Blast from the past: Bill Clinton sought State’s permission to meet with Russian nuclear official during Obama uranium decision – IOTW Report

Blast from the past: Bill Clinton sought State’s permission to meet with Russian nuclear official during Obama uranium decision

The Hill: 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.  more here

6 Comments on Blast from the past: Bill Clinton sought State’s permission to meet with Russian nuclear official during Obama uranium decision

  1. billy blue dress met privately with putin, who was then Prime Minister. He was, essentially, meeting with the leader of russia- almost the entire government was staffed by Putin’s previous staff. I’m sure they talked about grandchildren and golf. He must be thankful that obama was able to be ‘more flexible,’ as nothing was said about the meeting. obama was knowledgable of the uranium one fiasco.
    This needs to be expanded and explained to the voting public. It is very convoluted and difficult to comprehend, but it must be done, so it can never happen again.
    They did sell 20% of our uranium reserves, and that is going forward, into the future. Just the gyrations of the changes of ownership of uranium mining companies that allowed that to happen are dizzying.
    There is a lot of corruption in DC.

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  2. Russian “collusion” was always about the Demonrats’ conspiracy to commit Treason with the Russians.

    Anybody remember the Uranium deal?
    Anybody remember “I’ll have more flexibility after the election?”
    Anybody remember the reset button?

    How is it that Mueller dug into Russian “collusion” for 3 fucking years and never uncovered any of this shit?

    And I’m fairly certain that smuggling WMDs out of Libya into Syria was orchestrated by the Russians.

    But, mysteriously, the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, InterPol, MI-6, the “Double-Naught” spies, and the Park Police are all like Sgt. Schultz.

    Kinda weird.

    izlamo delenda est …

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