New Twist in Obama/Hillary Uranium Scandal. Russians Controlled U.S. Uranium AND Exported It

Another example of how Russian influence during the Obama years is fact, not fiction!

So, we had some left wing commenters who only recently discovered Russia as a strategic threat defend the Obama/Hillary Uranium One deal. The same deal which allowed the Ruskies to corner the market on world supplies of uranium.  These Russian/Obama apologists insisted that no uranium had left the United States.  Not exactly.

From The Hill by John Solomon:

After the Obama administration approved the sale of a Canadian mining company with significant U.S. uranium reserves to a firm owned by Russia’s government, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission assured Congress and the public the new owners couldn’t export any raw nuclear fuel from America’s shores.

“No uranium produced at either facility may be exported,” the NRC declared in a November 2010 press release that announced that ARMZ, a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned Rosatom, had been approved to take ownership of the Uranium One mining firm and its American assets.

A year later, the nuclear regulator repeated the assurance in a letter to Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican in whose state Uranium One operated mines.

“Neither Uranium One Inc. nor AMRZ holds a specific NRC export license. In order to export uranium from the United States, Uranium One Inc. or ARMZ would need to apply for and obtain a specific NRC license authorizing the exports of uranium for use in reactor fuel,” then-NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko wrote to Barrasso.
The NRC never issued an export license to the Russian firm, a fact so engrained in the narrative of the Uranium One controversy that it showed up in The Washington Post’s official fact-checker site this week. “We have noted repeatedly that extracted uranium could not be exported by Russia without a license, which Rosatom does not have,” the Post reported on Monday, linking to the 2011 Barrasso letter.

Yet NRC memos reviewed by The Hill show that it did approve the shipment of yellowcake uranium — the raw material used to make nuclear fuel and weapons — from the Russian-owned mines in the United States to Canada in 2012 through a third party. Later, the Obama administration approved some of that uranium going all the way to Europe, government documents show.
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Rather than give Rosatom a direct export license — which would have raised red flags inside a Congress already suspicious of the deal — the NRC in 2012 authorized an amendment to an existing export license for a Paducah, Ky.-based trucking firm called RSB Logistics Services Inc. to simply add Uranium One to the list of clients whose uranium it could move to Canada.

The license, reviewed by The Hill, is dated March 16, 2012, and it increased the amount of uranium ore concentrate that RSB Logistics could ship to the Cameco Corp. plant in Ontario from 7,500,000 kilograms to 12,000,000 kilograms and added Uranium One to the “other parties to Export.”
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The United States actually imports the majority of the uranium it uses as fuel. In 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 24 percent of the imports came from Kazakhstan and 14 percent came from Russia.

Note that last paragraph. The Obama Administration gave Russia control of U.S. uranium and in so doing is even more dependent on Russian produced uranium. How is that wise? But it gets worse...

Government officials told The Hill that the NRC was able to amend the export license affecting Uranium One because of two other decisions previously made by the Obama administration as part of a Russian “reset” in President Obama’s first term.

First, Obama reinstated a U.S.-Russia civilian nuclear energy cooperation agreement. President George W. Bush had signed the agreement in 2008, but withdrew from it before it could take effect after Russia became involved in a military conflict with the former Soviet republic of Georgia, a U.S. ally, and after new concerns surfaced that Moscow was secretly aiding Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

Obama re-submitted the agreement for approval by the Democrat-controlled Congress in May 2010, declaring Russia should be viewed as a friendly partner under Section 123 the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 after agreeing to a new nuclear weapons reduction deal and helping the U.S. with Iran.
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The other step that allowed uranium from the Russian-controlled mines in the United States to be exported came in 2011, when the Commerce Department removed Rosatom, Uranium One’s owner, from a list of restricted companies that could not export nuclear or other sensitive materials or technologies without special approval under the Export Administration Regulations.
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The Uranium One deal has been controversial since at least 2015, when The New York Times reported former President Bill Clinton received a $500,000 speech fee from a Russian bank and millions in donations to his charitable foundation from sources interested in the deal around the time the Uranium One sale was being reviewed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department and eight other federal agencies.
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The entire Uranium One episode is getting a fresh look after The Hill disclosed late last month that the FBI had gathered extensive evidence in 2009 — before the mine sale was approved — that Rosatom’s main executive in the United States was engaged in a racketeering scheme that included bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering.

The probe was enabled by an undercover informant working for the FBI inside the Russian nuclear industry, court records show. But the Justice Department did not make that evidence public until 2014, long after Rosatom benefited from multiple favorable decisions from the Obama administration.
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of both the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees, told The Hill she would like to learn more about what the FBI knew.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) has criticized Republicans for investigating Clinton, but said on “Morning Joe” last month he has "no problem looking into" the Uranium One deal.

And Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said Sunday on CNN that he believed it was appropriate for Congress to investigate the new information.

Want to see MORE evidence of Democrats colluding with Russia? Stay tuned!