‘I repeat: those issues have nothing at all to do with this case…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Justice Department prosecutors in a Maryland bribery trial labelled Hillary Clinton‘s Uranium One scandal a “conspiracy theory” while trying to distinguish it from their own case, much to the delight of partisan naysayers in the press.
In April 2015, the New York Times first reported on the shocking pay-to-play setup involving the Russian government, a Canadian uranium-mining firm, the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.
Shortly thereafter, more details on the Uranium One scandal emerged in conservative investigative journalist Peter Schweizer‘s exposé Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.
Liberal media sources like McClatchy News Service have since chafed under the allegations that Clinton, during her tenure as secretary of State, colluded with the Russians in a 2010 deal that gave them controlling stake in several U.S. and Canadian uranium mines while the Clinton Foundation simultaneously received a kickback.
During the 2016 election and afterward, the story proved an inconvenient counterpoint to Democrats’ unfounded claims that President Donald Trump was a puppet of the Russians.
Trump, himself, observed that the real evidence of Russian collusion lay with his Democrat opponent and accused Clinton of having given away 20 percent of U.S. uranium.
But investigative efforts stalled in Congress after Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives last year.
In typical form, left-wing fact-checkers have nit-picked at minutiae surrounding the complicated series of exchanges in order to qualify, downplay and dismiss Republicans’ assertions.
These deflections, of course, gloss over the fundamental ethical concerns and national security implications regarding Clinton’s corrupt track record of quid-pro-quo bargains for her own political benefit.
Some sought to use the recent legal filing in Maryland as a justification to dispel the entire Uranium One story as a conservative fiction. However, the DOJ prosecutors seem only to have been denying one crucial aspect of it.
Maryland U.S. Attorney Robert K. Hur is leading the upcoming case against Mark Lambert, the former president of a company that transported nuclear material. Lambert is accused of bribing Russian officials to win their business.
Websites and social media posts have reportedly sought to establish a connection between Lambert’s indictment and questions as to whether the Justice Department is actively investigating the Uranium One scandal.
Hur, who worked in the office of former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein while he was overseeing the Mueller investigation into debunked claims of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, emphatically denied that the cases were linked.
In court documents released Monday that outlined jury selection for the November trial, prosecutors proposed two subsections titled “Unrelated Conspiracy Theories,” reported McClatchy.
“Although this is a case involving an alleged criminal conspiracy with a Russian official, this case has nothing at all to do with the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, or alleged collusion between the Donald Trump Presidential Campaign and Russia, or alleged Russian interference in U.S. elections,” wrote Hur’s legal team. “I repeat: that investigation has nothing at all to do with this case.”
It then issued a similar disclaimer regarding the Uranium One matter.
“This case also has nothing at all to do with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, or the approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (or ‘CFIUS’) of the Russian government’s acquisition of a company called Uranium One and certain uranium rights in the United States,” they wrote. “I repeat: those issues have nothing at all to do with this case.”