The multilayered story surrounding Uranium One—the former South
African, then Canadian, and now Russian company, of which both Bill and Hillary
Clinton and their family foundation are the enriched beneficiaries—has all the
usual elements of a typical Clinton scandal.
A talented con man, Bill Clinton perfected his game in Arkansas.
Through his control over state contracts, regulatory agencies, and judicial
appointments, the creation of public credit and of agencies like the Arkansas
Development and Finance Authority and their misuse, then-Governor Clinton was
able to reward his allies, punish his enemies, and insert his political machine
into nearly every endeavor, public and private, statewide. Clinton nailed down
the couple’s franchise by continually getting himself re- elected governor of
Arkansas, while his spouse handled the paperwork at the Rose Law Firm.
When Bill and Hillary made the move from Little Rock to
Washington, the territory under their influence was enlarged, and the public
cash pots at their disposal grew significantly, but their modus operandi remained
the same. The only thing that changed when Hillary began her adventures in the
U.S. Senate, and then at the State Department, was that she was now the one
with political power, and Bill became the ornamental figure.
Uranium One’s predecessor is a Canadian company, UrAsia Energy
Ltd., founded in 2005 by Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra. By mysterious
means Giustra was able to fill what was no more than a shell company with the
rights to three uranium mines located in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic
that is fantastically rich in just about everything, including uranium. Bill
Clinton appears to have played a significant role in smoothing the rough edges
of Giustra’s good fortune by supporting Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s
appointment to a U.N. agency dedicated to validating elections, a p.r. coup for
Nazarbayev.
Thereafter, Bill got the use of Giustra’s luxurious private jet,
and the two began jetting about the globe together to Third World countries
that enjoy attractive endowments of natural resources. Bill made his
speeches, and Frank made his deals.
In 2007, UrAsia purchased a South African uranium firm, Uranium
One, and moved the company to Canada while retaining the firm’s South African
name. Bill and Frank then set up their own philanthropic entity, the Clinton
Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, to promote “progressive environmental
and labor practices in the natural resources industry.” Giustra pledged $100
million and dragged in $16 million more in pledges at a 2008 star-studded gala
in Toronto.
In 2008, things got more interesting. The Russian atomic-energy
agency Rosatom, short of uranium for its own needs, entered into negotiations
for a 17-percent stake in Uranium One. But in 2009, Kazakhstan questioned
Uranium One’s claim of having obtained government approvals for UrAsia’s first
mine purchases. The Kazakh government’s public doubts coincided with the arrest
of Mukhtar Dzhakishev, the head of Kazatomprom (the country’s national importer
and exporter of nuclear-fuel components), on charges of illegally selling
uranium deposits to foreign companies.
Uranium One’s shareholders and principals were beside
themselves. Would the company lose the Kazakh mines? Already, Uranium One’s
stock value had collapsed by 40 percent. The Moscow investment bank Renaissance
Capital was similarly alarmed since it had been heavily promoting Uranium One
shares to its investors. Could some dastardly Russian scheme for control of
Kazakh uranium assets be afoot? And was it possible that Vladimir Putin,
who enjoys excellent relations with his Kazakh neighbor, and with President
Nazarbayev personally, was the kingpin of the operation?
Now why would anyone think that?
The office of the presidency of the Russian Federation is
relatively new, having come into existence a mere quarter century ago. Vladimir
Putin’s interpretation of the office is shaping and defining it. He is
the nation’s khozyain,
a unique figure whose origins are in Russia’s misty past when the Slavic tribes
roaming the great Eurasian steppe were among the freest people on earth. Unlike
Western Europe, the tribal lord wasn’t an hereditary office, but one elected by
the veche (popular
assembly) in which each mature male householder of the votchina (estate)
had a vote. When one khozyain’s
leadership delivered poor results, the votchina’s
electorate did not hesitate to replace him. And since each householder
considered himself a rightful claimant to some part of the votchina’s
earnings, the criterion for political support was the shared prosperity and
security of all claimants.
