Uranium One Export Licenses, Obama and the Clintons, Catalonia, and the Rule of Law

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the 26 dead and 20 injured victims and with the entire close-knit community of Sutherland Springs, Texas. President Trump, speaking from Tokyo, said : "Through the tears and through the sadness, we stand strong." • • • THE REAL NEWS TODAY IS THAT THE URANIUM ONE SCANDAL WILL NOT STOP. Until Hillary is forced to explain her actions to a jury of her peers. • • • HOUSE MEMBERS CALL FOR MUELLER'S RESIGNATION. Zero Hedge reported on Saturday that House Judiciary Committee member Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida has submitted a resolution calling for Robert Mueller to resign as special counsel overseeing the investigation by the FBI of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The resolution says, among other things, that the former FBI director is “hopelessly compromised” as a result of his failed oversight of the controversial Uranium One transaction. • An excerpt from a press release posted to Gaetz’s website said : “Evidence has emerged that the FBI withheld information from Congress and from the American people about Russian corruption of American uranium companies. A confidential US witness, working in the Russian nuclear industry, revealed that Russia had deeply compromised an American uranium trucking firm through bribery and financial kickbacks. Although federal agents possessed this information in 2010, the Department of Justice continued investigating this 'matter' for over four years. The FBI, led at the time by Robert Mueller, required the confidential witness to sign a non-disclosure agreement. When the witness attempted to contact Congress and federal courts about the bribery and corruption he saw, he was threatened with legal action. By silencing him, Obama’s Justice Department and Mueller’s FBI knowingly kept Congress in the dark about Russia’s significant and illegal involvement with American uranium companies. These deeply troubling events took place when Mr. Mueller was the Director of the FBI. As such, his impartiality is hopelessly compromised. He must step down immediately.” • Gaetz’s resolution currently has two co-sponsors, both are members of the House Freedom Caucus -- Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona and Louie Gohmert of Texas. • While Speaker Paul Ryan later said that Congress will not interfere with Mueller's investigation or call for his removal, Ryan does not "speak" for the entire Congress -- and certainly not for the House Freedom Caucus. Will other conservative House members be brave enough to stand with Gaetz and sign the resolution?? • Pressure has been growing on Mueller for several weeks and reached a fevered pitch when the TheHill recently revealed last Tuesday the story of “Confidential Source 1,” a man that the FBI used as an informant back in 2009 and who says he was silenced by the FBI and Obama administration when he attempted to come forward with information that linked the Clinton Foundation directly to the Uranium One scandal. The information Confidential Source 1 possesses, according to his lawyer, includes specific allegations about Russian executives telling him 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 US to an entity assisting Bill Clinton’s Foundation. At the time, Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and on the government panel that approved the deal. It was previously reported that Bill Clinton accepted $500,000 in Russian speaking fees in 2010 and collected $145 million more in donations for his Clinton 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. • Confidential Source 1 has finally been cleared by the Sessions DOJ to meet with Congress to tell his story. • • • OBAMA ADMINISTRATION APPROVED YELLOWCAKE EXPORT TO RUSSIAN COMPANY. Meanwhile, the Uranium One scandal took another turn for the worse last week when, despite numerous assurances to the contrary from the Obama administration, new memos obtained and reported as truly 'Breaking News' by TheHill confirmed that, in fact, Uranium One yellowcake was exported from the US repeatedly between 2012 and 2014. Yellowcake uranium -- the raw material used to make nuclear fuel and weapons -- was apparently shipped 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 on to Europe, government documents show. We don't know how much yellowcake was shipped to Canada, but the yellowcake was allegedly forwarded from Canada to Europe between 2012 through 2014, and the approval involved a nefarious process with multiple US agencies. • TheHill article published by John Solomon and Alison Spann last Thursday received little attention. It should have. • TheHill article says that after the Obama administration approved the sale of a Canadian mining company with significant US uranium reserves to a firm owned by Russia’s government, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) assured Congress and the public that the new owners couldn’t export any raw nuclear fuel from America : “No uranium produced at either facility may be exported.” That is a fairly straightforward statement. And, in addition, the NRC declared in a November 2010 press release 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 NRC repeated the assurance in a letter to Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican in whose state Uranium One operated mines. The NRC letter to Senator Barrasso stated : “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.” • THE LETTER to Barrasso was signed by then-NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko : "March 21, 2011 The Honorable