Find the Handcuffs: Trump's DOJ Issues First Indictment of Uranium One Scandal
On Friday, the Justice Department filed an 11-count indictment against a Maryland businessman who bribed Russian officials in order to secure business contracts to transport uranium to the United States from a Russian entity linked to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The businessman, Mark Lambert, previously served as the “co-president of a Maryland-based transportation company that provides services for the transportation of nuclear materials to customers in the United States and abroad,” according to a DOJ news brief.
The charges against Lambert involve an alleged plot by him and other company executives to bribe Vadim Mikerin, a top official at JSC Techsnabexport, or TENEX, “a subsidiary of Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation and the sole supplier and exporter of Russian Federation uranium and uranium enrichment services to nuclear power companies worldwide.”
Apparently, the company’s clients needed uranium, so Lambert and his peers bribed Mikerin in a bid to convince TENEX to conduct business with them.
But I know what you’re wondering: What does this have to do with Clinton? Possibly everything.
As noted by The Daily Wire, “TENEX is the commercial sales arm for Russia’s Rosatom, which took full control of Uranium One in 2013,” thus acquiring control over roughly 20 percent of the United States’ uranium production capacity.
“The sale occurred in stages, beginning in 2009 when Rosatom purchased a minority stake in Uranium One, and continued in 2010, when the Russian agency took ownership of a 51 percent share of the company,” adds Politico. “In 2013, a third transaction gave Rosatom full ownership of Uranium One.”
But the only reason Rosatom was able to get this far is because of Clinton, who “was secretary of state in 2010 when the State Department signed off on Rosatom’s purchase of Uranium One,” as noted by Politico.
That would be perfectly fine, I suppose, if it weren’t the mounds of evidence showing that “(s)everal of Uranium One’s owners were also donors to the Clinton Foundation, giving $145 million to the charitable foundation.”
While Politico further notes no direct evidence exists proving that these donations were meant as quid pro quo payments for Clinton’s approval of the Uranium One deal, conservatives have long believed — in part because of Clinton’s shady history — that they were indeed.
Dovetailing back to Lambert, the DOJ notes that between as early as 2009 and as late as October 2014, he and his peers made “corrupt and fraudulent bribery and kickback payments to offshore bank accounts associated with shell companies, at the direction of, and for the benefit of” Mikerin.
The charges against him include one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and commit wire fraud, seven counts of violating the FCPA, two counts of wire fraud and one count of “international promotion money laundering.”
Though conservatives are no doubt thrilled to see this bad man be brought to justice, I suspect many of them are patiently waiting for the day a similar indictment is finally at lost last filed against Hillary Rodham Clinton.
*fingers crossed*
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