Uranium One - Both Sides Of The Story

Editors Note: This post is a clear cut demonstration of the depth of ideology that dictates the source of information on public policy, politics and the inevitable related controversies that we the people hear and read about every day, Based on these 2 stories, no objective person can possibly know which side of this story to believe. Newsweek barely touches on the millions of dollars paid directly to the Clinton's by the Russians. Gingrich doesn't mention a word about the insignificance of America;s uranium mining production in the world market - in other words - this is not a big deal related to national security.  

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One Side of The Story (The one we hear in the liberal media)

Newsweek  10/27/17 

A conspiracy theory involving uranium, Russians, bribery and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to trigger a congressional probe this week. But if the story seems unbelievable, well, that's exactly what it is, some expert observers said.

“I have to say that this is one of those things where reasonable people cannot disagree: There just aren’t two sides,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear materials and nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.

The controversy centers around a 2010 deal that allowed a Russian company to take over management of uranium mines in Wyoming and Utah, and it gained steam after The Hill reported on October 17 that the FBI had been investigating allegations that American trucking companies offered bribes to Russian nuclear officials tied to the deal. 

 According to documents released by The Hill, the bribes were organized by Vadim Mikerin, who managed U.S. operations for the Russian firm Rosatom and its subsidiary Tenex—the company that would buy Uranium One, the manager of the mines—and allegedly helped the American companies secure deals to truck Russian nuclear material in the U.S. through kickbacks to Russian officials.

According to documents released by The Hill, the bribes were organized by Vadim Mikerin, who managed U.S. operations for the Russian firm Rosatom and its subsidiary Tenex—the company that would buy Uranium One, the manager of the mines—and allegedly helped the American companies secure deals to truck Russian nuclear material in the U.S. through kickbacks to Russian officials.

The Hill described the bribes as “designed to grow [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States,” although the alleged bribes, which totaled about $2 million, covered only transport contracts for Russian nuclear material and didn’t actually increase Russian uranium sales in the U.S.

The U.S. produces very little uranium—about 2 million pounds in 2015, a year nuclear power plants imported 57 million pounds of the element. The vast majority of the uranium comes from Kazakhstan and Australia.

But the idea that Russia had bought control of one of the larger uranium mines in the U.S. led some imaginations to run wild, even if that uranium isn’t being used for weapons. Russia and the U.S. have worked to shrink nuclear stockpiles in recent years.

Conservative media outlets have been circulating theories about the deal for years, and Donald Trump even brought it up while campaigning for the presidency. Trump claimed that Clinton “approved the transfer of 20 percent of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.”

The Hill article sent such coverage into overdrive. Lou Dobbs ran a segment on his Fox Business show under the banner “Russia Collusion” and featuring a photo of Clinton the day the story was published. Trump hyped the theory again several times in the past week, calling the deal a “modern-day Watergate” and the “real Russia story.”

The guilt by association theory centers on Clinton’s role on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The committee reviews deals that would transfer to foreign ownership companies that might be sensitive to national security.

According to the conspiracy theory, Clinton received money from several people affiliated with the uranium mine deal, and then pushed the CFIUS to approve it in return.

The problem is, that’s not how CFIUS works. Clinton’s vote would have been only one of nine, as the reviews are run by the Treasury Department and other Cabinet secretaries get to weigh in.

“The secretary of state is one, and frankly not usually a very powerful, member of the committee,” said Steve Grundman, a fellow at the Atlantic Council who dealt with CFIUS reviews while serving in the Pentagon in the 1990s. “You have to remember with CFIUS, the first letter stands for the committee.”

Also, Cabinet secretaries almost never deal with the committee themselves, instead delegating to underlings. For Clinton, that delegate was the assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, Jose Fernandez.

“Secretary Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter,” Fernandez toldTime in 2015. Two former State Department officials who served under Clinton told Newsweek that Clinton would have been notified of a CFIUS decision only if there were disagreement among members of the committee, which would push a final decision to the president. The CFIUS decision on the Uranium One deal, however, was unanimous—all nine representatives agreed to approve it.

 "For this conspiracy theory to be true, she would have to twist the arms of all these other eight Cabinet secretaries, which is completely absurd and completely implausible,” said Max Bergmann, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who specializes in U.S.-Russia relations and who worked at the State Department under both Clinton and her successor, John Kerry.

“For this conspiracy theory to be true, she would have to twist the arms of all these other eight Cabinet secretaries, which is completely absurd and completely implausible,” said Max Bergmann, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who specializes in U.S.-Russia relations and who worked at the State Department under both Clinton and her successor, John Kerry.

The claim that Clinton received big money for the Clinton Foundation from those tied to the Tenex–Uranium One deal is also tenuous. PolitiFact reviewed that claim, which was floated in a book by an editor at the far-right media outlet Breitbart, and found that almost all the money came from Frank Giustra, who sold his stake in Uranium One before Clinton became secretary of state.

