kurtster wrote: 
The usual denial and F.U.D., but to save people the time and effort to click the link, and to judge the veracity of both your words and esp. the meme (below):

Two House committees have said that they will investigate the Obama administration’s approval of a deal that gave Russia a financial interest in U.S. uranium production.

The 2010 deal allowed Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency, to acquire a controlling stake in Uranium One, a Canadian-based company with mining stakes in the Western United States.

We covered it during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Donald Trump falsely accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of giving away U.S. uranium rights to the Russians and claimed — without evidence — that it was done in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.

Now, the issue is back in the news, and numerous readers have asked us about it again. So we will recap here what we know — and don’t know — about the 2010 deal.

The Deal

On June 8, 2010, Uranium One announced it had signed an agreement that would give “not less than 51%” of the company to JSC Atomredmetzoloto, or ARMZ, the mining arm of Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency.

At the time, Uranium One’s two licensed mining operations in Wyoming amounted to about “20 percent of the currently licensed uranium in-situ recovery production capacity in the U.S.,” according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In-situ recovery is the extraction method currently used by 10 of the 11 licensed U.S. uranium producers.

Uranium One also has exploration projects in Arizona, Colorado and Utah.

But the deal required multiple approvals by the U.S., beginning with the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States. Under federal law, the committee reviews foreign investments that raise potential national security concerns.

The Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States

The Committee on Foreign Investments has nine members, including the secretaries of the treasury, state, defense, homeland security, commerce and energy; the attorney general; and representatives from two White House offices (the United States Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy).

The committee can’t actually stop a sale from going through — it can only approve a sale. The president is the only one who can stop a sale, if the committee or any one member “recommends suspension or prohibition of the transaction,” according to guidelines issued by the Treasury Department in December 2008 after the department adopted its final rule a month earlier.

For this and other reasons, we have written that Trump is wrong to claim that Clinton “gave away 20 percent of the uranium in the United States” to Russia. Clinton could have objected — as could the eight other voting members — but that objection alone wouldn’t have stopped the sale of the stake of Uranium One to Rosatom.

“Only the President has the authority to suspend or prohibit a covered transaction,” the federal guidelines say.

We don’t know much about the committee’s deliberations because there are “strong confidentiality requirements” prohibiting disclosure of information filed with the committee, the Treasury Department says on its website. Some information would have become available if the committee or any one of its members objected to the sale. But none of the nine members objected.

“When a transaction is referred to the President, however, the decision of the President is announced publicly,” Treasury says.

We don’t even know if Clinton was involved in the committee’s review and approval of the uranium deal. Jose Fernandez, a former assistant secretary of state, told the New York Times that he represented the department on the committee. “Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any C.F.I.U.S. matter,” he told the Times, referring to the committee by its acronym.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission

It is also important to note that other federal approvals were needed to complete the deal, and even still more approvals would be needed to export the uranium.

First, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had to approve the transfer of two uranium recovery licenses in Wyoming from Uranium One to the Russian company. The NRC announced it approved the transfer on Nov. 24, 2010. But, as the NRC explained at the time, “no uranium produced at either facility may be exported.”

As NRC explained in a March 2011 letter to Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the Russian company would have to apply for and obtain an export license and “commit to use the material only for peaceful purposes” in accordance with “the U.S.-Russia Atomic Energy Act Section 123 agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation.”

In a June 2015 letter to Rep. Peter Visclosky, the NRC said it granted RSB Logistics Services an amendment to its export license in 2012 to allow the Kentucky shipping company to export uranium to Canada from various sources — including from a Uranium One site in Wyoming. The NRC said that the export license allowed RSB to ship uranium to a conversion plant in Canada and then back to the United States for further processing.

Canada must obtain U.S. approval to transfer any U.S. uranium to any country other than the United States, the letter says.

“Please be assured that no Uranium One, Inc.-produced uranium has been shipped directly to Russia and the U.S. Government has not authorized any country to re-transfer U.S. uranium to Russia,” the 2015 letter said.

“That 2015 statement remains true today,” David McIntyre, a spokesman for the NRC, told us in an email.

RSB Logistics’ current export license, which expires in December, still lists Uranium One as one of its suppliers of uranium.

Uranium One, which is now wholly-owned subsidiary of Rosatom, sells uranium to civilian power reactors in the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration. But U.S. owners and operators of commercial nuclear reactors purchase the vast majority of their uranium from foreign sources. Only 11 percent of the 50.6 million pounds purchased in 2016 came from U.S. domestic producers, according to the EIA.

