Before President Obama approved a controversial deal in 2010 that gave Russia control of large quantities of American uranium, the FBI already had collected a lot of evidence that nuclear industry officials in Russia were involved in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering. The idea behind these activities were to grow Putin’s energy business inside the US, according to US government documents and interviews.
FBI agents used a secret US witness who worked in the nuclear industry in Russia to collect financial records. He also made secret recordings and gathered emails back in 2009 that indicated Moscow had influenced an American uranium trucking company with kickbacks and bribes. This was in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, according to FBI and court documents.
They also had an eyewitness account that showed that nuclear officials in Russia had taken millions of dollars to the US that were supposed to benefit Bill Clinton’s charity when Hillary Clinton served in a governmental organization that provided favorable outcomes to Moscow, according to sources.
Racketeering Scheme Involved High Level Russian Officials
This racketeering scheme was done with the agreement of high level Russian officials who shared proceeds from the kickbacks, according to an agent years later.
Instead of bringing charges right away in 2010, the DOJ continued to look into the matter for four more years. This largely left the American public and Congress unaware of what was going on regarding Russian nuclear corruption inside the United States. This all occurred in a time when the Obama administration made decisions that benefited the commercial nuclear desires of Vladimir Putin.
The first of these decisions happened in October 2010. This was when the US State Department and various government agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US approved a partial sale of a mining company in Canada called Uranium One to the Russian nuclear company Rosatom. This gave Russia control of a full 20% of the uranium supply in America.
This sale was mentioned on the campaign trail by Donald Trump in 2016, but Hillary Clinton’s camp stated that she was not involved in any committee review. Her team also noted that the State Department person who had handled the matter said that Clinton never intervened on any of these matters involving the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
Tenex Was Allowed to Sell Commercial Uranium in US By Obama
In 2011, the Obama administration gave the green light for Rosatom’s Tenex offshoot to market commercial uranium in the United States to nuclear power plants. This was in a partnership with the US Enrichment Corp. Before that, Tenex was limited to selling nuclear power plants in the US reprocessed uranium from old Soviet nuclear weapons under an old program called Megatons to Megawatts, a peace program.
According to a source on the case, the Russians were compromising US contractors in the nuclear field with extortion and kickbacks. All of these matters raised serious national security worries. None of this evidence was aired before the Obama team made the decisions.
The decision by the Obama administration to green light the purchase of Uranium One by Rosatom has been a major political controversy for several years. It became one when the New York Times and author Peter Schweitzer showed how Bill Clinton had received hundreds of thousands of dollars to give speeches, and his charity had collected millions of dollars in political donations from stakeholders that were interested in the deal when Hillary Clinton was a key player on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US.
The Clintons and the Obama administration defended these actions at the time. They insisted that there was not any evidence that any donors or Russians had engaged in anything wrong. They also stressed that there were no national security reasons for any members of the committee to oppose the deal by Uranium One.
However, Energy Department, FBI and court documents that have been reviewed by the media indicate that the FBI had collected a lot of evidence before the decision by the committee that Vadim Mikerin was involved in wrongdoing in 2009. Mikerin was the main person who was overseeing Putin’s nuclear expansions inside the US.
Holder Was Involved in Uranium One Approval
Eric Holder, the Attorney General at the time, was one of the Obama administration officials who was with Hillary Clinton on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US when the Uranium One deal was green lighted. Several government officials both current and foreign told the press that they were unaware of whether the DOJ or FBI had told committee members about the criminal activities that were uncovered.
Mikerin was the director of Tenex in Moscow since at least the early 2000s. There he was in charge of the oversight of the nuclear collaboration between Rosatom and the US under the Megatons to Megawatts program and the commercial sale of uranium to other countries. In 2010, the director was sent to the United States on a work visa that was okayed by the Obama team to open a new American unit of Rosatom called Tenam.
From 2009 to 2012, Mikerin was found in a 2014 indictment to have consipired with other parties to delay, obstruct and affect commerce in the movement of enriched uranium by extortion.
This illegal activity was brought to light with the assistance of a confidential witness who started to make several kickback payments to the direction of Mikerin’s direction and with the FBI’s permission. The initial kickback payment was recorded by the FBI in February 2009.
Ronald Hosko, who was the assistant FBI director of criminal cases when this investigation was underway, told the media that he did not know about the Mikerin case, even though criminal charges had been brought. Major congressional figures also did not know.
According to former Representative Mike Rogers, who chaired the House Intelligence Committee at the time, he did not know a thing about the Russian nuclear corruption case, even though many lawmakers were concerned about the approval of the Uranium One deal by the Obama administration.
Rogers stated that failing to provide information on a corruption scheme prior to the uranium deal with Russia being approved by regulators in the US served to undermine national security interests in the United States.