Bergmann said the claim “just doesn’t make any sense. It’s just frankly a vehicle for distraction.”

According to the experts, even if Clinton had somehow managed to tilt the CFIUS decision in favor of Russian buyers, it wouldn’t matter: The mine isn’t very important.

The Russian-owned company does not have a license to export the uranium, and the actual mining process is not sensitive at all.

“It’s just a mine,” Lewis said. “There’s no technology that’s special. There’s no shortage of uranium around the world.”

Also, the deal took place during a period when the U.S. was trying to rebuild economic ties to Russia after Clinton and President Barack Obama initiated a “reset” with that country. The U.S. was buying helicopters from Russia for Afghanistan’s army, as well as rockets for U.S. satellite programs. It was a time before Russia had invaded Ukraine and meddled in the U.S. election.

Lewis said that even if he were asked to review the sale today, his security assessment would not change.

“We might refuse it to be bloody minded because we wouldn’t want to engage in any economic action, but it’s not a national security issue,” he said. “The uranium, it’s harmless.”

Still, all the hubbub about it has triggered a probe. Announced Tuesday, it is being led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. Nunes became a household name when he handed over the responsibility for running the committee’s probe into Russian election meddling after word of his secret visits to the White House came to light.

Nunes said the Uranium One probe would focus on the FBI investigation into the bribery scheme, and whether it should have affected the CFIUS decision. Although Clinton’s name has appeared in nearly every conservative media segment discussing the deal, and appeared repeatedly in the article published by The Hill, Nunes did not mention the former presidential candidate when announcing the probe.

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The Other Side of The Story (The one we hear on Fox News)

Newt Gingrich 10/27/17 

The Left has been desperately working for months to find any shred of evidence that Donald Trump had even the slightest connection to Russia during the presidential campaign. Despite having the full support of their friends in the media, they have consistently failed to find anything substantive.

At first, I assumed the liberal elites were simply driven by their inability to accept that the American people elected Donald Trump as their 45th president. Now, I have another theory: The Trump-Russia story is meant to serve as a pure distraction aimed at masking real corruption by the Clinton political machine.

As The Hill reported on Sunday, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, a Kremlin-linked bank paid her husband, former President Bill Clinton, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also during her tenure as top diplomat, earlier reports indicate Canadian and Russian business executives directed many millions more to the Clinton Foundation. In fact, citing recently unsealed Federal Bureau of Investigation reports, The Hill described a thorough Russian campaign aimed at gaining access to the Clintons and capitalizing on their influence, while also spying on them to advance a pro-Russia agenda. In 2010, the FBI arrested 10 so-called “sleeper cell” Russian spies who had reportedly become too close to Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, while serving as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was also overseeing a laundry list of U.S.-Russian initiatives and dealings.

Among other things, she served on the Committee on Foreign Investment, where she voted in favor of President Obama’s approval of the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian business, to a state-owned Russian nuclear energy outfit. At the time, the Canadian company controlled 20 percent of the U.S. uranium reserves.

Before the sale was approved, a Kremlin-linked bank that supported the deal paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a 90-minute speech in Moscow to promote the Uranium One’s stock. Bill then met personally with Vladimir Putin. All the while, people linked with Uranium One – and its previous incarnation UrAsia – reportedly paid the Clinton Foundation $145 million in donations.

You can’t make this stuff up, and while the news media continues to acknowledge the facts, they still claim there is no foul play on behalf of the Clintons in terms of the uranium deal. The Media Research Center found that the ABC, NBC, and CBS evening shows have “spent only 3 minutes and 1 second on the Clinton Foundation scandal in more than two years.”

In comparison, another Media Research Center report found that since Inauguration Day evening shows on these three networks have aired “1,000 minutes of coverage discussing Russia’s attempt to boost Trump in 2016, and speculation that Trump’s campaign may have colluded with the Russians in this project.”

And remember: The so-called collusion story came out of supposed opposition research we now know was funded by Clinton and her Democrat allies.

Thankfully, House and Senate Republicans have now launched new investigations into the Clintons’ ties to Russia – as well as Hillary’s illegal use of a private email server as Secretary of State. The email scandal is now even more significant given that we know that she continued to use a private, insecure email server despite the FBI arresting a ring of Russian agents who were specifically targeting her.

As I told Sean Hannity on Monday, I think we are on the edge of the greatest corruption scandal in American history.

The first thing Congress should do is demand that every single dollar donated to the Clinton Foundation and its charity initiatives be made public to show exactly where the Clintons derived their money. I suspect there are millions of foreign dollars hidden away in foreign subsidiaries that were never reported in financial disclosures.

The truth about the level of foreign donation, influence peddling, and outright corruption involved in the Clinton world could change American politics forever.

The great irony of all this though, is that the Clintons started the so-called Russian collusion scandal, and in the end, they may be the ones destroyed by it.