Vladimir Putin’s principal aim has been the restoration of the
Russian state and economy, and for that the state must be protected from both
invaders and usurpers. This requires an army, which, in turn, requires the
state to have income—preferably income that is not derived from crushing both
healthy competition and the population generally, as was true under the tsars
and the commissars.
Thus we arrive at the 1999 Law on State Corporations that
governs strategic industries and giants like Russian Railways, Sberbank,
Rosneft, and Rosatom. Each corporation is created by separate legislation
and escapes the scrutiny of the Federal Agency for State Property Management,
being controlled instead by the Kremlin.
In the first years of Putin’s rule, Kremlin strategists puzzled
over the best ways in which to invigorate the Russian economy. Where might they
excel in this new, modern world in which post-Soviet Russia was struggling to
find her footing? What was Russia good at? What could Russia provide the
world besides oil and gas? The answer was bigness.
Enormity does give the Russians a special joy. The idea of
bigness empowers them: the biggest country, the biggest dam, the biggest steel
mill. When describing some aspect of their industries or their land to a
visitor in terms of Big, they will sigh in exasperation because the guest
clearly doesn’t grasp just how big Big is. The poet Lermontov
captured the Russians’ proud defiance when he wrote, “We may be slaves,
but we are enslaved by Russia, the ruler of the universe.”
Rosatom, a large state corporation built in 2007 out of the
Soviet atomic industry’s degraded assets, exemplifies the Russian state’s
policy of developing key strategic industries and infrastructure. These
big state corporations are (at least in theory) positioned to enable and
stimulate the rest of the economy; in turn, Rosatom’s (and similar firms’)
corporate earnings support the state.
Rosatom’s projects are enormous, and the Russians have proved
themselves quite adept at developing nuclear reactor technology as well as
advanced safety technology and procedures. They are also quite capable of
strengthening the country’s position in the global nuclear-energy market.
The Kremlin’s idea of delivering nuclear-industry products to customers
that cover the entire supply chain from raw uranium to a reactor’s final energy
output is being realized, and Uranium One is a part of that story. It’s a
story that began in Vancouver at the first Clinton-Yeltsin summit.
In April 1993, Americans were rightly concerned about nuclear
proliferation, but wrongly focused on a contract Moscow had with Iran to build
a nuclear reactor. In his memoir The
Russia Hand, Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s advisor on
Russian affairs, insisted that this reactor, once completed, would
“contribute to the covert nuclear-weapons program of a regime that
supported international terrorism and violently opposed the Middle East peace
process.”
The Russians knew the Iranians had no “covert nuclear-weapons
program,” and that peace in the Middle East hinged more on Israel’s
behavior than on Iran’s. Viktor Mikhailov, then-minister of atomic
energy, refused to swallow what he said was Washington’s cover story to conceal
its true aim: keeping Russia out of a legitimate market for nuclear technology.
Russia needed income, and what Russia sold and to whom was none of
Washington’s business.
That was hardly what the Americans expected to hear.
Talbott quotes his then- assistant and future State Department Ukrainian
strategist and outspoken E.U. supporter “Toria” Nuland: “See that’s how
the Russians are. You try to get them to eat their spinach, and the more you
tell them it’s good for them, the more they gag.”
After the first Chechen war erupted in 1994, the Iranian contract
took on additional importance. Russia is home to the largest population
of Muslims of any predominantly Christian country on earth. Concentrated
in the Caucasus (Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Circassia, Bashkiria, etc.), Islam’s
centuries-old settlements and communities crawl northward along both sides of
the Volga to Tatarstan, and westerly to Bashkortostan. Having already
lost the buffer of Eastern Europe and nearly a third of the Soviet Union’s
national territory, Russia Defense Minister Pavel Grachev warned Boris Yeltsin
that if Chechnya broke free, there would be a domino effect in neighboring
Muslim-dominated areas. Russia would run the risk of being cut in two.
