http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/372861-uranium-one-informant-makes-clinton-allegations-in-testimony An FBI informant connected to the Uranium One controversy told three congressional committees in a written statement that Moscow routed millions of dollars to America with the expectation it would be used to benefit Bill Clinton's charitable efforts while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quarterbacked a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations. The informant, Douglas Campbell, said in the statement obtained by The Hill that he was told by Russian nuclear executives that Moscow had hired the American lobbying firm APCO Worldwide specifically because it was in position to influence the Obama administration, and more specifically Hillary Clinton. Democrats have cast doubt on Campbell’s credibility, setting the stage for a battle with Republicans over his testimony. Campbell added in the testimony that Russian nuclear officials “told me at various times that they expected APCO to apply a portion of the $3 million annual lobbying fee it was receiving from the Russians to provide in-kind support for the Clintons' Global Initiative." “The contract called for four payments of $750,000 over twelve months. APCO was expected to give assistance free of charge to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of their effort to create a favorable environment to ensure the Obama administration made affirmative decisions on everything from Uranium One to the U.S.-Russia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation agreement." APCO officials told The Hill that its support for the Clinton Global Initiative and its work with Russia were not connected in any way, and in fact involved different divisions of the firm. They added their lobbying for Russia did not involve Uranium One but rather focused on regulatory issues aimed at helping Russia better compete for nuclear fuel contracts inside the United States. “APCO Worldwide’s activities involving client work on behalf of Tenex and The Clinton Global Initiative were totally separate and unconnected in any way,” APCO told The Hill in a statement. “All actions on these two unconnected activities were appropriate, publicly documented from the outset and consistent with regulations and the law. Any assertion otherwise is false and unfounded.” Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton, said Campbell’s account is simply being used to distract from the investigations into President Trump and Russian election meddling. “Just yesterday the committee made clear that this secret informant charade was just that, a charade. Along with the widely debunked text-message-gate and Nunes' embarrassing memo episode, we have a trifecta of GOP-manufactured scandals designed to distract from their own President's problems and the threat to democracy he poses,” Merrill said. In addition to his written statement, Campbell on Wednesday was interviewed for several hours behind closed doors by staff from both parties on the Senate Judiciary, the House Intelligence and the House Oversight and Government Reform committees. Democrats have asked that a transcript of the interview be released to the public, but a court reporter was not present for the interview and Campbell was not sworn in. Republicans are seeking to use Campbell’s account to expand their investigations beyond the 2016 election and Trump to possible questions about Russian graft during the Obama administration. They note that the FBI found Campbell’s undercover work valuable enough to reward him with a $50,000 check in 2016. Democrats, in turn, have accused Republicans of making “wild claims” about Campbell and Uranium One. In a letter sent this week, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, asserted that Justice Department officials told both parties during a briefing in December that they ultimately found they “could not trust” Campbell when he was working as an FBI informant. Justice officials also said that Campbell had at no point made “any allegations of corruption, illegality, or impropriety on Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, President Clinton, the Uranium One deal, or [the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States],” according to the Democrats. “They also confirmed that there were 'no allegations of impropriety or illegality' regarding Secretary Clinton in any of the documents they reviewed,” the Democrats said. Campbell painted a different picture in his written statement. He accused Obama administration officials of making decisions that ended up benefitting the Russian nuclear industry, which he said was seeking to build a monopoly in the global uranium market to help President Vladimir Putin seek a geopolitical advantage over the United States. The United States already imports more than 90 percent of the uranium it uses in nuclear reactors, according to U.S. government figures from 2016. Campbell wrote that Russian nuclear executives “boasted” during vodka-fueled meetings monitored by the FBI about “how weak the U.S. government was in giving away uranium business and were confident that Russia would secure the strategic advantage it was seeking in the U.S. uranium market.” He also said he asked his FBI handlers why the U.S. was not more aggressive. “I expressed these concerns repeatedly to my FBI handlers. The response I got was that politics was somehow involved,” he stated. Much of the GOP’s interest in Campbell’s story centers on the Obama administration’s approval of the Uranium One deal. That deal at the time gave the Russian mining giant Rosatom control of roughly 20 percent of America’s capacity to mine uranium. The deal was approved unanimously in 2010 by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a multi-agency board that includes the State Department, the Defense Department and the Justice Department, among other agencies. The board has the power to block deals that threaten national security. Campbell, whose work as an informant was first