Although Uranium One once held 20 percent of licensed uranium in-situ recovery production capacity in the U.S., that’s no longer the case. There were only four in-situ recovery facilities licensed by the NRC in 2010. Currently, there are 10 such facilities, so Uranium One’s mining operations now account for an estimated 10 percent of in-situ recovery production capacity in the U.S., the NRC told us in an email.

As for production, the company was responsible for only about 11 percent of U.S. uranium production in 2014, according to 2015 congressional testimony by a Department of Energy contractor. More recently, Uranium One has been responsible for no more than 5.9 percent of domestic production, according to a September 2017 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Clinton Foundation Donations and Bill Clinton Speaking Fee

Clinton’s role in the Uranium One sale, and the link to the Clinton Foundation, first became an issue in 2015, when news organizations received advance copies of the book “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” by Peter Schweizer, a former fellow at a conservative think tank.

On April 23, 2015, the New York Times wrote about the uranium issue, saying the paper had “built upon” Schweizer’s information.

The Times detailed how the Clinton Foundation had received millions in donations from investors in Uranium One.

The donations from those with ties to Uranium One weren’t publicly disclosed by the Clinton Foundation, even though Hillary Clinton had an agreement with the White House that the foundation would disclose all contributors. Days after the Times story, the foundation acknowledged that it “made mistakes,” saying it had disclosed donations from a Canadian charity, for instance, but not the donors to that charity who were associated with the uranium company.

The Times also wrote that Bill Clinton spoke at a conference in Moscow on June 29, 2010 — which was after the Rosatom-Uranium One merger was announced in June 2010, but before it was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States in October 2010. The Russian-based Renaissance Capital Group organized the conference and paid Clinton $500,000.

Renaissance Capital has “ties to the Kremlin” and its analysts “talked up Uranium One’s stock, assigning it a ‘buy’ rating and saying in a July 2010 research report that it was ‘the best play’ in the uranium markets,” the Times wrote.

But there is no evidence that the donations or the speaking fee had any influence on the approvals granted by the NRC or the Committee on Foreign Investments.

Back in the News

This arcane bit of campaign trivia resurfaced in the news after The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, reported that a Russian spy sought to gain access to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state.

Lydia Guryev, who used the name “Cynthia Murphy” while living in the United States, pleaded guilty to espionage charges in July 2010 and was forced to leave the U.S. Her guilty plea came after the Rosatom-Uranium One merger was announced and before the Committee on Foreign Investments approved it. But there was nothing about the merger in the federal criminal complaint or the press release announcing her guilty plea.

The criminal complaint said that Guryev had been working as a spy in the United States since the 1990s and took orders from the foreign intelligence organ of the Russian Federation in Moscow.

For example, Guryev was ordered in the spring of 2009, in advance of Obama’s upcoming trip to Russia, to get information on “Obama’s goals which he expects to achieve during the summitin July,” the complaint said.

The only reference in the criminal complaint to Clinton was a veiled one. Federal agents said Guryev sought to get close with “a personal friend of .” The Hill identified the cabinet official as Clinton.

The Hill story also rehashed an FBI investigation that resulted in “charges against the Russian nuclear industry’s point man in the United States, TENEX director Vadim Mikerin, as well as a Russian financier and an American trucking executive whose company moved Russian uranium around the United States.”

In 2015, Mikerin was sentenced to 48 months and required to pay more than $2 million in restitution for conspiring to commit money laundering, according to the Justice Department.

The Hill quoted the attorney for a former FBI informant in the TENEX case as saying her client “witnessed numerous, detailed conversations in which Russian actors described their efforts to lobby, influence or ingratiate themselves with the Clintons in hopes of winning favorable uranium decisions from the Obama administration.”

The convictions of Guryev and Mikerin are not new, and there’s no evidence that either case has any connection to the Rosatom-Uranium One merger. Nevertheless, the article has prompted the Republican chairmen of the House intelligence and oversight committees to announce a joint investigation of the merger.

On Fox News, Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, said that “we’ve been communicating back and forth through different channels” with the FBI informant in the TENEX case.

“You are talking about major decisions that were made at a time when we were resetting relations with Russia that actually happened to benefit, you know, the Clinton Foundation, perhaps other avenues, we don’t know yet,” Nunes said in an Oct. 24 interview with Bret Baier.