Otherwise on the proliferation front, Russian and American
interests were aligned. The two nations were quick to agree to the George
H.W. Bush administration’s “Megatons to Megawatts” proposal, announced in
August 1992, in which over 20 years Russia would convert 500 tons of
highly enriched uranium from dismantled nuclear warheads into low- enriched
uranium to be purchased by the U.S. to fuel power plants. The agreement
was finalized under President Clinton in 1993, and everybody was happy.
The Russians were earning money from their nuclear expertise while
reducing their overlarge nuclear arsenal (as were the Americans), and the
Americans had a reliable supply of energy-grade uranium for their nuclear-power
industry.
However, the following six years proved revelatory. Putin
summed them up well just recently: “We gave you uranium; you
repaid us by bombing Belgrade.” What exactly did Putin mean?
What was he summarizing?
In the oil and gas business, distribution is key. Whoever
controls the pipe servicing a field controls the product.
By securing an energy supply corridor from the fields of the
Caspian Sea region to Europe, the West would provide for a significant supply
of oil and gas to Central and Western Europe by pipeline, and to the U.S.
through load-out terminals in the NATO sphere, in Turkey, Greece, and Albania.
The only trick would be to “maintain stability” along the pipeline from
the Caspian through the Caucasus and the Balkans to Western Europe; the chosen
solution was to create individual U.N.-NATO protectorates from the six
republics and two autonomous regions that made up Yugoslavia before 1989.
NATO’s “peace bombs” served to undermine the last sovereign state that stood in
the way of the West’s colonization of the Balkans.
None of this was lost on the Russians. They understood
that there was nothing “humanitarian” in NATO’s Kosovo aggression, and the
alliance’s cheap rhetoric was really cover for the West’s ongoing
oil-grab and the rolling expansions of NATO, both of which continue to this
day.
Moscow had always controlled the pipes that carried the former
Soviet Union’s oil and gas to Western markets. Much better, the Americans
reasoned, that the Central Asian republics should owe their future wealth,
transit payments, and security to an imperial Washington.
Stripped of her pipeline monopoly, her nuclear capacity diminished
through obsolescence, her defense sector in decline from lack of resources, and
burdened with a corrupt government, unsustainable foreign-debt payments, and a
thieving elite, Russia would be no more than a vast, disorganized, ineffective,
and landlocked territory capable only of delivering raw materials (and
thousands of thermonuclear warheads) to the West. And even the efficient
exporting of raw materials, certain interests argued, would require Western
management.
Over the following decade the fracking revolution would change
the face of the oil and gas industry; now the United States, for example, was
to become an exporter of oil, not merely an importer. But the pressure on
Russia did not cease: It has only intensified. The West’s sanctions regime
compels Russia to live through a 21st-century version of the
medieval siege.
In 2009, it was Sergey Kiriyenko who first saw the saving
opportunity. The West, which had focused on gaining control of Russian
gas and oil, had neglected uranium. The former Yeltsin prime minister saw
that profitable assets which were even then giving a good return could be had
for a cheap price. He also knew that when the Megatons to Megawatts
program ended in 2013, the U.S. would have insufficient uranium to supply her
industry. Kiriyenko’s proposal thus would give Russia a significant claim
on U.S. uranium assets. But that was not likely the driving force behind
the plan. What was essential for the development of Rosatom was
increasing Russia’s supply of raw uranium, not settling old scores.
After Kiriyenko’s presentation to the Presidium, Putin gave the
go-ahead for Rosatom to proceed to lock those assets up. The first step
was the bid for 17 percent of Uranium One that had so alarmed the company’s
principals and Renaissance Capital’s promoters of the stock.
Uranium One quickly responded to Kazakhstan’s challenge to the
company’s ownership of the Kazakh mines—which Russia had no discernible motive
to disrupt—and contacted Canadian and U.S. diplomats, telling them they needed
official written confirmation that the licenses were valid. Cables flew
to the U.S. State Department, whose head was then Mrs. Clinton.
In mid-June 2009, according to a New York Times report
(April 23, 2015), the American energy officer of the U.S. embassy in Kazakhstan
met with Kazakh officials. “Three days later,” writes the Times, “a wholly
owned subsidiary of Rosatom completed a deal for 17 percent of Uranium
One.” That same month, Bill Clinton gave his now-famous
half-million-dollar speech at Moscow’s “Kremlin-connected” Renaissance Capital.