disclosed in a series of stories published last fall by The Hill, helped the FBI gather evidence as early as 2009 that the Russian nuclear industry was engaged in a kickback, bribery and racketeering scheme on U.S. soil. The criminal scheme, among other things, compromised the U.S. trucking firm that had the sensitive job of transporting uranium around America, Campbell testified. Campbell says he provided the FBI the evidence of wrongdoing months before the Obama administration approved a series of favorable decisions that enriched Rosatom, including the CFIUS decision. The Hill’s stories last fall prompted the Justice Department to take the rare step of freeing Campbell from his nondisclosure agreement as an intelligence asset so he could testify to Congress about what he witnessed inside Russia’s nuclear industry. Campbell gave the congressional committees documents he said he provided to his FBI handlers in 2010 showing that the Russian and American executives implicated in the Tenex bribery scheme specifically asked him to try to help get the Uranium One deal approved by the Obama administration. “In 2010, officials inside Tenex became interested in helping another Rosatom subsidiary, ARMZ, win Obama administration approval to purchase Uranium One, a Canadian company with massive Kazakh and large U.S. uranium assets,” Campbell said. “Although Tenex and ARMZ are separate subsidiaries, Tenex had its own interest in Uranium One. Tenex would become responsible for finding commercial markets and revenue for those uranium assets once they were mined." “The emails and documents I intercepted during 2010 made clear that Rosatom’s purchase of Uranium One — for both its Kazakh and American assets — was part of Russia’s geopolitical strategy to gain leverage in global energy markets,” he testified. “I obtained documentary proof that Tenex was helping Rosatom win CFIUS approval, including an October 6, 2010 email … asking me specifically to help overcome opposition to the Uranium One deal.” Campbell told lawmakers the purchase of the Uranium One assets and the securing of billions of new uranium sales contracts inside the United States during the Obama years were part of the “Russian uranium dominance strategy.” “The importance of the Uranium One decision to Tenex was made clear by the fact that the Russian government directed Mikerin to open a new U.S. office for Tenex and to create a new American entity called Tenam in early October 2010, just weeks before Rosatom and ARMZ won the Obama administration approval to buy Uranium One,” he said. “Rosatom/Tenex threw a party to celebrate, which was widely attended by American nuclear industry officials. At the request of the FBI, I attended and recorded video footage of Tenam’s new offices,” he added. Campbell’s written statement covered a wide array of activities he conducted under the FBI’s direction, ranging from a failed sting effort to lure Putin to the United States to gathering evidence that Russia was “helping Iran build its nuclear capability.” Campbell provided Congress an April 16, 2010, memo he said he wrote and gave to the FBI that spelled out in detail the Russian efforts to aid Iran. “Tenex continues to supply Iran fuel through their Russian company,” Campbell wrote in that 2010 document obtained by The Hill, naming the specific company that was being used to help. “They continue to assist with construction consult [sic] and fabricated assemblies to supply the reactor. Fabricated assemblies require sophisticated engineering and are arranged inside the reactor with the help and consult” of Russians. “The final fabricators to Iran are being flown by Russian air transport due to the sensitive nature of the equipment,” his 2010 memo to the FBI added. Campbell told lawmakers he also gave the FBI “documentary proof that officials in Moscow were obtaining restricted copies of IAEA compliance reports on Iranian nuclear inspections, a discovery that appeared to deeply concern my handlers.” While most of his account involved intelligence matters, Campbell also briefly described the toll years of undercover work took on him personally. He continued informing through a bout with brain cancer, a case of leukemia and battles with excessive drinking, he told lawmakers. He also was never reimbursed for the hundreds of thousands of dollars he used of his own money to make bribe payments under the FBI’s direction to the Russians to facilitate his cover. But Campbell said he was gratified when the FBI in 2016 gave him a $50,000 reward check celebrating his undercover work, directly answering Democrats criticisms that federal prosecutors didn’t trust him as a witness. “My FBI handlers praised my work. They told me on various occasions that details from the undercover probe had been briefed directly to FBI top officials. On two occasions my handlers were particularly excited, claiming that my undercover work had been briefed to President Obama as part of his daily presidential briefing,” he said. In the end, though, he told lawmakers he remains disturbed that the Obama administration made so many favorable decisions benefiting the Russian nuclear industry when the evidence of wrongdoing and ill intent was so extensive. “I was frustrated watching the U.S. government make numerous decisions benefiting Rosatom and Tenex while those entities were engaged in serious criminal conduct on U.S. soil,” he wrote. “Tenex and Rosatom were raking in billions of U.S. dollars by signing contracts with American nuclear utility clients at the same time they were indulging in extortion by using threats to get bribes and kickbacks, with a portion going to Russia for high ranking officials.” He said he never got a satisfactory answer from the FBI. “I remember one response I got from an agent when I asked how it was possible CFIUS would approve the Uranium One sale when the FBI could prove Rosatom was engaged in criminal conduct. His answer: ‘Ask your politics,’ ” Campbell said. This article was corrected on Feb. 8 to reflect that Campbell gave an interview to lawmakers.
