later, it was announced that the crisis was resolved (translation: the shakedown was complete). Russia\u2019s energy giant, Rosatom, would purchase 17 percent of Uranium One, and the Kazakh threat would disappear \u2014 and with it, the threat to the value of the Clinton donors\u2019 holdings.<\/p>\n

For Putin, though, that was just a start. He didn\u2019t want a minority stake in Uranium One, he wanted control of the uranium. For that, Rosatom would need a controlling interest in Uranium One. That would be a tall order \u2014 not because of the Kazakh mining rights but because acquisition of Uranium One\u2019s American reserves required U.S. government approval.<\/p>\n

Uranium is foundational to nuclear power and thus to American national security. As\u00a0the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0explained<\/a>\u00a0in a report on the disturbing interplay between the Clinton Foundation and the transfer of American uranium assets to Russia, the United States gets a fifth of its electrical power from nuclear energy, but only produces a fifth of the uranium it needs. Consequently, a foreign entity would not be able to acquire rights to American uranium without the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.<\/p>\n

CFIUS is composed of the leaders of 14 U.S. government agencies involved in national security and commerce. In 2010, these included not only Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had cultivated a reputation as a hawk opposed to such foreign purchases, but Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department (and its lead agency, the FBI) were conducting the investigation of Rosatom\u2019s ongoing U.S. racketeering, extortion, and money-laundering scheme.<\/p>\n

In March 2010, to push the Obama \u201creset\u201d agenda, Secretary Clinton traveled to Russia, where she met with Putin and Dimitri Medvedev, who was then keeping the president\u2019s chair warm for Putin. Soon after, it emerged that Renaissance Capital, a regime-tied Russian bank, had offered Bill Clinton $500,000 to make a single speech \u2014 far more than the former president\u2019s usual haul in what would become one of his biggest paydays ever. Renaissance was an aggressive promoter of Rosatom. The Clinton speech took place in Moscow in June. The exorbitant speech fee, it is worth noting, is a pittance compared with the $145 million\u00a0Newsweek<\/em>\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0was donated to the Clinton Foundation by sources linked to the Uranium One deal.<\/p>\n

The month before the speech,\u00a0the\u00a0Hill<\/em>\u00a0reports<\/a>, Bill Clinton told his wife\u2019s State Department that he wanted to meet while in Russia with Arkady Dvorkovich, who, in addition to being a top Medvedev aide, was also a key Rosatom board member. It is not known whether the State Department gave clearance for the meeting; the question appears to have become moot since the former U.S. president met directly with Putin and Medvedev. You\u2019ll be comforted, I\u2019m sure, to learn that aides to the Clintons, those pillars of integrity, assure us that the topics of Rosatom and Uranium One never came up.<\/p>\n

Keeping Congress in the Dark<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, congressional opposition to Russia\u2019s potential acquisition of American uranium resources began to stir. As Peter Schweizer noted in his essential book,\u00a0Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich<\/em><\/a>, four senior House members steeped in national-security issues \u2014 Peter King (R., N.Y.), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla.), Spencer Bachus (R., Ala.), and Howard McKeon (R. Calif.) \u2014 voiced grave concerns, pointing out that Rosatom had helped Iran, America\u2019s sworn enemy, build its Bushehr nuclear reactor. The members concluded that \u201cthe take-over of essential US nuclear resources by a government-owned Russian agency\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0would not advance the national security interests of the United States.\u201d Republican senator John Barrasso objected to Kremlin control of uranium assets in his state of Wyoming, warning of Russia\u2019s \u201cdisturbing record of supporting nuclear programs in countries that are openly hostile to the United States, specifically Iran and Venezuela.\u201d The House began moving a bill \u201cexpressing disfavor of the Congress\u201d regarding Obama\u2019s revival of the nuclear-cooperation agreement Bush had abandoned.<\/p>\n

Clearly, in this atmosphere, disclosure of the racketeering enterprise that Rosatom\u2019s American subsidiary was, at that very moment, carrying out would have been the death knell of the asset transfer to Russia. It would also likely have ended the \u201creset\u201d initiative in which Obama and Clinton were deeply invested \u2014 an agenda that contemplated Kremlin-friendly deals on nuclear-arms control and accommodation of the nuclear program of Russia\u2019s ally, Iran. That was not going to be allowed to happen. It appears that no disclosure of Russia\u2019s racketeering and strong-arming was made to CFIUS or to Congress \u2014 not by Secretary Clinton, not by Attorney General Holder, and certainly not by President Obama. In October 2010, CFIUS gave its blessing to Rosatom\u2019s acquisition of Uranium One.<\/p>\n

A Sweetheart Plea Helps the Case Disappear<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even though the FBI had an informant collecting damning information, and had a prosecutable case against Mikerin by early 2010, the extortion racket against American energy companies was permitted to continue into the summer of 2014. It was only then that, finally, Mikerin and his confederates were arrested.<\/p>\n

Why then? This is not rocket science. In March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. Putin also began massing forces on the Ukrainian border, coordinating and conducting attacks, ultimately taking control of territory. Clearly, the pie-in-the-sky Obama reset was dead. Furthermore, the prosecution of Mikerin\u2019s racketeering scheme had been so delayed that the Justice Department risked losing the ability to charge the 2009 felonies because of the five-year statute of limitations on most federal crimes.<\/p>\n

