The FBI had gathered essential evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business in the U.S. before the previous American administration, led by President Barack Obama, approved the controversial deal in 2010, The Hill reports relying on government documents and interviews. The deal gave Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium.
The Bureau used witnesses who worked inside the Russian nuclear industry. The witnesses helped FBI to gather financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails since 2009. The documents reveal that all of those materials showed that the Russians compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes. According to unnamed sources, there is also an eyewitness account indicating Russian nuclear officials sent millions of dollars to the U.S. in order to benefit Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation. The interesting detail is that this happened while Hillary Clinton was in a government body that provided the favorable decision for Moscow.
Still, the Department of Justice did not bring charges in 2010, but it continued investigating for four more years. An agent had even said that Russian officials from a higher level, who were sharing the revenue, gave consent for the bribing.
In October 2010, the State Department and government agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in U.S. approved the partial sale of Canadian mining company Uranium One to the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom. That gave Russia control of more than 20% of U.S. uranium supply. One year later, the administration said yes for Rosatom’s Tenex branch to sell commercial uranium to American nuclear power plants in a partnership with the U.S. Enrichment Corp. Tenex was previously limited to selling U.S. nuclear power plants reprocessed uranium recovered from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons.
The Clintons and the former administration have always been saying that there was no evidence that the Russians were doing something wrong and no national security reason for any member of the committee to oppose the Uranium One deal, but FBI, Energy Department, and court documents reveal that the bureau had evidence that Vadim Mikerin was engaged in wrongdoing. The evidence had been gathered long before the decision. Mikerin was the number one Russian overseeing Russia’s nuclear expansion in the United States.
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