I just saw this from Dec. at the hill. DOJ failed to interview FBI informant before it filed charges in Russian nuclear bribery case FBI informant gathered years of evidence on Russian push for US nuclear fuel deals, including Uranium One, memos show TheHill.com Autoplay: On | Off While he was Maryland’s chief federal prosecutor, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s office failed to interview the undercover informant in the FBI’s Russian nuclear bribery case before it filed criminal charges in the case in 2014, officials told The Hill. And the prosecutors did not let a grand jury hear from the paid informant before it handed up an indictment portraying him as a “victim” of the Russian corruption scheme or fully review his extensive trove of documents until months later, the officials confirmed. The decisions backfired after prosecutors conducted more extensive debriefings of William Campbell in 2015, learning much more about the extent of his undercover activities and the transactions he engaged in while under the FBI’s direction, the officials said. The debriefings forced prosecutors to recast their entire criminal case against former Russian uranium industry executive Vadim Mikerinn — removing the informant as a star witness and main victim for the prosecution, the officials added. Justice Department officials began briefing Congress last week, divulging missteps in a case that nonetheless proved the Russian state-owned Rosatom was engaged in criminal activity through its top American executive beginning in 2009, well before the Obama administration made a series of favorable decisions benefitting Moscow’s nuclear giant. Multiple House and Senate committees already are investigating whether the FBI alerted President Obama or his top aides to the Russian criminal activity and plan to interview the undercover informant soon. The new revelations, however, could tip some scrutiny toward federal prosecutors’ own conduct in the case, a sensitive topic since Rosenstein is now Justice’s No. 2 official and the supervisor of the special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said it was troubling that prosecutors would ever bring a case without talking first to a person they portrayed in court as a victim, especially when that person was an FBI informant available to them. “I’ve never heard of such a case unless the victim is dead. I’ve never heard of prosecutors making a major case and not talking to the victim before you made it, especially when he was available to them through the FBI,” Dershowitz said. “It is negligence, and I’m sure there will be internal issues with the Justice Department and U.S. attorney for making such an obvious mistake,” he said. Officials told The Hill that prosecutors working for Rosenstein first interviewed Campbell, the informant, after they had already filed a sealed criminal complaint against Mikerin in July 2014. Campbell got one debriefing after the criminal charges were filed, but was never brought before the grand jury that indicted the Russian figure in November 2014 even though the informer was portrayed as “Victim One” in that indictment, the officials confirmed When prosecutors finally interviewed Campbell more extensively in early 2015 and reviewed all of the records he had gathered for the FBI, they learned new information about the sequence of transactions he conducted while under the FBI’s supervision, as well as the extensive nature of his counterintelligence work for the U.S. government that went far beyond the Mikerin case and dated to at least 2006, the officials said. “Based on what was learned, we decided to change the theory of the case. … A plea deal became our goal so we wouldn’t have to litigate or make an issue of some of the stuff he had done for [counterintelligence] purposes,” a source directly familiar with the case said. Campbell’s lawyer, Victoria Toensing, confirmed the Justice officials’ account. “The first time Mr. Campbell was interviewed by the U.S. Attorney’s office was after the criminal complaint was filed, and he was never brought before the grand jury before the indictment,” she told The Hill. Justice officials said they knew when they first brought the case that Campbell had been part of a controlled, FBI-authorized bribery scheme, meaning he had permission to make payments to the Russians as kickbacks to further the investigation. They declined to say why, with that knowledge, they initially portrayed Campbell in the indictment as a “victim” of an extortion scheme that began in November 2009 when the FBI had authorized him to make regular kickback payments of $50,000 in order to keep his consulting work for the Russians. They said, however, they decided to pivot the case from extortion to money laundering after the more extensive 2015 debriefings revealed other transactions that pre-dated the extortion charges. One source familiar