Yesterday, Kemberlee blogged about the recent reports that allege President Barack Obama’s administration covered for failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her family on a few occasions.
One instance included the Clinton Foundation’s dealings with Canadian Uranium One, a bribery scandal the FBI knew about and decided to sit on the evidence. Now The Hill has reported that an FBI informant in Russia alleges the Obama DOJ blocked him from speaking to Congress “about conversations and transactions he witnessed related to the Russian nuclear industry’s efforts to win favor with Bill and Hillary Clinton and influence Obama administration decisions.”
His lawyer is Victoria Toensing, who served as a Reagan DOJ official and chief counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She is currently working with Congress to free her client so he can finally tell the lawmakers about what he witnessed and heard.
The Hill continued:
Toensing said she also possesses memos that recount how the Justice Department last year threatened her client when he attempted to file a lawsuit that could have drawn attention to the Russian corruption during the 2016 presidential race as well as helped him recover some of the money Russians stole from him through kickbacks during the FBI probe.The undercover client witnessed “a lot of bribery going on around the U.S.” but was asked by the FBI to sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) that prevents him from revealing what he knows to Congress, Toensing explained.When he tried to bring some of the allegations to light in the lawsuit last year, “the Obama Justice Department threatened him with loss of freedom. They said they would bring a criminal case against him for violating an NDA,” she added.Emails obtained by The Hill show that a civil attorney working with the former undercover witness described the pressure the Justice Department exerted to keep the client from disclosing to a federal court what he knew last summer.“The government was taking a very harsh position that threatened both your reputation and liberty,” the civil lawyer wrote in one email. In another, she added, “As you will recall the gov’t made serious threats sufficient to cause you to withdraw your civil complaint.”
Federal court records between 2014-2015 present “a wide-ranging FBI probe into Russian nuclear industry corruption” by an American consultant employed by “the Moscow-based nuclear energy giant Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary on a multiyear campaign to grow Moscow’s uranium business inside the United States.”
This included the U.S. approving Rosatom’s “purchase of Canada-based Uranium One’s American uranium assets” along with more approvals “to sell new commercial uranium to the federally backed United States Enrichment Corporation and winning billions in new U.S. utility contracts for Russian nuclear fuel.”
These records refer to the FBI informant as “confidential source 1,” “contractor,” and “Victim 1.” Toensing said this man is her client. It also shows that her client went to the FBI in 2009 “after Russian officials asked him to engage in illegal activity.”
The FBI allowed the informant to hand out “kickback payments to the Russians” as he gathered other evidence.
The Hill heard from sources that this informant led the government “to crack a multimillion dollar racketeering scheme by Russian nuclear officials on U.S. soil that involved bribery, kickbacks, money laundering and extortion.” This led to an executive to expand the nuclear business, an executive at a U.S. trucking firm, and Russian financier from New Jersey to plead “guilty to various crimes in a case that started in 2009 and ended in late 2015.”
The documents that the informant has shows connections between the Clintons and Obama:
The information the client possesses includes specific allegations that Russian executives made to him about how they facilitated the Obama administration’s 2010 approval of the Uranium One deal and sent millions of dollars in Russian nuclear funds to the U.S. to an entity assisting Bill Clinton’s foundation. At the time, Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of State on the government panel that approved the deal, the lawyer said.It has been previously reported that Bill Clinton accepted $500,000 in Russian speaking fees in 2010 and collected millions more in donations for his foundation from parties with a stake in the Uranium One deal, transactions that both the Clintons and the Obama administration denied had any influence on the approval.Federal law requires officials such as then-Secretary Clinton to avoid both conflicts of interest and the appearance of conflicts when it comes to the business and financial interests of a spouse. Clinton signed a special agreement when she became secretary to disclose her husband’s charitable donations to the State Department to avoid any such conflicts. Both Clintons have repeatedly insisted no donations raised by the foundation ever influenced her decisions.
Remember, back in 2015, these donations became a huge story because the Clintons did not publicly disclose these donations. The investigation also found that Ian Telfer, chairman of Uranium One, has a family charity in Canada called the Fernwood Foundation and a review of tax records in Canada showed that he donated millions more:
His donations through the Fernwood Foundation included $1 million reported in 2009, the year his company appealed to the American Embassy to help it keep its mines in Kazakhstan; $250,000 in 2010, the year the Russians sought majority control; as well as $600,000 in 2011; and $500,000 in 2012. Mr. Telfer said that his donations had nothing to do with his business dealings, and that he had never discussed Uranium One with Mr. or Mrs. Clinton. He said he had given the money because he wanted to support Mr. Giustra’s charitable endeavors with Mr. Clinton. “Frank and I have been friends and business partners for almost 20 years,” he said.The Clinton campaign left it to the foundation to reply to questions about the Fernwood donations; the foundation did not provide a response.Mr. Telfer’s undisclosed donations came in addition to between $1.3 million and $5.6 million in contributions, which were reported, from a constellation of people with ties to Uranium One or UrAsia, the company that originally acquired Uranium One’s most valuable asset: the Kazakhstan mines. Without those assets, the Russians would have had no interest in the deal: “It wasn’t the goal to buy the Wyoming mines. The goal was to acquire the Kazakh assets, which are very good,” Mr. Novikov, the Rosatom spokesman, said in an interview.
This FBI informant can also tell Congress about comments made by FBI agents that suggest “political pressure was exerted during the Justice Department probe of the Russia corruption case and that there was specific evidence that could have scuttled approval of the Uranium One deal if it became public.”
The Hill noted yesterday that then-Attorney General Eric Holder and Clinton were on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States when the Uranium One deal received approval. Sources told The Hill that they do not know if either one of them told other committee members about the criminal activity the departments uncovered.
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