John Barrasso United States Senate Washington, D.C. 20510 Dear Senator Barrasso: I am responding to your December 21, 2010, letter to President Barack Obama regarding the uranium recovery licenses in Wyoming now controlled by JSC Atomredmetzoloto (ARMZ), a Russian corporation. Last November, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved the transfer of control of the licenses from Uranium One USA, Inc. and Uranium One Americas, Inc. to ARMZ. At that time, we determined that the US subsidiaries of Uranium One Inc. (the formerly Canadian, now Russian-owned firm that is the parent of the two US subsidiaries) would remain the licensees and continue to be qualified to conduct the uranium recovery operations. As a condition of our approval, we required the licensees to notify the NRC before ARMZ appoints, hires, or designates personnel to perform NRC-licensed activities. Once fully operational, the ARMZ licenses will represent approximately 20 percent of the currently licensed uranium in-situ recovery production capacity in the US. The licensed Willow Creek facility (formally known as Irigaray and Christensen Ranch) is expected to start producing uranium in 2011, and the licensed Moore Ranch facility is in the initial stages of construction. At this time, neither Uranium One Inc. nor ARMZ 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 export of uranium for use in reactor fuel. Before issuing such a license, the NRC would have to determine that the proposed export would not be inimical to the common defense and security of the United States. Under existing NRC regulations, this means that any uranium proposed for export to Russia for use in nuclear fuel would be made subject to the US-Russia Atomic Energy Act Section 123 agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation and confirmed in case-specific, government-to-government assurances for each proposed export. Russia would be required to commit to use the material only for peaceful purposes (not for development of any nuclear explosive device), to maintain adequate physical protection, and not to retransfer it to a third country or alter it in form or content without the prior consent of the US. Every application submitted to the NRC for a specific export or import license is made available to the public on the NRC’s web site, and the NRC welcomes public comment on such applications. Our regulations outline in detail procedures for public participation concerning these license applications....Under its governing statutes, the NRC regulates to assure the safe use of nuclear materials, but does not have a role in promoting any particular use of those materials. With respect to your request for cooperation with the Executive Branch in fostering a robust domestic uranium industry, the Department of Energy would be the agency responsible for such concerns. If you need any additional information, please contact me or Ms. Rebecca Schmidt, Director of the Office of Congressional Affairs. Sincerely, /RA/ Gregory B. Jaczko" • • • OBAMA URANIUM ONE TRICKERY. The NRC never issued a "specific" export license to Uranium One or ARMZ, a FUDGED fact so engrained in the Uranium One 'spin' that it showed up in The Washington Post’s official fact-checker site last 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 NRC letter to Barrasso. • BUT, when The Hill reviewed NRC memos, it found that the NRC did approve the shipment of yellowcake uranium 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 on to Europe, according to TheHill, which says government documents show the export authorization. NRC officials told TheHill that Uranium One exports went from Wyoming to Canada and on to Europe between 2012 and 2014, and the approval involved a process with multiple agencies. In an administrative sleight of hand, the Obama administration did not give Rosatom a direct export license -- "that would have raised red flags inside a Congress already suspicious of the deal," says TheHill -- instead, the NRC in 2012 authorized an amendment to an existing export license for a Paducah, Kentucky-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 was reviewed by TheHill, and is dated March 16, 2012. 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.” • Congress missed the Obama sleight of hand export approval for Uranium One. • While officials at RSB Logistics Services, Cameco and Rosatom did not return repeated phone calls or emails from TheHill, Uranium One's American arm, emailed a statement to TheHill last Wednesday, confirming that it did export uranium to Canada through the trucking firm and that 25% of that nuclear fuel eventually made its way outside North America to Europe and Asia, stressing all the exports complied with federal law. Donna Wickers, a Uranium One American executive, said in the email : “None of the US U308 product produced to date has been sold to non-US customers except for approximately 25% which was sold via book transfer at the conversion facilities to customers from Western Europe and Asia. Any physical export of the product from conversion facilities to non-US destinations is under the control of such customers and subject to NRC regulation.” • Wickers' referral to "book transfer" means that the yellowcake in US facilities was transferred by inventory entries to provide for use outside the US of US-produced yellowcake, leaving the US short of the product on its inventory books. Think of it as the "wheeling" of electric power among the grids in the US -- or like somebody giving you access to funds in their European bank by debiting your US account. • The upshot of these Uranium One book transactions is that