By Peter Schweizer
Uranium One is a story about powerful politicians seeking money and rich people buying power. It is about reformers who fall into corruption, and about journalists who are too lazy to challenge the lies and spin they get from the powerful, the rich, the corrupted.
I have been writing books about cronyism in politics for more than fifteen years. It is, I’m sorry to tell you, very fertile ground. Where political power is great, the temptation to use it to help oneself and one’s friends becomes greater still. Even in societies like ours, where we hate this kind of self-dealing and pass laws to prevent graft and bribery, the ingenuity of the truly corrupt still seems to find a way.
In the United States today, this means that exposing corruption or cronyism is a complicated task, buried under layers of connections and transactions that politicians are careful to mask, lest they become obvious. It rarely shows up as a single, highlighted line in a tax return or an eye-popping entry on a financial disclosure form. Rarely is a politician as careless as former U.S. Representative William Jefferson (D-LA), who—infamously—was caught by the FBI with $90,000 in cash bribes neatly wrapped in foil and placed in the back of his freezer.
But such frozen treats are the exception, not the rule. As a journalist, I can tell you that it takes months of hard work to connect the dots that sneaky politicians take pains to obfuscate. There is no “smoking gun” to sniff out, only a shadowy trail of money and “coincidence.” That trail is a little different every time; it might start with finding an investment here that might lead to a brother-in-law there who has a company somewhere that got a no-bid contract from a government agency that just happens to be overseen by that politician you began with. Oh, and maybe the original investment at the top of this trail is actually held by the politician’s spouse, or by his or her children. Certainly not by him or her—the deceit is rarely clear and often legal.
I founded the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) eight years ago because I realized I couldn’t do this kind of work on my own. Based in Florida and with a very small staff, we began investigating these kinds of stories because we noticed how rarely the mainstream media, which no longer seemed to have the appetite to look into them deeply, covered them. We noticed that because of Watergate and various other “*-gate” scandals, the public understood the need to expose these misdeeds. Congress and the rest of official Washington have passed many laws designed to make it harder to cheat, to get rich through their positions, and to steer political and financial favors to their biggest donors—all in exchange for large campaign contributions to scare off serious challengers. And the laws they passed certainly have helped. At least, up to a point.
Maybe they really did mean well, but what was supposed to force them to declare their earnings and confess their conflicts of interest has instead created a market where corruption is brokered through third parties. The standard for identifying these sorts of pay-to-play schemes has long been to look for the straight line, the “quid pro quo” like frozen cash in a congressman’s freezer. Today’s corruption is rarely this simple. The gun no longer smokes.
Instead, we are left with a question: How do you prevent this when the “quid” happens in broad daylight, almost untraceable to the “quo” that lies behind shell companies, international banking secrets, the children of politicians, cronies, foreign business partners, and various “charitable organizations” set up by the politicians themselves?
The sale of Uranium One to a Russian government-controlled company called Rosatom is that kind of story.
Our 2015 book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich focused on the connections between the people who wanted that sale to happen and the Clinton Foundation, the multibillion-dollar charitable organization set up by the former president and his wife. Hillary Clinton, while Secretary of State, was in a position to make sure that it did. Uranium One, and its connections to the Clintons, comprised just two chapters of that book—one example of many that showed how the Clintons used the power of their office and the cover of their philanthropy to enrich themselves and their friends through many different “pay-to-play” schemes.
Documenting these connections took us to Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada, and other places. Our team, and especially Seamus Bruner, tracked the money trail of massive contributions to the Clintons and connected them to the players and the timeline of the Uranium One deal. All of it was distilled into thirty-six pages of Clinton Cash.
Seamus found more information than we could use in that book. His gut told him there was a lot more going on, enough for a whole book. I was skeptical at first, but he was right, and the complex, interconnected web of interests, strategic mistakes, and coincidences is all laid out in detail here for the first time. As you will see, the Uranium One story sprawls across multiple U.S. administrations and reaches the highest levels of the Kremlin, where it becomes a key part of the long-held ambition of Russian President Vladimir Putin to corner the world market for atomic energy.
This book tells, as the late radio commentator Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story.”
The sale of Uranium One to Rosatom in 2010 (and finalized in 2013) was a bad deal for U.S. national security and should never have been approved. What was said at the time in defense of the deal has been proven not to be true, and most of what its critics feared has come to pass. Yet the Washington Post recently described this criticism as “debunked,” despite having published its own news stories confirming what we uncovered back in 2015. Something is amiss.
The best that we as independent journalists can do with these kinds of stories is to find and expose the patterns that strongly suggest corruption. Reporters at mainstream media outlets apply this standard routinely to their political coverage of everything from gun control bills to health care, by noting how the timing of campaign contributions received by politicians matches up with those decisions. But for this story, with its cast of characters in Russia, Ukraine, Europe, and the United States, these same media outlets want to move the goalposts.
After the Uranium One story emerged, we called for official investigations—ones armed with subpoena power and the ability to gather information we could not hope to get ourselves. We were optimistic when, in 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, to look into concerns that the FBI had not fully pursued cases of possible corruption when the U.S. government decided not to block the sale of Uranium One. Huber’s “investigation,” finally released in 2020, was a disappointment, as it was simply a review of the FBI’s earlier insufficient efforts. His team called no witnesses, did no interviews or investigations of its own, and, after more than two years, left all these questions unanswered.
As investigative journalists, we don’t have the power or the soapbox that mainstream news organizations do to press for the truth. But that is their job. Part of doing this work—and why we document our facts so precisely—is our faith that those reporters, editors, congressional overseers, and executive branch prosecutors will pick up where we left off. And if they do not, it is fair to ask: Why not? Many of our friends in major news organizations tell us that they get sucked into what I have called “the Trump Vortex,” the fixation by the media on President Donald J. Trump’s actions, tweets, and possible misdeeds. I don’t question the importance of covering those stories.
But that singular focus leaves other important corruption stories ignored. America’s adversaries, in China, Russia, and elsewhere, have done business for years by working through back channels to sway those who are temporarily in office in the United States, regardless of political party. We wrote about those techniques before and will no doubt do so again. The interconnected worlds of international commerce and global strategic competition introduce temptations for our political representatives to compromise themselves and our country, and in ways far more dangerous than frozen stacks of cash in a congressman’s freezer.
In this book, Seamus Bruner and John Solomon will show those dangers, detail those temptations, and expose those dark worlds.