It may be that individuals and companies sought to curry favor with Hillary Clinton and even influence her department’s decision on the Uranium One sale. But, as we’ve written before, there is no evidence that donations to the Clinton Foundation from people with ties to Uranium One or Bill Clinton’s speaking fee influenced Hillary Clinton’s official actions. That’s still the case. We will update this article with any major developments.

Update, Nov. 1: This story has been updated to say that NRC now estimates that Uranium One’s mining operations account for about 10 percent of in-situ recovery production capacity in the U.S. That’s half of what it was in 2010, because more in-situ recovery mining operators have been licensed since 2010.

We also added that Uranium One is responsible for no more than 5.9 percent of domestic production, according to a September 2017 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Trump wrongly said that Hillary Clinton “gave” Russia 20 percent of the uranium in the United States. Clinton was one of nine votes approving the deal. She alone couldn’t have stopped the deal, which involved 20 percent of U.S. production capacity, not stocks, and the uranium can’t go to Russia without export licenses.

And let's not forget the delicious irony of a Trumpist pretending to care about corruption...

 R_P wrote: 
That is so wrong and so out of date. 

We now have testimony revealed publicly this past week from a trusted and vetted informant who drops this squarely into Clinton's lap complete with quid pro quo and a trail that leads right to the White House.  This past week has been very bad for Hillary, Holder, Lynch, Comey and Mueller and maybe Obama when it comes to Uranium One.  Its just about certain this coverup is the reason for all the BS being thrown at Trump.

Stay tuned ...

 Beaker wrote: 
Oh dear.

For this and other reasons, we have written that Trump is wrong to claim that Clinton “gave away 20 percent of the uranium in the United States” to Russia.

 Coaxial wrote: 

 R_P wrote: 
I knew that bastid could not be trusted.

Vladimir Putin suspected of colluding with Russians to win election

Russian state TV warns 'traitors' not to settle in England

 islander wrote: 
It may be significant that among the attendees were Manafort, Kushner, and Rinat Akhmetshin.  

 Lazy8 wrote: 
Yeah, and he just politely declined right?  Except for that whole "gotta set up a meeting with the head of the campaign" thing and express enthusiasm about the offer and even mention timing of late summer...

No I don't think he's particularly bright (or dim for that matter). He's just an average billionaire used to getting his way with everything and not familiar with laws that he thought never would apply to him (literally and figuratively), and certainly not understanding the tank he just jumped into.

And yes, It is fun to watch people like this get their comeuppance - especially following all the 'drain the swamp' rhetoric they espoused. Is there a better use of people's time?  Maybe, but I'm not offended when any of these people get theirs. 

 islander wrote:
The emails only show that Donald Jr. was offered dirt from hacked emails. The Trump campaign didn't release them, someone else did.

It's possible that Donald Jr. was clever enough to realize that accepting this offer of help would violate campaign finance law; maybe some overzealous prosecutor could also gin up a case for receiving stolen goods or something. Federal hacking statutes are broad enough (and poorly-written enough) that it's possible just being in a conversation with someone alleging to have hacked emails is a crime, don't know.

Or care really—the dirt they dug up (that hadn't already been made public via the Benghazi hearings, which was far worse) was that the DNC was doing its best to promote the establishment candidate over primary rivals. That came as a surprise to absolutely no one.

And assuming Donald Jr. is that clever (show me some evidence of that, somebody?) if he had simply said "Can't accept this, but I can't stop you from releasing it" he's off the hook for campaign finance violations. If he said "Can't accept this, you release it" it's possible that violates campaign finance law. Which would subject the Trump campaign to...a fine.

So yeah, let's tie up dozens of FBI agents for months and prosecute a few campaign staffers...for tax evasion and lying to the FBI.

It is fun to watch the vermin under the rocks of the Trump campaign exposed to the light of day, just as we only found out the Secretary of State was hiding her communications in a private email server because of the Benghazi hearings—which were also a partisan witch hunt. Maybe some transparency will result. I guess that'd be good. But isn't what we already know about Donald Trump—what he brags about publicly—bad enough?

 Lazy8 wrote: 
I know you are trying to be mocking here, but you aren't far from what happened: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/11/donald-trump-jr-emails-full-text-russia-rob-goldstone

I'd say Donald Trump Jr. is a little better placed than "random henchman".  And while I don't think even this crew has the hubris to leave documentation of open collusion, I do think there is enough there that it shows the willingness to step way over the line of normal in accepting assistance from a hostile foreign power. 

