Uranium One

I first posted about this on Tuesday, and it was basically a lengthy excerpt from the article in The Hill that first brought the full extent of the details known at this point to light.

It's one of those intricate tales, replete with meetings and documents and organizations with names to match the arcane nature of what they do.

But the most noteworthy aspects of the whole thing, it seems to me are these:

• A guy named Vadim Mikerin, who was the head of Maryland-based Tenam USA, a subsidiary of Tenex, a Russian (state-controlled) uranium sale-and-transport company that was in turn a subsidiary of the Russian energy conglomerate Rosatom. He "used [his] leverage [with US contractors] to extort and defraud the U.S. contractors into paying inflated prices for uranium. They then laundered the proceeds through shell companies and secret bank accounts in Latvia, Cyprus, Switzerland, and the Seychelle Islands — though sometimes transactions were handled in cash, with the skim divided into envelopes stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash." A guy working for Mikerin turned FBI informant, and clear evidence of what was going on started piling up.

• Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, was on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which, in 2010, after the FBI had amassed the goods on Mikerin, signed off on the deal to hand over 20 percent of the US uranium supply to Russia, via Rosatom purchase of Uranium One.

• Robert Mueller, currently the special investigator into the Trump-collusion nothingburger, was head of the FBI at the time.

• Congress was kept in the dark throughout all this.

As I've said before, I'm not big on lobbing charges of corruption at anybody, for reasons similar to those that find me unimpressed with hypocrisy. Both foibles are based on the kind of human weakness than can befall any of us with the right amount and kind of temptation. Pointing out someone's corruption usually - usually - tells us nothing about the principles at stake in a given situation. 

But this is an exception. Some people, and we don't yet know exactly who, beyond this Mikerin fellow, and, of course, the Clinton crime family, were behaving corruptly, and were willing to badly compromise US national security, apparently for personal gain. Or maybe out of some ideological motivation, like hating America and thinking increasing its vulnerability would be just dandy.

And then there is most of the post-American media. What is their motivation for not covering this like the front-burner story it is?