with the case said extortion felt like a weaker charge when Campbell was acting with the FBI’s blessing and that the evidence of money laundering that Campbell documented through secret accounts in Latvia and Cyprus was irrefutable. Campbell, who now has leukemia, also suffered an earlier bout with cancer in the middle of the case when a lesion was detected on his brain. He survived, all the while working undercover, but he developed some memory issues after treatment, sources said. To compensate, he developed a system of extensive note taking and documentation with his FBI handlers through email to ensure facts were captured before his memory became hazy. A lot of those notes did not get reviewed by prosecutors until 2015, well after charges were filed, the sources said. The documentation shows Campbell’s work had exposed wide-ranging details about Russia’s nuclear activities across the globe, including efforts to corner the global uranium market, assist Iranian nuclear ambitions and to criminally compromise a U.S. trucking firm that transported Russia’s nuclear fuel, they said. Officials said the investigation and Campbell’s work from 2006 to 2013 fell under the FBI’s counterintelligence arm and Justice’s national security division, and officials originally did not intend for it to become a criminal case. Justice officials originally hoped they simply could use the threat of criminal prosecution to “flip” Mikerin as a cooperating asset, but their confrontation with him at an office building in 2014 failed to persuade him to cooperate, sources said. Prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland then assembled charges and an indictment, using mostly information from the FBI’s counterintelligence files and interviews of Campbell done by an Energy Department investigative agent, officials said Mikerin was an icon in the Russian nuclear industry, a top executive of the state-controlled Rosatom firm and its Tenex subsidiary and the man Moscow sent to Washington in 2010 to oversee Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan to grow uranium sales inside the United States under the Obama administration. The November 2014 indictment, bearing Rosenstein’s name, charged Mikerin with felony conspiracy to interfere with interstate commerce through extortion. Court documents alleged Mikerin was part of a larger racketeering scheme that also involved bribery, kickbacks and money laundering and that he demanded $50,000 in regular kickbacks from Campbell starting in November 2009 in order for Campbell to keep his consulting work for the Russians. The court documents portrayed Campbell alternatively as “Victim One” or “Confidential Witness 1” who came forward to report Mikerin’s wrongdoing and cooperate with the FBI. In fact, Campbell had been under the FBI’s control informing on the Russian nuclear industry since 2006, had signed a formal nondisclosure agreement with the FBI in 2008 and eventually was rewarded in 2016 with a $51,000 check for his extensive counterintelligence work. Mikerin eventually pleaded guilty to a money laundering conspiracy charge and was sentenced in December 2015 to 48 months in prison. A month later, the FBI paid Campbell compensation of more than $51,000, a transaction prosecutors did not learn about until The Hill published a copy of the check last month, officials said. Congress is now investigating the entire Russian nuclear bribery case after The Hill disclosed Campbell’s work, with multiple committees demanding to know whether the FBI told the Obama administration about Mikerin’s criminality before the administration made favorable decisions that rewarded Rosatom with billions of dollars in new American nuclear fuel contracts. Justice officials began briefing congressional officials this week, starting with the Senate Judiciary Committee. After the briefings end, congressional investigators plan to interview Campbell. After Campbell’s name and work surfaced, anonymous allegations surfaced in stories by Yahoo and Reuters suggesting the Justice Department had grave reservations about Campbell’s credibility, in part because he had three misdemeanor alcohol arrests. But officials told The Hill those leaks were not authorized by the Justice Department and did not reflect accurately the official thinking of the department. For instance, they said prosecutors had no concerns about Campbell’s three misdemeanor alcohol arrests and that the FBI held the informant in enough esteem to pay him the check after the case ended. And after prosecutors completed three debriefings with Campbell, they approved the payment in 2015 of the last of his expenses as an undercover. Prosecutors’ concerns primarily dealt with the sequence of events and transactions surrounding Campbell’s undercover work during the counterintelligence part of the probe before criminal prosecutors got involved, officials said.
