The Real Russian Scandal

by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

October 21, 2017 4:00 AM @ANDREWCMCCARTHY

Not only the Clintons are implicated in a uranium deal with the Russians that compromised national-security interests.

Let’s put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: The cool half-million bucks the Putin regime funneled to Bill Clinton was five times the amount it spent on those Facebook ads — the ones the media-Democrat complex ludicrously suggests swung the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.

The Facebook-ad buy, which started in June 2015 — before Donald Trump entered the race — was more left-wing agitprop (ads pushing hysteria on racism, immigration, guns, etc.) than electioneering. The Clintons’ own long-time political strategist Mark Penn estimates that just $6,500 went to actual electioneering. (You read that right: 65 hundred dollars.) 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–secretary of state Hillary Clinton. At the time, Russia was plotting — successfully — 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.

That Russia story is a couple of years old. In April 2015, a New York Times investigation and timeline laid out an insanely complicated story about the U.S. government, the Clinton Foundation and foreign actors. At issue was the interest of a Russian energy concern, Rosatom, in the Canadian mining colossus that would come to be known as Uranium One, a company that held assets in the United States. Yet the transaction required the nod of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a sprawling multi-agency instrumentality that has a representative from the State Department, which Hillary Clinton led at the time.

Here’s where a possible conflict of interest entered the picture: “As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation,” wrote the New York Times. CFIUS approved Rosatom’s bid for majority ownership of Uranium One in October 2010.

The adjacencies weren’t tidy: As the New York Times put it, “The episode underscores the special ethical challenges presented by the Clinton Foundation, headed by a former president who relied heavily on foreign cash to accumulate $250 million in assets even as his wife helped steer American foreign policy as secretary of state, presiding over decisions with the potential to benefit the foundation’s donors.” Yet the newspaper conceded that it was “unknown” whether donations influenced actions.

Russians gained control of 20 percent of U.S. uranium production capacity through the deal. In Trump’s imprecise hands, however, the story took on a misleading and possibly mendacious aspect: “We had Hillary Clinton give Russia 20 percent of the uranium in our country. You know what uranium is, right? This thing called nuclear weapons, like lots of things, are done with uranium including some bad things,” said Trump in a February news conference. Not true: The decision, again, was not Clinton’s exclusive jurisdiction, as The Post’s Fact Checker noted.

In any case, the New York Times devoted two ace investigative reporters — Jo Becker and Mike McIntire — to the story. The project received a boost from materials gathered by Peter Schweizer, who has been a senior editor at large at Breitbart and is the author of “Clinton Cash.” Fox News used input from Becker for a piece on the uranium decision. Other media outlets ran followups, fact-checks, blog posts, the whole deal.

So you had the New York Times working with a Breitbart guy and Fox News. Which is to say that the investigation of Clinton’s cross-cutting duties and allegiances brought the media country together.

A conspiratorial tone sneaks into the Hill’s story, as it questions why the Justice Department didn’t make a bigger deal of its probe. “The Justice Department and FBI took little credit in 2014 when Mikerin, the Russian financier and the trucking firm executives were arrested and charged,” notes the story. More elliptical and suggestive language relates to another matter:

[Federal agents] 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.

Bolding inserted to highlight what-the-heck-are-you-talking-about language. Circa’s Sara A. Carter reported Thursday that Tenex paid consulting firm APCO Worldwide Inc. $3 million in 2010 and 2011 to lobby U.S. agencies. Starting in 2008, APCO provided pro bono services to the Clinton Global Initiative, an arm of the Clinton Foundation. “APCO’s work for Tenex and APCO’s work for the Clinton Global Initiative were separate and unconnected, publicly documented from the outset, and fully consistent with all regulations and US law,” the company told Circa.

kingstonlake wrote:Hasn't the whole Clinton's sold uranium to Russia thing been debunked? Honestly can't remember.

A month prior to the trip, Clinton, whose wife, Hillary Clinton, was secretary of state at the time, asked the State Department if it had any “concerns” about a list of 15 people he intended to meet in Russia, The Hill reported Thursday, citing emails and government records.

According to The Hill, the emails did not indicate how the matter was concluded, but Bill Clinton ended up not meeting with Dvorkovich or the 14 others listed. Also, aides to the Clintons and its foundation said the former president never met anyone involved in the Rosatom-Uranium One deal.

But Bill Clinton did visit Putin at his home. At the time, Putin was serving as Russia’s prime minister after spending eight years as its president, from 2000 to 2008.

Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 for the speech, and concerns have been raised about the amount of money donated to the Clinton Foundation by a mining financier who sold off his shares after his company, UrAsia, merged with Uranium One. The majority of those donations were made later, before Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run.

kingstonlake wrote: What am I looking for now?

Rocinante wrote:I'd call this trolling as we already have a thread with all of this in it on the front page.

New revelations that the FBI uncovered a Russian bribery plot before the Obama administration approved a nuclear deal with Moscow, that involved millions of kickback money to the Clinton Foundation, have been utterly ignored by the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) network evening or morning shows, since the story broke early Tuesday.

In fact, the network evening shows have only spent only 3 minutes and 1 second on the Clinton Foundation scandal in more than two years.

The latest developments in the Russia/Uranium/Clinton scandal were first reported, on Tuesday, by The Hill’s John Solomon and Alison Spann

On Wednesday, The Hill reported that a key FBI informant involved in the investigation of the Clinton/Russia/Uranium scandal was threatened by the Obama administration and warned not to publicly disclose details. Also, at a Senate hearing that same day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions promised that the Justice Department would take “appropriate action” in response to the new information.

So how much time have the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks devoted to the growing story this week? As of Thursday morning, a grand total of ZERO seconds.

So did Callum Borchers draw the short straw over at The Washington Post? One has to ask because he ended up with the rather unenviable task of performing spin control on the Uranium One scandal which broke wide open on October 17 with a big story written by John Solomon and Alison Spann in The Hill.

Borchers' spin technique was to grumble about those currently reporting on the scandal and then touch on the outline of what happened without getting too specific. Oh, and as a final touch, he compared the Uranium One scandal to foreign dignitaries staying at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Two-and-a-half days later, the Associated Press has finally reacted — by treating the report as a mere "reprise" of old news.

Even though the AP report as seen at Raleigh, North Carolina's NewsAndObserver.com web site has a Thursday time stamp of 6:04 p.m., a search on "uranium" at its own APNews.com web site at 8:10 p.m. Eastern Time Thursday (screen grab is here for future reference) carried no story on the matter. (The story was still not present when this post was completed.)

The AP would be wise to continue to keep the story off its own site, because it's so utterly embarrassing. Ken Thomas — seen as the story's reporter at this Minneapolis Star Tribune link — omitted almost every new bit of information learned about the Russian uranium deal, and clearly wanted readers to believe that the story's revival is just another example of President Donald Trump bringing up a matter that was supposedly been settled without controversy:

Thomas knows darned well that readers would and should be interested in the amount of money which flowed into the Clinton Foundation coinciding with the Russia-uranium deal. The only plausible reason he didn't disclose it is because he and the AP don't want readers and subscribers to grasp the breathtaking scope of the corruption involved.

A rundown of more current information Thomas left out of his dispatch would require copying and pasting nearly all of both The Hill's report and subsequent findings reported at Circa.com.

Though each report should be read and understood in full, we'll have to settle for presenting their headlines and opening paragraphs, each of which makes it sufficiently obvious that the Associated Press and Ken Thomas have no interest in communicating the truth.

At The Hill: