By Karoun Demirjian / The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Leading House Republicans are beginning an investigation of the Obama administration’s handling of a deal that gave a Russian-owned company control over 20 percent of the United States’ supply of uranium, an episode that the Trump campaign used to try to discredit Democratic rival Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said Tuesday that the panel has “been looking into this for a while now” but elected to formally start the inquiry in light of new evidence, reported in the Hill, that the FBI had been investigating Russian efforts to influence the American nuclear industry through various corrupt schemes.
Nunes said the first goal of the investigation, for which the Intelligence Committee is partnering with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is determining “was there actually an open FBI investigation or not.”
Oversight committee member Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., said Tuesday that members had identified a “witness who was a confidential informant who wants to talk about his role in this” but were trying to first get the witness released from a nondisclosure agreement with the Justice Department.
The uranium deal in question dates to 2009, when state-owned Russian nuclear energy company Rosatom began buying shares in Uranium One, a company based in Toronto with interests in the United States. The next year, Rosatom sought to assume majority ownership in Uranium One — a deal that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) had to approve. Russia later assumed full ownership of the company.
At the time, Clinton was secretary of state, leading one of nine government agencies comprising CFIUS. Notably, Nunes did not mention Clinton’s name Tuesday as he announced his investigation — instead, he, DeSantis and Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., focused on the involvement of then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and the extent to which the Justice Department and the FBI had been scrutinizing the transaction or the entities involved.
The House is not the first body to resurrect the Russian uranium deal — last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee also announced that it would be investigating the matter.
In a C-SPAN interview Monday, Clinton said the new focus on the uranium deal is “baloney” and evidence that the Trump administration is worried and trying to deflect attention away from the ongoing probes into the Trump team’s alleged ties to the Kremlin.
Nunes has become a focal point of such efforts before. Earlier this year, he came under fire for suggesting that the Obama administration had inappropriately unmasked the identities of members of the Trump transition team, and perhaps the president himself. He made those allegations after visiting the White House, leading Democrats to accuse him of coordinating his efforts with the Trump administration. Nunes, now the subject of an ethics inquiry for his actions, subsequently handed over the reins of the committee’s investigation of Russian election meddling to Rep. Michael Conaway, R-Texas, but he has not recused himself from the inquiry.
Nunes said Tuesday that he has not spoken with the White House about the uranium matter. But when asked whether he would brief the White House in the future, he would not commit to continuing to steer clear of the administration.
“If appropriate, yeah,” he said.
King, appearing with Nunes, insisted that the investigation of the uranium deal was a separate matter entirely from the committee’s ongoing inquiry of Russian election meddling.
“This is totally different from the election issue … it has nothing to do with the Russian election,” King said, stressing that his focus, at the time of the deal and now, was primarily driven by concerns about “why 20 percent of the U.S.’s uranium supply was being given to a Russian-owned company.”
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