Our Whole System Is
Rotten To The Core
Bill Clinton Sought
Permission to Meet with Russian nuclear
official during Obama uranium decision
By
John Solomon and Alison Spann
October 20, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
As he
prepared to collect a $500,000 payday in
Moscow in 2010,
Bill Clinton
sought clearance from the State
Department to meet with a key board
director of the Russian nuclear energy
firm Rosatom — which at the time needed
the Obama administration’s approval for
a controversial uranium deal, government
records show.
Arkady Dvorkovich, a top aide to
then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev
and one of the highest-ranking
government officials to serve on
Rosatom’s board of supervisors, was
listed on a May 14, 2010, email as one
of 15 Russians the former president
wanted to meet during a late June 2010
trip, the documents show.
“In the context of a possible trip to
Russia at the end of June, WJC is being
asked to see the business/government
folks below. Would State have concerns
about WJC seeing any of these folks,”
Clinton Foundation foreign policy
adviser Amitabh Desai wrote the State
Department on May 14, 2010, using the
former president’s initials and
forwarding the list of names to former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s
team.
The email
went to two of
Hillary Clinton’s
most senior advisers, Jake Sullivan and
Cheryl Mills.
The approval question, however, sat
inside State for nearly two weeks
without an answer, prompting Desai to
make multiple pleas for a decision.
“Dear Jake, we urgently need feedback on
this. Thanks, Ami,” the former
president’s aide wrote in early June.
Sullivan finally responded on June 7,
2010, asking a fellow State official
“What’s the deal w this?”
The documents don’t indicate what
decision the State Department finally
made. But current and former aides
to both Clintons told The Hill on
Thursday the request to meet the various
Russians came from other people, and the
ex-president’s aides and State decided
in the end not to hold any of the
meetings with the Russians on the list.
Bill Clinton instead got together with
Vladimir Putin at the Russian leader’s
private homestead.
“Requests of this type were run by the
State Department as a matter of course.
This was yet another one of those
instances. Ultimately,
President Clinton did not meet with
these people,” Angel Urena, the official
spokesperson for the former president,
told The Hill.
Aides to the ex-president, Hillary
Clinton and the Clinton Foundation said
Bill Clinton did not have any
conversations about Rosatom or the
Uranium One deal while in Russia, and
that no one connected to the deal was
involved in the trip.
A spokesman
for Secretary Clinton said Thursday the
continued focus on the Uranium One deal
smacked of partisan politics aimed at
benefiting
Donald Trump.
“At every turn this storyline has been
debunked on the merits. Its roots are
with a project shepherded by Steve
Bannon, which should tell you all you
need to know,” said Nick Merrill. “This
latest iteration is simply more of the
right doing Trump’s bidding for him to
distract from his own Russia problems,
which are real and a grave threat to our
national security.”
Current and former Clinton aides told
The Hill that the list of proposed
business executives the former president
planned to meet raised some
sensitivities after Bill Clinton’s
speaker bureau got the invite for the
lucrative speech.
Hillary Clinton had just returned from
Moscow and there were concerns about the
appearance of her husband meeting with
officials so soon after.
In
addition, two of the Russians on the
former president’s list had pending
business that would be intersecting with
State.
The first was Dvorkovich, who was a
chief deputy to Medvedev and one of the
Russian nuclear power industry’s
cheerleaders. He also sat on the
supervisory board of Rosatom, the state
owned atomic energy company that was in
the midst of buying a Canadian uranium
company called Uranium One
The deal required approval from the
Committee on Foreign Investment in the
United States (CFIUS), an
intergovernmental panel represented by
14 departments and offices that approve
transactions and investments by foreign
companies for national security
purposes. Approval meant that control of
20 percent of U.S. uranium production
would be shifting to the Russian-owned
Rosatom’s control.
CFIUS approved the transaction in
October 2010, saying there was no
national security concerns. Hillary
Clinton has said she did
not intervene in the matter and instead
delegated the decision to a lower
official, who said he got no pressure
from the secretary on any CFIUS matters.
Any one of the participating offices and
departments could have sought to block
the deal by requesting intervention by
the president.
The Hill reported earlier this week that
the FBI had uncovered evidence that
Russian nuclear officials were engaged
in a massive bribery scheme before CFIUS
approved the deal, raising new questions
in Congress and drawing attention from
President Trump. Uranium “is the real
Russia story,” he told reporters,
accusing news media of ignoring the new
developments reported in The Hill.
