When the story broke in April 2015 that the Obama administration, with the help of Hillary Clinton’s State Department, paved the way for Russia to gain control of 20 percent of America’s uranium, it sent shock waves through the halls of power in Washington. It caused red flags to go up and raised scores of questions with enormous implications.
Many people wondered why the United States would give Russia and Vladimir Putin a sweetheart deal like this. In the context of the 2016 presidential campaign, the central questions were about the money flowing to the Clinton Foundation, accusations of pay for play with financial benefits for the Clintons winning out over national security concerns, and why the Obama Justice Department seemed to do nothing about it.
{mosads}There was more than enough smoke for the FBI to investigate official government favors in exchange for big donations to the Clinton Foundation, but agents ran into a hyper-politicized Attorney General in Loretta Lynch, whose public integrity section said it “did not have enough evidence to move forward,” according to to Washington Post in October 2016.
Last week, blockbuster allegations surfaced in The Hill shedding light on what was happening inside the Obama administration and FBI while Russia was seeking control of massive amounts of our uranium supply. It turns out that the Obama administration inexplicably approved the uranium deal with Russia even though the FBI was investigating a massive corruption scheme that included bribery, extortion and other felonies involving Russia’s nuclear energy industry in the United States.
Also during this time, under the leadership of its chief diplomat Secretary of State Clinton, the Obama administration was prioritizing and very publicly working to “reset” America’s relationship with Russia. Then Attorney General Eric Holder, who along with Lynch has faced harsh scrutiny for running a politicized Justice Department, was overseeing the FBI probe of Russia at the time. Holder also happened to be on the foreign investment committee that controlled the fate of the questionable Russian uranium deal along with Hillary Clinton.
Citizens United’s discovery of Russia-related Clinton emails through its Freedom of Information Act litigation revealed in The Hill that Bill Clinton sought to meet with the director of a Russian nuclear energy firm and other top Russian businessmen while on a trip to Moscow for a $500,000 speech, just months before Hillary Clinton helped seal the Uranium One deal in October 2010. To make matters worse, The Hill reported that the FBI busted a Russian spy ring that had infiltrated the Clintons’ orbit the day before the former president’s lucrative speech.
Why Congress and the public at large were kept in the dark about this ongoing investigation is a troubling question. The Obama administration was clearly looking to make the reset of U.S.-Russia relations one of its top foreign policy success stories for the 2012 reelection campaign. If the Robert Mueller-led FBI corruption investigation was made public at the time, the uranium deal could have gone sideways, and the Russia reset would have been ridiculed as a silly idea by a naive administration.
When President Obama belittled Mitt Romney at a 2012 presidential debate for calling Russia our top foreign policy threat, it made clear that Obama and Clinton had a lot riding on their Russian gamble. Now we’ve learned through The Hill reporting that a key FBI informant in the Russian corruption case was blocked by the Obama Justice Department from testifying before Congress. This individual must now be cleared to tell his story to congressional investigators without delay.
The questionable actions of the Obama Justice Department and FBI peaked in June 2016, when a secret and highly inappropriate meeting between Attorney General Lynch and Bill Clinton was exposed on the eve of FBI Director James Comey’s unorthodox announcement that Secretary Clinton would not be prosecuted in the case involving her private email server. It’s been revealed since then that Comey had actually written a draft memo clearing Hillary Clinton before her FBI interview took place.
Citizens United called on Lynch to appoint a special counsel in the Clinton email case and related matters in July 2015. We questioned how Lynch, a former appointee of President Clinton, could run an impartial investigation of the former president’s spouse who was on her way to being the Democratic nominee for president at the time. When the tarmac meeting between the two became public, our suspicions were confirmed. Now with the new allegations surrounding Russian corruption and the Uranium One deal, Attorney General Jeff Sessions must finally appoint an impartial special counsel to thoroughly investigate these matters.
David N. Bossie is president of Citizens United and a contributor to Fox News. He served as President Donald Trump’s deputy campaign manager and was chief investigator for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee during the Clinton administration.