the US remained short of uranium product? America actually imports the majority of the uranium it uses as fuel. In 2016, according to the US Energy Information Administration, 24% of the imports came from Kazakhstan and 14% came from Russia. • That shortage did not seem to bother the Obama administration or the Clintons. Government officials told TheHill 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 the infamous Hillary Russian “reset” in President Obama’s first term. • First, according to TheHill : "Obama reinstated a US-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 US 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 US with Iran. Obama sent his statement to Congress in 2010 : “I have concluded: (1) that the situation in Georgia need no longer be considered an obstacle to proceeding with the proposed Agreement; and (2) that the level and scope of U.S.-Russia cooperation on Iran are sufficient to justify resubmitting the proposed agreement to the Congress.” The Democrat-controlled Congress took no action and the deal became effective 90 days later. • The other step that TheHill says 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. The final notice in the Federal Register appeared on May 24, 2011. Rosatom had been on the list for a long time, so long in fact that it was still listed in the federal database under its old name, Rusatom. Obama officials said the effort to remove the Russian nuclear firm was a “policy decision” driven by the State Department, Energy Department, Commerce Department and other agencies with Russia portfolios designed to recognize that bilateral relations between Russia and the United States had improved slightly. • In March 2012 -- just 9 months after Rosatom was removed from the export restrictions list -- the NRC issued its license amendment to the RSB Logistics Services trucking firm that cleared the way for Uranium One exports, making it effective for nearly five years, to the end of 2017. The NRC stipulated that Uranium One’s uranium should be returned to the United States -- but that didn't happen either. Obama officials told TheHill that the Energy Department subsequently gave approval for some of the American fuel to be exported from Canada to European enrichment centers, according to a 2015 letter the NRC sent to Representative Pete Visclosky, an Indiana Democrat. The NRC explained to Visclosky that it had originally stipulated that after the American uranium was treated in Canada, it had to “then return the uranium to the US for further processing....That license stated that the Canadian Government needed to obtain prior approval before any of the US material could be transferred to any country other than the US....Subsequently the US Department of Energy granted approval for some re-transfers of US uranium from the Canadian conversion facilities to European enrichment plants.”...The NRC added it did not believe any of the American uranium made its way “directly” to Russia....And that the whole supply chain scenario was made possible by the resubmission of Obama’s Section 123 agreement in 2010." The transfer of the US-supplied uranium from Canada to Europe also was "subject to applicable Section 123 agreements,” the NRC noted. Section 123 is the part of the Atomic Energy Act that allows for the US to share civilian nuclear technology and goods with allies. • • • THE URANIUM ONE AFFAIR WORRIED CONGRESS. In fact, Congress kept nibbling around the edges of the Uranium One affair, creating political waves that have led to multiple congressional investigations. Now, following TheHill's exposée of the deceit and potential illegality evident in the Obama-Hillary Uranium One deal with Russia, Republicans say they want to learn how the sale could have been approved and whether there was political interference. Senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said : “The more that surfaces about this deal, the more questions it raises." Grassley has launched an investigation into Uranium One : "It now appears that despite pledges to the contrary, US uranium made its way overseas as a part of the Uranium One deal. What’s more disturbing, those transactions were apparently made possible by various Obama Administration agencies while the Democrat-controlled Congress turned a blind eye. Americans deserve assurances that political influence was not a factor in all this. I’m increasingly convinced that a special counsel -- someone with no prior involvement in any of these deals -- should shine a light on this ordeal and get answers for the American people.” • AND, of course, Uranium One hit the front page when it became clear in 2015 that Uranium One was part of Hillary and Bill's pay-for-play scheme while Hillary was Secretary of State -- after the New York Times reported that Bill Clinton received a $500,000 speech fee from a Russian bank and $145 million in donations to the "charitable" Clinton 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. • AND, the entire Uranium One scandal is getting another fresh look after TheHill broke the story late in October that the FBI had gathered extensive evidence in 2009 -- before the uranium 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. • That's where Confidential Source 1 enters the Uranium One story. The FBI probe was enabled by the undercover informant working for the FBI inside the Russian nuclear industry, court records show. But, the DOJ did not make that evidence public until 2014, long after Rosatom benefited from multiple favorable decisions from the Obama administration. The Justice Department has now given approval for the undercover informant to testify for the first