“Within a year,” continues the Times,
“the Russian government substantially upped the ante, with a generous offer to
shareholders that would give [Russia] a 51 percent controlling stake.”
But to pull that deal off, Rosatom had to obtain the approval of
the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), on
which sat the committee’s most important member, Hillary Clinton, whose husband
was collecting millions in donations from people associated with Uranium One.
Bill and Hillary’s long-serving praetorian guard, the FBI, even
managed to run an investigation, and the Department of Justice a successful
prosecution, of Vadim Mikerin, whom the DOJ describes as “the former director
of the Pan American Department of JSC Techsnabexport (TENEX), a
subsidiary of Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation,” for
money-laundering and corrupt practices, without having to avail themselves of
what were said to be “suitcases of evidence” gathered by an American informant
within the Rosatom crew, William Campbell. That done, the Justice
Department then gagged their informant.
Contrary to the agreement Hillary struck with the Obama
administration in return for her appointment as the U.S. secretary of state,
the Clinton Foundation’s $145 million rake from individuals connected to
Uranium One was not reported, nor were the names of the donors. Reporters
would soon learn that asking for specifics from foundation spokesmen, former
campaign and staff personnel, pretty much guarantees nobody’s home.
The Giustra & Pals donations add up to some $50 million.
Where did the rest of the $145 million come from? Peter Schweizer, author
of Clinton Cash, told
FOX News that, according to his FBI sources, within the trove of evidence
gathered by Campbell is a recording of “Russian officials with this uranium
company talking about making donations to the Clinton Foundation to gain
favorable action.” If true, the FBI would have uncovered the Russian
bribery plot before the Obama administration approved the 2010 Russian bid for
51-percent ownership of Uranium One, which Russia—through ARMZ, a subsidiary of
Rosatom—fully owns today (100 percent, contrary to Moscow’s stated
intentions in 2010), and thereby controls 20 percent of U.S. uranium. Why
wasn’t CFIUS informed about the bribery scandal? Why was the
investigation and prosecution of Mikerin hidden from Congress? Why was it
kept from the public, when every bit of unsubstantiated Russian calumny is
shouted from the rooftops?
Was the small leverage over U.S. energy needs Russia gained
through the ownership of Uranium One worth a $145 million payoff to the
Clintons? Rosatom contracts are calculated in the billions, meaning a
$145 million campaign is not unreasonable, according to the standard practices
of the international bribe market; a ten-percent rake is the usual percentage
taken of those bribes that are actually paid out. Did Russia overpay for
the shares of Uranium One in the 2013 buyout with the understanding that the
lucky principals would send a sliver of their piece of the pie to the Clintons?
Giustra himself is said to have cashed out of Uranium One for some $300
million, after which he donated $31.5 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Overall, the most compelling question is this: Why would the
Russians, having such excellent kompromat on
Hillary and while enjoying such genial relations with Madam Reset, want a
volatile and capricious Trump in the White House instead of her? They’d
had a bellyful of all that from their own Boris Yeltsin. Hillary they
knew; Trump they didn’t.
What of Putin? Is he a bribe-giver? Is he so bold
and confident a character as to step into the muddy waters of international
corruption, involving himself with the Clintons in the United States, a land
that both amuses and confounds him? Despite the historical roots of
Putin’s legal structures, favoring what he refers to as Russia’s “champions,”
could they not collectively compose a proto-fascist structure not entirely
unlike Governor Clinton’s Arkansas Development and Financial Authority?
The utility of Russia’s state corporations to the nation depends
almost entirely upon the character and competency of the khozyain and
his subordinates. In self-interested hands, the overall structure as
designed could lead to great harm. Would not a Rosatom management gone
rogue exemplify the potential danger?