Sure Senate Republicans say their investigation of Hillary Clinton’s role in approving a deal to sell U.S. uranium mines to a Russian company hinges in part on the testimony of a secret informant in a bribery and extortion scheme inside the same company. The Senate committee searching for Clinton’s alleged wrongdoing is keeping their witness’s name cloaked. However, William D. Campbell, a lobbyist, confirmed to Reuters he is the informant who will testify and provide documents to Congress about the Obama Administration’s 2010 approval of the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian company with uranium mines in the United States, to Russia’s Rosatom. At the time of the sale, Campbell was a confidential source for the FBI in a Maryland bribery and kickback investigation of the head of a U.S. unit of Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear power company. Campbell was identified as an FBI informant by prosecutors in open court and by himself in a publicly available lawsuit he filed last year. Some people who know Campbell are skeptical that he can shed much light on Uranium One. Two law enforcement officials with direct involvement in the Rosatom bribery case in which Campbell was an informant said they had no recollection or record of him mentioning the deal during their repeated interviews with him. Also, although both Uranium One and the bribery cases involved Rosatom, the two cases involved different business units, executives and allegations, with little other apparent overlap, Reuters found in a review of the court records of the bribery case. Federal prosecutors were ready to use Campbell as a star witness against Mikerin, but they backed away after defense attorneys raised questions about Campbell’s credibility and whether he was a victim or had “entered into a business arrangement with eyes wide open,” according to court records. Before it was taken down last year, the website of Campbell’s company, Sigma Transnational, did not suggest his firm was a lobbying powerhouse. The website listed four other employees and advisers, although one had died years earlier. A second employee listed said in a court document that she never worked for the company but had agreed in 2014 to pay Campbell to list her as an employee and allow her to use the Sigma name in a business deal. Campbell declined to comment on the staffing or his lobbying contract with Tenex. Prosecutors dropped the extortion charges against Mikerin and never mentioned Campbell again in any charging documents. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the case. Campbell also declined to comment on the issue. Reuters has been unable to learn why Tenex chose Campbell as its lobbyist. He acknowledged in lawsuit he filed in 2016 that he was hired despite the fact he “had no experience with nuclear fuel sales.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...is-ex-lobbyist-for-russian-firm-idUSKBN1DG1SB A guy who wasn't involved in U1 at all, who never mentioned it before is suddenly peddling a conspiracy theory that Russians paid a US firm to route money to CF even when Clinton was the only person they bribed when she had no power to unilaterally authorize or kill the deal, and it was a unanimous decision. Russia who export Uranium to the US wanted 0.3% of low grade Uranium from a US mine. Makes so much sense! Right wingers are geniuses indeed.
And this is the guy's lawyer Victoria Toensing and her husband, Joseph DiGenova Lawyers Representing The “Whistleblowers” In Hearings Are Long-Time GOP Activists With History Of Pushing Discredited Claims. The lawyers claiming to represent some of the witnesses at the Benghazi hearing, Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, are long-time Republicans known for pushing false claims in the media and for having conflicts of interest in their professional work. They have both served as advisors to Republican candidates and donated thousands of dollars to GOP candidates and causes, and have been criticized for a conflict of interest for serving in a dual role in separate Justice Department investigations and for dropping “the air of impartiality, non-partisanship, and professionalism required” by their roles as leaders of a congressional investigation.
that is comedy. did you actually write this? Justice Department investigations and for dropping “the air of impartiality, non-partisanship, and professionalism required” by their roles as leaders of a congressional investigation. you have defended the fbi like a peacock defending its turf night and day for months. and now you are making our argument about one of the major problems with the FBI and Muellers team? 2. the real issue here is the clintons taking in the millions from Putin.
First of all, where is this millions? Your guy HEARD, that's right - he heard, what happened to the suitecases full of cash theory? Secondly, this is what Trump's DOJ said [Justice Department] officials said that “at no point did [the individual] provide any allegation of corruption, illegality, or impropriety on Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, President Clinton, the Uranium One deal, or CFIUS,” Cummings and Schiff wrote. “They also confirmed that there were ‘no allegations of impropriety or illegality’ regarding Secretary Clinton in any of the documents they reviewed.” https://www.motherjones.com/politic...-debunked-the-gops-phony-uranium-one-scandal/ Why the contradictions? So there's that, I am for facts, let me know when Clinton gets indicted and charged for this. I suggest you keep waiting for another 30 years.
yes, I would like to know more about what went on there. Was that an inverse Headquarters special from Mueller? Did not even interview its own star witness. I wonder if they were hiding something?
1. Under normal circumstances the "objections" raised by the DOJ would be a concern. However, if this guy had a brain or was properly advised he might not bring Obama and Clinton into the situation (unless requested) since they were running things and some witnesses to Clinton and DNC problems seem to have short lifespans. I do not know. I would like to see his notes and his evidence for myself. 2. If you read all the articles posted here... the inconsistencies could be that the FBI allowed him to participate in crimes to keep his cover.
Given that his ONLY evidence is that he HEARD (aka pure hearsay) and has absolutely no evidence of any action or event and the fact that he wasn't involved with the U1 case at all and the fact that he wasn't found credible even in the very case he was involved and the fact that authorities suspected him of financially benefiting from the bribery, I see no point of you speculating about Obama or Clinton over this. Name one witness to Clinton or DNC that has died, and I mean actual witnesses that were going to testify against them. Name one.