I don't think there is much to be done about it until 2020, but I'm stunned at the lack of bother most of the upright/law & order/strong defense GOP crowd has just because it got the result (marginally) they wanted.  

 haresfur wrote:
Yes, different. But not as different as you might think.

  
Just because you are the lackey, not the ring-leader, doesn't mean you aren't guilty of the crime. The laws are different for foreign nations than for internal organizations, right?

 R_P wrote: 

They Came, They Saw, They Tweeted

My sense of anticipation was hyped. Robert Mueller had just indicted the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency, along with several of the trolls who had slaved tirelessly from their cyber-cubicles in St. Petersburg in a plot to despoil American democracy. Having recently survived a hit-and-run collision with a suspected Russian troll, who had recklessly driven the internet highways using a false ID (Alice Donovan), I was eager to see what the former FBI man had uncovered.

My appetite was further whetted by an NBC News producer who proclaimed the Mueller indictment “one of the most important political documents in US history.” Right up there with the Monroe Doctrine, the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, and the Starr Report, I suppose.

I greedily downloaded a pdf of the 33-page filing, expecting to finally get answers to questions that had been nagging me for months, such as: How could the Russians have been so sloppy as to get caught with their hands in Trump’s pockets? Did they believe Trump was smart enough to effectively collude with them? Did they really think Hillary needed any help blowing a sure thing? And, most importantly, what was Alice Donovan’s real name? (...)

 Lazy8 wrote: 

"For one the Trump administration will have proved to its supporters that the Deep State is out to get it, that the outrage expressed was just sour grapes and partisan rah-rah. They will be immunized against scrutiny when they actually do something evil that merits oversight and intervention."
At this point, Trump's supporters are quite willing to ignore the truth or dismiss evidence pointing towards the truth if someone tells them that it's "fake news." So even if Mueller finds nothing worth prosecuting OR finds seriously criminal activity, Trump's supporters have in many cases have already made up their minds, or had them made up for them. 

"I'm not seeing any evidence that that happened, or that anyone on Team Trump was clever enough to direct it if it had. If the awesome investigatory powers of the FBI aren't enough to penetrate the evidence hiding of henchmen who can't save a Word doc as PDF maybe it's because there's nothing there to find."



It's way too early to speculate about what Mueller and Co. will find or won't find. Legal experts quoted in the news stories that I've read find the number of indictments and plea deals indicative of Mueller having strong evidence to prosecute and convict people. Whether that evidence will lead to Trump and his inner circle remains to be seen. 

 
Of course it is politicized when you investigate a political campaign. Such is life.

In my mind the crimes that members of the Trump campaign have plead guilty to are enough to show he is unfit for office (yes, I know unfit doesn't mean impeachable). If he didn't know, he is unfit to lead any organization.

islander wrote:
This really amuses me. Trump (or a henchman, whatever) goes to The Russians: "We want you to help the candidate you already want to win."

The Russians: "Brilliant! Would never have thought of that! What you want us to do?"

T(oah,w): "Post defamatory stories on Facebook so fake that only our supporters will believe them. Also maybe spying? I hear you're good at that. Like, the best."

TR: "Am on it, comrade! Also we have dirt from emails but no idea what to do with."

T(oah,w): "Publish!"

TR: "Also brilliant! Would never have thought of that in million years!"

T(oah,w): "Glad to have you on the team, doing my bidding!" (Rubs hands).

If there were any evidence that Team Trump solicited help from the Russians and directed their activities you might have a case. In the current thicket of campaign laws that would probably count as an illegal campaign contribution or something. After all, you're allowed to accept help from outside organizations (Fox News, CNN, Moveon.org, the NRA) but you're not allowed to direct it.

I'm not seeing any evidence that that happened, or that anyone on Team Trump was clever enough to direct it if it had. If the awesome investigatory powers of the FBI aren't enough to penetrate the evidence hiding of henchmen who can't save a Word doc as PDF maybe it's because there's nothing there to find.

When Robert Mueller wraps up his witch hunt and prosecutes a few henchmen for unrelated crimes and it turns out that's all he gets...what has been accomplished? For one the Trump administration will have proved to its supporters that the Deep State is out to get it, that the outrage expressed was just sour grapes and partisan rah-rah. They will be immunized against scrutiny when they actually do something evil that merits oversight and intervention.