There is yet another consideration. When large sums move
improperly from one pocket to another, the problem of leaving a trail of
evidence can be alleviated with the help of a friendly offshore investment
bank—one like, say, Renaissance. The complete buyout of a company done
privately offers folks who are on the take a rare opportunity. Did some
other highly political benefactor step in and buy the shares at an inflated
price from Uranium One shareholders and then sell them at a loss to the
Russians at a previously agreed price? (There are all sorts of ways the
rich can make new friends while expanding their circle of influence.) Who
else might have benefited, besides the Clintons, from alleged Rosatom largesse?
All of these questions need to be answered. At the start
of 2018, the mainstream media have declared Trump’s “obsession” (NBC News) with
Uranium One to be his and his supporters’ attempt at distracting Americans from
his oft alleged “collusion” with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential
election. Oddly enough, those who are working to establish ties between
Russia and Trump have ties to the Clintons, including matters related to Uranium
One.
Sydney Powell at The
Daily Caller (“Mueller’s Hit Squad Covered for Clinton and
Persecutes Trump Associates,” December 6) outlines numerous connections between
the lawyers who worked the Mikerin bribery case and who today labor on the
Special Counsel’s Trump investigatory team.
Among the relationships Powell mentions, the first is the
publicly admitted, close friendship between former FBI Director James Comey and
former FBI Director Robert Mueller, and their previous subordinates, Rod
Rosenstein and Andrew Weissmann. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein
named Mueller as special counsel “within seven days of Comey’s firing.”
In turn, Mueller had a hand in placing Mr. Weissmann on the Enron Task
Force, allowing him to run rough-shod over most of Houston, destroy Arthur
Andersen LLP and 85,000 jobs, and send four innocent Merrill executives to
prison in indictments for crimes he made up while he and his team hid the
evidence that showed they were innocent.
Then there is Mueller’s protection of Peter Strzok,
his lead investigator, who greatly assisted Comey’s effort to
liberate Hillary Clinton from the legal consequences of her failure as
secretary of state to protect U.S. national-security information via her
infamous private server. Weissmann’s emailed praise and support for Obama’s
Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates for her refusal to enforce President
Trump’s travel ban further stirs the pot. (Yates claims she had to snitch
on General Flynn because his glancing reference to Trump’s intention to
overturn Obama’s sanctions in a telephone conversation with Russian
Ambassador Kislyak days before Trump was sworn in made him subject to
blackmail. But that whole $145 million deal with the Clinton Foundation
and the Russian buyout of Uranium One? Meh.)
On Sunday, December 17, True
Pundit posted a report on FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s
years-long association with Russian organized-crime figures and highly unusual
front-running of investigations involving the Boston Bombers, the alleged
Iranian kidnapping of FBI agent Robert Levinson, and other cases involving
Russian figures normally left to lower-level field agents. Such agents
made up McCabe’s various investigatory teams, but he did not share with them
his findings nor any gleanings from his contacts with Oleg Deripaska, the
multibillionaire victor in the bloody aluminum wars of the 1990’s, who
figures prominently in Mueller’s indictment of Paul Manafort. Add in
McCabe’s receipt of a $700,000 contribution to his wife’s failed
Virginia state-senate campaign from Virginia governor and longtime Clinton
operative, Terry McAuliffe (himself under investigation at the time);
McCabe’s promotion of disgraced investigator Peter Strzok; his links to
Democrat-linked Fusion GPS through his colleague, the recently demoted Bruce
Ohr and his wife, Nellie, a former Fusion GPS employee and CIA spook, and Team
Mueller looks like the tool of some very special interests, and not the
immaculate public servants as advertised.
For now, Robert Mueller’s nearly year-long fruitless
investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged collaboration with Russian officials
rolls on. At this writing, it is off in the weeds of Deutsche Bank
real-estate lending from a decade ago. Yet the ultimate Clinton scandal
involves significant collusion with certain opportunistic Russians, over the
course of decades—from the U.S.-organized and –funded privatization debacle, to
the 1998 IMF-funded Russian bond market collapse, to Uranium One—and represents
an actual threat to American security and interests.
This originally appeared in Chronicles Magazine and was reprinted
with the author’s permission.