time about what he witnessed the Russians doing to influence Obama administration decisions favorable to Rosatom between 2009 and 2014. • In their usual fashion, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats have described the renewed focus on the Uranium One deal as simply a distraction from the current investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Hillary also says that concerns about the Uranium One sale have long ago been “debunked.” BUT, even Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, a member of both the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees that are investigating the affair, told TheHill she would like to learn more about what the FBI knew. And, the anti-Trump House lapdog of the Hillary cabal, Representative Elijah Cummings, who has vociferously criticized Republicans for investigating Clinton, told “Morning Joe” recently that he has "no problem looking into" the Uranium One deal. Add to that list Senator Angus King, the Maine Independent, who has told CNN he believed it was appropriate for Congress to investigate the new information : “One of the House committees has already begun an oversight committee hearing. I always think oversight hearings are appropriate. I’ve been trying to understand this deal." King repeated the often-quoted FAKE narrative that the “company changed hands, but the uranium that is mined in the United States cannot leave the United States." The NRC license shows how Uranium One was allowed to export American uranium. • • • THE FBI TRIED TO "SAVE" URANIUM ONE DOCUMENTS. Zero Hedge reported on Sunday that : "An internet researcher has uncovered what appears to be proof that the FBI was investigating the Uranium One deal back in 2015 -- months after the Peter Schweizer book Clinton Cash exposed the scheme, along with an article in the New York Times which laid out allegations of criminal malfeasance by the Clintons, their charitable Foundation, and several associates. Twitter user Katica (@GOPPollAnalyst) -- who [earlier] notably discovered Hillary Clinton’s IT guy ‘Stonetear’ asking Reddit users how to strip Clinton’s name from archived emails -- discovered several Preservation and Records requests sent by an FBI special agent to various agencies involved in the approval of the Uranium One deal on August 28th, 2015, as first published by The Conservative Treehouse. Katica found the requests buried in an FBI file released via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)." Zero Hedge says the timeline is "revealing." Here is how Zero Hedge puts it : "While the Clinton email investigation was launched in March of 2015 after it was revealed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal server and non-approved email accounts to conduct government business, reports from August, 2015 revealed that the FBI investigation was actually a criminal probe -- though most assumed it was simply covering Clinton’s mishandling of classified information and not the content of her emails. What Katica discovered is that weeks after the criminal probe began, the FBI sent notices to every agency involved in the Uranium One approval process to preserve records." • Zero Hedge says : "This is huge…The agencies which received the request included the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the US Dept. of Treasury, the Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI James Clapper), The National Counter Terrorism Center, and the US Department of Energy (DOE). Five days after the initial request, the same FBI agent sent another round of notifications to the same agencies, adding the National Security Agency (NSA) and the US Secret Service (USSS). The next day, September 3rd, 2015, three more agencies were added to the preservation request: The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Department of Defense (DOD). • At this point, every single member of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) which signed off on the Uranium One deal was served with a notice to preserve records." • And, says Zero Hedge : "a former Podesta Group executive interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller told Tucker Carlson Tonight that the FBI probe is now focusing on people in Washington who have worked as de-facto operatives on behalf of Russian government and business. The source had a lot to say about his former boss Tony and his relationship to the Uranium One deal....In late 2013 or early 2014, Tony Podesta and a representative for the Clinton Foundation met to discuss how to help Uranium One....In 2013, John Podesta recommended that Tony hire David Adams, Hillary Clinton’s chief advisor at the State Department, giving them a 'direct liaison' between the group’s Russian clients and Hillary Clinton’s State Department....As for the current state of the FBI investigation, 'They are more focused on facilitators of Russian influence in this country than they are on election collusion.' " • Tying it together with previous reports of Federal investigations into the Clinton Foundation, Katica’s FOIA discovery corroborates a New York Times report of November 1, 2016, that said an FBI investigation was kicked off based on revelations of pay-for-play in the book 'Clinton Cash' written by Peter Schweizer. The New York Times investigation, based in New York, had not developed much evidence and was based mostly on information that had surfaced in news stories and the book 'Clinton Cash,' according to several law enforcement officials briefed on the case. The book asserted that foreign entities gave money to Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation and in return received