Still, a lid needed to be kept on the case. It would have made for an epic Obama administration scandal, and a body blow to Hillary Clinton\u2019s presidential hopes, if in the midst of Russia\u2019s 2014 aggression, public attention had been drawn to the failure, four years earlier, to prosecute a national-security case in order to protect Russia\u2019s takeover of U.S. nuclear assets.<\/p>\n

The Obama administration needed to make this case go away \u2014 without a public trial if at all possible.<\/p>\n

Think about this: The investigation of Russian racketeering in the American energy sector was the kind of spectacular success over which the FBI and Justice Department typically do a bells-n-whistles victory lap \u2014 the big self-congratulatory press conference followed by the media-intensive prosecutions\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0and, of course, more press conferences.<\/p>\n

Here\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0crickets.<\/p>\n

As the\u00a0Hill<\/em>\u00a0reports, the Justice Department and FBI had little to say when Mikerin and his co-conspirators were arrested. They quietly negotiated guilty pleas that were announced with no fanfare just before Labor Day. It was arranged that Mikerin would be sentenced just before Christmas. All under the radar.<\/p>\n

How desperate was the Obama Justice Department to plead the case out? Here, Rosenstein and Holder will have some explaining to do.<\/p>\n

Mikerin was arrested on a complaint describing a racketeering scheme that stretched back to 2004 and included extortion, fraud, and money laundering. Yet he was permitted to plead guilty to a single count of money-laundering conspiracy.<\/p>\n

Except it was not really money-laundering conspiracy.<\/p>\n

Under federal law, that crime (at\u00a0section 1956<\/a>\u00a0of the penal code) carries a penalty of\u00a0up to 20 years\u2019 imprisonment<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 not only for conspiracy but for each act of money laundering. But Mikerin was not made to plead guilty to this charge. He was permitted to plead guilty to an offense charged under the catch-all federal conspiracy provision (section 371<\/a>) that criminalizes agreements to commit any crime against the United States. Section 371 prescribes a sentence of\u00a0zero to five years\u2019 imprisonment<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Justice Department instructs prosecutors that when Congress has given a federal offense its own conspiracy provision with a heightened punishment (as it has for money laundering, racketeering, narcotics trafficking, and other serious crimes), they may not charge a section 371 conspiracy. Section 371 is for less serious conspiracy cases. Using it for money laundering \u2014 which caps the sentence way below Congress\u2019s intent for that behavior \u2014 subverts federal law and signals to the court that the prosecutor does not regard the offense as major.<\/p>\n

Yet, that is exactly what Rosenstein\u2019s office did, in a plea agreement his prosecutors co-signed with attorneys from the Justice Department\u2019s Fraud Section. (See in the\u00a0Hill<\/em>\u2019s\u00a0report<\/a>, the third document embedded at the bottom, titled \u201cMikerin Plea Deal.\u201d)\u00a0No RICO, no extortion, no fraud \u2014 and the plea agreement is careful not to mention any of the extortions in 2009 and 2010, before CFIUS approved Rosatom\u2019s acquisition of U.S. uranium stock. Mikerin just had to plead guilty to a nominal \u201cmoney laundering\u201d conspiracy charge. This insulated him from a real money-laundering sentence. Thus, he got a term of just four years\u2019 incarceration for a major national-security crime \u2014 which, of course, is why he took the plea deal and waived his right to appeal, sparing the Obama administration a full public airing of the facts.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, as the plea agreement shows, the Obama DOJ\u2019s Fraud Section was then run by Andrew Weissmann, who is now one of the top prosecutors in Robert Mueller\u2019s ongoing special-counsel investigation of suspected Trump collusion with Russia.<\/p>\n

There was still one other problem to tamp down. That was the informant \u2014 the lobbyist who alerted the FBI to the Russian racketeering enterprise back in 2009. He wanted to talk.<\/p>\n

Specifically, as his attorney, Ms. Toensing, explains, the informant wanted to tell Congress what he knows \u2014 about what the FBI and the Justice Department could already have proved in 2010 when CFIUS signed off on Russia\u2019s acquisition of American nuclear material, and about what he\u2019d learned of Russian efforts to curry favor with Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he was not allowed to talk.<\/p>\n

It turns out, the lawyer explains, that the FBI had induced him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The Justice Department warned him that it was enforceable \u2014 even against disclosures to Congress. (Because, you know, the FBI is opposed to all leaks and disclosures of confidential investigative information\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0except those initiated by the FBI, of course.) In addition, when the informant was primed to file a federal civil lawsuit to recover his own losses from the scheme, he claims that the Justice Department threatened him with prosecution, warning that a lawsuit would violate the non-disclosure agreement. The\u00a0Hill<\/em>\u00a0reports that it has obtained emails from a civil lawyer retained by the witness, which describe pressure exerted by the Justice Department to silence the informant.<\/p>\n

What a coincidence: That was in 2016, the stretch run of Hillary Clinton\u2019s presidential campaign.<\/p>\n

This stinks.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Andrew C. McCarthy is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.<\/p>\n

___
\nhttp:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/452972\/uranium-one-deal-obama-administration-doj-hillary-clinton-racketeering<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Obama Administration\u2019s Uranium One Scandal ANDREW C. MCCARTHY National Review Not only the Clintons are implicated in a uranium deal with the Russians that compromised national-security interests. Let\u2019s put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: The cool half-million bucks … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}