Flashback: The Clintons and Uranium One

FPI / March 28, 2022

Sen. John Barrasso, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, introduced legislation last week to prohibit U.S. imports of uranium from Russia.

The Wyoming Republican argued that the U.S. purchase of Russia uranium is helping to fuel Vladimir Putin’s war machine in Ukraine.

“We in the United States are still buying uranium from Russia. I have a bill to stop that,” Barrasso told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “We need to stop the whole thing.”

Uranium is needed for nuclear power plants, which Barassa noted "is an important part of our electric grid. About 20% of the energy we have here is from nuclear power. It is carbon-free energy. We need to immediately, immediately cut off the importation of uranium from Russia. That cuts off their money."

But quitting Russia is complicated for Team Biden and the Democrat Party, thanks in large part to Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill.

The Biden administration also continues to rely on Russia in negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal because Iran will not deal directly with U.S. negotiators.

As for Russia and uranium, one of the largest and perhaps least understood Obama-era scandals was the Russian takeover of Uranium One, a Canadian mining company with large uranium holdings in the United States.

The Uranium One scandal involves alleged bribery, kickbacks, extortion, and money laundering at the highest levels of the U.S. nuclear industry. FBI informant-turned-whistleblower William Douglas Campbell infiltrated Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and claimed to have video evidence of “suitcases full of bribery cash.”

Former President Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 by a Kremlin-backed bank to deliver a speech in Moscow just months before the Uranium One sale was approved by the Obama administration. Clinton sought approval from his wife’s State Department to meet with a Russian board member of Rosatom, the state-owned nuclear agency. Clinton ended up meeting directly with Putin instead, who thanked the former president for the visit. Soon after, Bill Clinton was paid a half million dollars by Russian interests, and Hillary Clinton’s State Department allowed the Russian takeover of U.S. nuclear assets.

"The Uranium One scandal contains elements of corruption and abuses of power. Neither Watergate nor the Lewinsky affair involved payments to top White House officials by foreign adversaries in exchange for favorable policies. However, Uranium One did — and the payments were massive," Seamus Bruner wrote in a May 2019 op-ed for The Epoch Times.

The payment figure was reportedly $145 million, which refers to the collective “commitments and donations” made to the Clinton Foundation by “investors who profited from the deal,” as documented extensively in Peter Schweizer’s book “Clinton Cash” and confirmed by The New York Times. Any uncertainty in the dates or amounts is due exclusively to the Clinton Foundation, which reports its donations once per year and in wide ranges — or as Schweizer calls it, “the Clinton blur.” The bulk of the $145 million figure came from longtime Clinton friend Frank Giustra. Another major Clinton donor included in that figure is uranium investor Frank Holmes, who was grilled on his timely donations by CNBC.

Many of the same players in the Russiagate targeting of the Trump campaign also played lead investigative roles in the Uranium One scheme.

James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, and Andrew Weissmann all appear to have been involved in both the investigation of long-running Russian nuclear conspiracies and in the attempt to unseat a duly elected president who threatened to expose them.

Free Press International