favors from the State Department when Hillary was Secretary of State, but Hillary has adamantly denied those claims. The Wall St. Journal also reported last October that five FBI field offices were investigating the Clinton Foundation -- New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Little Rock and Miami -- and "were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling, according to people familiar with the matter." The FBI field office in New York had done most of the work on the Clinton Foundation case, with help from the FBI field office in Little Rock, the people familiar with the matter told the WSJ. In November, Wikileaks tweets and reports by the Dallas Observer said the Clinton Foundation has been under investigation by the IRS since July of 2016. The investigation has been notably held not in Washington but at at the Dallas IRS office, where the local branch of the IRS’ Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division is reviewing the tax status of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation." • • • DEAR READERS, while the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton was sold as a simple matter of mishandling of classified material, we now have growing proof that the FBI set its sights on the Uranium One scandal weeks after they began looking into Hillary Clinton’s emails. We also know that five FBI field offices and the IRS have been investigating the Clinton Foundation about pay-to-play and other criminal acts. • The mainstream media disinterst in finding the truth about Uranium One and the Clintons is the Blinking Neon Sign that says the elite Clintons felt they could do anything because they were above the law -- the law was meant to keep the Deplorables in their place while the Clintons and their cronies, and all their minions too frightened to say anything, played Americans for suckers and saw constitutional government as a joke. • It reminds me of the unelected elites in the European Union sitting silently by while 8 former ministers of the ousted Catalonian government are in prison, awaiting charges of sedition and rebellion. A European arrest warrant was issued for the arrest of former Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, who has surrendered to police in Brussels. But, Belgium has thus far refused to extradite him. The mainstream argument in Europe says that the Catalans must be suppressed and punished in order to support the rule of law. The Guardian called the actions of the Catalan government "undemocratic" because polls have consistently shown that "only a minority of Catalans support independence; over the past three years, support has remained at 40-45%. A slightly higher percentage, but still a minority, oppose independence. Catalonia is split down the middle." • It is a view of the democratic process far removed from the American Constitution's rule of law that gives voice and protection even to minorities -- especially to minorities. If the actions of the Catalan government are not democratic, what can be said of the Madrid government that used police brutality in response to the referendum, and imprisoned democratically elected political officials. The number of Catalans backing secession has nearly doubled since 2010. Fewer than one-third want to maintain the status quo. It is not just in Catalonia that Spanish disaffection with central government exists. Harsh EU-enforced austerity policies, soaring unemployment and mainstream institutions being deaf to people’s needs have led to popular grievances throughout Spain, and Catalonia, its richest region, is angry for having to bail out the rest of the country. But, the Guardian got one thing very right : "Madrid is effectively criminalizing political dissent. The 'rule of law' has become a cloak for a refusal to engage in a political debate in socially fragmented Spain." • And it is contagious. There is a region in France that the UK Sunday Express called the "French Catalonia" : "As the struggle for Catalan independence from Spain continues to venture into unknown territory, a French region [the Basques] across the border have demanded a united Catalan state....2,000 protesters took to the streets Saturday in Perpignan, southwestern France, to demand their own independence referendum. Activists at the peaceful march revealed their hopes for a 'united Catalan state' that would break apart Spain and France -- amid fears of an independence domino effect in the EU....People held esteladas -- Catalan independence flags -- during the massive demonstration in Perpignan, under the motto 'We are Northern Catalonia, we want to decide.' The demonstration in the Pyrénées region marked the anniversary of a 1659 Treaty, where Catalonia was taken over by French and Spanish control. One protester said : 'I am for democracy, for freedom and for defending the freedom of Catalonia North and South. We are here to support political prisoners.' " • French President Emmanuel Macron was "stunned" by the Basque march. Really??? The Basques have been fighting for independence from France for generations. • The rule of law and respect for political dissent still exist in America, although badly injured by the ProgDem insistence on Political Correctness and Identity Politics. It is time for America and its Congress and its duly elected President to take back the Republic -- and perhaps a scandal as grubby and money-fed as the Clinton-Obama Uranium One deal will be the vehicle. Nobody in America is above the law -- that is what we learned when schools still taught civics -- and the Clintons, and perhaps Barack Obama, will be forced to learn that lesson the hard way.