The second person on the list that
caught attention was Russian businessman
Viktor Vekselberg.
Two days after Hillary Clinton’s visit
to Russia, Vekselberg was named by
Medvedev to oversee a new technology
investment project called Skolkovo,
designed to be Russia’s new Silicon
Valley, according to media reports.
Hillary Clinton had directly discussed
the Skolkovo project with Medvedev, and
her State Department was whipping up
support for it among U.S. companies,
creating the potential appearance for a
conflict. She even attended a major
event with the Russians in 2010 to
promote the project.
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“We want to help because we think that
it’s in everyone’s interest do so,” she
was quoted as saying at the time.
A
third issue that emerged was Renaissance
Capital, a Russian bank that actually
paid the $500,000 speaking fee to the
former president for his 90-minute June
29, 2010, speech, one of the largest
one-day fees Bill Clinton ever earned.
Renaissance Capital had ties with the
Kremlin and was talking up the Uranium
One purchase in 2010, giving it an
encouraging investment rating in Russia
right at the time the U.S. was
considering approval of the uranium
sale, according to reports in The New
York Times in 2015.
The Hill was alerted to Bill Clinton’s
attempted meeting with Dvorkovich from a
nonpolitical source involved in the FBI
investigation into Russian nuclear
corruption. The Hill then scoured
through thousands of pages of documents
released under Freedom of Information
Act requests over the past four years
and located the Bill Clinton emails in a
batch delivered to the conservative
group Citizens United.
The head of that group, David Bossie,
said Thursday the documents forced into
the public by federal lawsuits continue
to shed light on new questions arising
from Hillary Clinton’s time at State,
and that Citizens United still gets
documents released almost every month.
“Citizens United continues to unearth
important information about the
relationship between Hillary Clinton’s
State Department and the Clinton
Foundation through our ongoing
investigations and litigation,” he said.
A
source familiar with that FBI
investigation says an undercover
informant that Congress is currently
trying to interview possesses new
information about what Russian nuclear
officials were doing to try to win
approval of the Uranium One deal.
The importance of CFIUS’s approval was
highlighted in Rosatom’s annual 2010
report that listed Dvorkovich as one of
its supervisor board directors. The
report crowed the U.S. approval was one
of its most “striking events” of the
year and allowed Russia to begin
“uranium mining in the United States.”
The head of Rosatom boasted in the
report that the Uranium One deal was
part of a larger Putin strategy to
strengthen “Russia’s prestige as a
leader of the world nuclear industry.”
Inside the Clintons' inner circle, there
also was a debate in 2010.
A
close associate of Bill Clinton who was
directly involved in the Moscow trip and
spoke on condition of anonymity,
described to The Hill the circumstances
surrounding how Bill Clinton landed a
$500,000 speaking gig in Russia and then
came up with the list of Russians he
wanted to meet.
The friend said Hillary Clinton had just
returned in late March 2010 from an
official trip to Moscow where she met
with both Putin and Medvedev.
The president’s speaker’s bureau had
just received an offer
from Renaissance Capital to pay the
former president $500,000 for a single
speech in Russia.
Documents show Bill Clinton’s personal
lawyer on April 5, 2010, sent a conflict
of interest review to the State
Department asking for permission to give
the speech in late June, and it was
approved two days later.
The Clinton friend said the former
president’s office then began assembling
a list of requests to meet with Russian
business and government executives whom
he could meet on the trip. One of the
goals of the trip was to try to help a
Clinton family relative “grow
investments in their business with
Russian oligarchs and other businesses,”
the friend told The Hill.
“It was one of the untold stories of the
Russia trip. People have focused on
Uranium One and the speaking fees, but
opening up a business spigot for the
family business was one only us insiders
knew about,” the friend said.
Conservative author Peter Schweizer,
whose 2015 collaboration with The New
York Times first raised questions about
the Uranium One deal and Clinton
donations, said Thursday the new emails
were “stunning they add a level of
granularity we didn’t have before."
“We knew of some sort of transactions in
which the Clintons received funds and
Russia received approvals, and the
question has always been how and if
those two events are connected,” he
said. “I think this provides further
evidence the two may be connected.”
