BEN: Okay. So this is breaking news. Attorney General Jeff Sessions apparently has ordered investigators at the Justice Department to ask FBI agents to explain all the evidence they found in the Uranium One investigation. This is a report from Tom Winter, Pete Williams, and Ken Delanian at NBC News.
Apparently, the interviews with FBI agents are part of the Justice Department's effort to fulfill a promise to an assistant's attorney general made to Congress last month, to examine whether a special council was warranted to look into what has become known as the Uranium One deal.
You remember all the details surrounding Uranium One. That issue is a 2010 transaction, in which the Obama administration allowed the sale of a US uranium mining facility, to Russian state atomic energy company. Hillary was Secretary of State at the time. The State Department was one of the nine agencies that agreed to approve the deal.
Now, senior law enforcement official was briefed on the initial FBI investigation, told NBC News, there are allegations of corruption surrounding the process, under which the US government approved the sale.
No charges were filed. But as the New York Times reported in April 2015, some of the people associated with the deal contributed millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.
And Bill Clinton was paid half a million dollars for one speech in Moscow by a Russian investment bank with links to the transaction. Hillary says she has nothing to do with it. Of course, that is somewhat doubtful. That is somewhat doubtful.
And there are a lot of people a few weeks back who were trying to undermine the suspicions about the Uranium One deal. And I did a bit of a summary over at my website, Daily Wire, talking about what exactly happened in the Uranium One story. So here is what was true about the Uranium One deal.
There's a guy named Frank JEW-STRA. Frank JEW-STRA was the original owner of Uranium One. And people said, okay. Well, he had invested it by the time of the sale of Uranium One and its assets to Rosatom, the Russian atomic energy agency. But here is what is true: JEW-STRA owned a company called Eurasia.
That was sold to Uranium One. JEW-STRA then said he divested his personal stake in the company, but his shareholders still own 60 percent of the company. And there's no way to confirm the truth of this claim.
In 2009 and 2010, Rosatom, which is Russia's atomic energy agency, was poised to buy a majority of the company. They were barred by law from supporting American Uranium abroad. So it wasn't that Russia was going to buy the uranium, send it back to Russia, and then use it to make bombs to murder Americans or something. That was not really the concern.
The real concern here was that Russia bought Uranium One because they actually didn't want the American assets. They bought Uranium One because Uranium One had assets in other countries that they could use to make news.
In 2013, Russia bought the rest of Uranium One with the approval of the committee on foreign investment in the United States, as well as the US nuclear regulatory commission in Utah agencies.
The CFIUS includes the State Department. Hillary Clinton said she had nothing to do with the green lighting.
So how much money actually flowed from Uranium One beneficiaries to the Clinton Foundation? Well, if you don't include JEW-STRA, about $4 million.
If you include JEW-STRA, it's 145 million. But this is all a little too simplistic.
So in 2015, here's what the New York Times reported. The Uranium One acquisition actually began in 2005, while JEW-STRA still owned the company.
Bill Clinton -- Bill Clinton flew with JEW-STRA to Kazakhstan, where the two of them dined with the authoritarian president, a guy named Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Clinton then handed the Kazakh president a propaganda -- this is the New York Times not me. When he expressed support from Mr. Nazarbayev's bid to head an international national elections monitoring group, undercutting American policy and criticism of Kazakhstan's poor human rights record, by among other people, over to Clinton. Within days of the visit, JEW-STRA's fledgling Eurasia signed a preliminary deal, giving it stakes in three uranium mines controlled by Kazakhaprom, which was the Kazakhstan official energy agency.
Eurasia then in 2007 merged with Uranium One, a South African company with assets in Africa and Australia in a $3.5 billion transaction. The new company kept the Uranium One name. It was controlled by Eurasia investors, including Ian Telfer, who is a Canadian who became chairman. JEW-STRA says at that point he sold his stake.
Soon Uranium One began to snap up companies with assets in the United States.
In April 2007, it announced that it was going to purchase the uranium mill in Utah. The questions about Rosatom's control of Uranium isn't really about the Russians crafting nukes, as I say. It's about shortages of uranium in the United States and us being dependent on foreign sources for that material. And, again, about Rosatom purchasing nuclear material in Kazakhstan. And the Clintons were still involved at this time. They were involved past the sale.
This is the point. It didn't end with JEW-STRA selling Rosatom. I mean, selling Uranium One.
The new head, Ian Telfer, he gave between 1.3 million and 5.6 million in contributions to the Clinton foundation.
From a constellation of people with ties to Uranium One or Eurasia. Without the assets, the Kazakh mines, the Russians would have had no interest in the deal. Amid the influx of Uranium One-connected money, Clinton was invited to speak in Moscow in June 2010. The same month Rosatom struck its deal for a majority stake in Uranium One. So the same month that Rosatom decided to buy Uranium One,
Clinton spent time in Moscow and got 500 grand for it. It's not at all unclear that the Clintons were unrelated to Uranium One. So, again, just more evidence that Democrats are perfectly willing to work with the Russians when they saw a way to benefit from it.
