What Did Mueller Know? New Documents Show Clinton-Russia Scandal Dwarfs Anything on Trump’s Side
Contrary to the Left's favorite
narrative, any Russia scandal has always been worse for Hillary Clinton
than for Donald Trump. Recent revelations confirmed this Tuesday, and
even implicated the special prosecutor at the center of the Trump-Russia
investigation, former FBI director Robert Mueller.
In
2010, the Obama administration approved a controversial deal giving
Russian company Rosatom partial control of Canadian mining company
Uranium One (and with it 20 percent of U.S. uranium), just as Russians
paid former president Bill Clinton for speeches and Hillary Clinton was
secretary of State. To make matters worse, the FBI had already gathered
evidence of Russian corruption in the U.S. but kept it secret just when
it would have mattered most, The Hill reported Tuesday.
A
confidential U.S. witness working in the Russian nuclear industry
helped federal agents gather financial records, make secret recordings,
and intercept email starting in 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised
U.S. trucking company Transport Logistics International, in violation of
the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Officials also acquired documents and an eyewitness account corroborating earlier reports
that Russian officials had routed million of dollars into the U.S. to
benefit the Clinton Foundation just as Hillary Clinton served on the
Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which endorsed the
Uranium One deal.
This
racketeering scheme was allegedly conducted "with the consent of higher
level officials" in Russia who "shared the proceeds," The Hill reported.
The
Department of Justice (DOJ) did not bring immediate charges upon
learning of the corruption in 2010, but kept investigating the matter
for nearly four more years, leaving the American public and Congress in
the dark.
Knowledge of
Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil would have been vital to
preventing the disastrous 2010 Uranium One deal, but it also might have
prevented a lesser known approval in 2011. That year, the Obama
administration approved a request from Rosatom's subsidiary Tenex,
allowing it to sell commercial uranium to U.S. nuclear power plants (in
addition to reprocessed uranium from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons
sold under the Megatons to Megawatts program).
The Russians were compromising American contractors in the nuclear
industry with kickbacks and extortion threats, all of which raised
legitimate national security concerns," a person who worked on the case
told The Hill. "And none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made those decisions."
Robert Mueller, the special
counsel in the Trump-Russia investigation, was at the helm of the FBI
from 2001 until 2013, so it seems likely he was culpable in keeping this
investigation secret — at the very time when it would have been most
pivotal for U.S. national security.
A
man who may be responsible for allowing tremendous Russian corruption
on U.S. soil to continue — and even intensify — during the Obama
administration is now leading the investigation into potential Russian connections involving the man who ran for president against Obama's legacy. Conflict of interest, much?
In 2015, conservative author Peter Schweitzer published a blistering story in The New York Times
uncovering Clinton's connections to and benefits from the 2010 Uranium
One purchase. The Obama administration and the Clintons defended their
authorization of that purchase by insisting that there was no evidence
any Russians or donors to the Clinton Foundation engaged in wrongdoing.
They also argued that there was no national security reason to oppose
the Uranium One deal
According to documents from the
FBI, Energy Department, and court proceedings, however, the FBI had
gathered substantial evidence before the committee's decision that Vadim
Mikerin — the Russian overseer of Putin's U.S. nuclear expansion — was
engaged in wrongdoing since 2009.
Mikerin
directed Rosatom's Tenex in Moscow since the early 2000s, and he
oversaw Rosatom's nuclear collaboration with the U.S. under the Megatons
to Megawatts program. In 2010, he acquired a U.S. work visa to open
Rosatom's new American arm, Tenam.
According
to a November 2014 indictment, Mikerin "did knowingly and willfully
combine, conspire, confederate and agree with other persons ... to
obstruct, delay and affect commerce and the movement of an article and
commodity (enriched uranium) in commerce by extortion" between 2009 and
2012.
His conduct was
discovered with the help of a confidential witness who began making
kickback payments at Mikerin's direction, with the permission of the
FBI. The first recorded kickback payment was dated November 27, 2009.
Energy Department Agent David Gadren testified that,
"as part of the scheme, Mikerin, with the consent of higher level
officials at TENEX and Rosatom (both Russian state-owned entities) would
offer no-bid contracts to US businesses in exchange for kickbacks in
the form of money payments made to some offshore banks accounts."
The
investigation was supervised by then-U.S. attorney (and currently
President Trump's deputy attorney general) Rod Rosenstein,
then-assistant FBI director (and now deputy FBI director) Andrew McCabe,
and then-FBI director Robert Mueller. All three of these men play key
roles in the Trump-Russia investigation.
The
FBI investigation, kept secret from the American public just when the
Obama administration made key international business decisions, also
exposed a serious national security breach: Mikerin signed a contract
giving American trucking firm Transport Logistics International the
rights to transport Russia's uranium around the U.S. — in return for
more than $2 million in kickbacks from executives.
Uncovering and blocking such a
massive Russian nuclear bribery scheme would seem like a pivotal success
for the DOJ and FBI, but they took little credit for the investigation
when Mikerin, the Russian financier, and the trucking firm executives
were arrested in 2014.
A full year later, the DOJ put out a press release unveiling
the defendants' plea deals. At that time, the case against Mikerin
consisted of a single charge of money laundering for a scheme from 2004
to 2014. Although agents had evidence of criminal wrongdoing since 2009,
federal prosecutors only cited a handful of transactions in 2011 and
2012 in the plea agreement. These came well after the Uranium One deal.
The
final court case also made no mention of the Russian attempts to peddle
influence with the Clintons, which the FBI undercover informant
witnessed, despite the documents showing millions of dollars sent from
Russian nuclear businesses to an American entity connected to the
Clinton Foundation.
Only in December 2015
did the Justice Department announce Mikerin's sentence of 48 months in
prison and the forfeiture of more than $2.1 million. The release
referred to him as "a former Russian official residing in Maryland."
Ronald Hosko, then-assistant FBI director in charge of criminal cases, told The Hill
he did not recall being briefed about Mikerin's case, despite the
criminal charges. "I had no idea this case was being conducted," he
said.
Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, also told The Hill he had not been briefed about the Russian nuclear corruption case.
"Not
providing information on a corruption scheme before the Russian uranium
deal was approved by U.S. regulators ... has served to undermine U.S.
national security interests by the very people charged with protecting
them," Rogers said.
In light
of such a scandal, it seems particularly damning that members of the
intelligence community have been shamelessly leaking allegations against
Donald Trump involving potential Russian connections. Every story in
this direction turns out to be a dead end.
Most recently, the Russian-backed Facebook ads turned out not only to support Hillary Clinton and Black Lives Matter, but to have a tiny impact on the election as a whole. In fact, Democrat senators like Richard Blumenthal made fools of themselves in a fruitless attempt to pin these ads on the Trump campaign.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount
that the Obama administration wiretapped key leaders in the Trump
campaign, most notably Paul Manafort, and may have spied on Trump
himself in doing so.
The
real Russia scandal has been a Clinton scandal, from 2010 onward — and
now, in a darkly ironic twist of fate, it involves the very former FBI
director responsible for investigating that elusive "collusion" between
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. It seems the Left's attempts to hide their own corruption by pinning it on Trump may be coming to an end.
