It’s taken a few months for Trump to follow up on the “Lock ‘er up!” chants that dominated his rallies. But now that his popularity is at a (new) record low, and Robert Mueller has made it clear that money laundering for Russian oligarchs is going to be part of his investigation, Trump is ready to pull this ripcord on his biggest distraction.
Hillary Clinton responded on Wednesday to news that the Trump administration is considering appointing a special counsel to investigate her alleged ties to the Uranium One deal, calling the move “a disastrous step into politicizing the Justice Department” and “such an abuse of power.”
Hillary Clinton’s connection to the Uranium One deal is … she had no connection to the Uranium One deal. Yes, some of the original investors in the company gave large donations to the Clinton Foundation, but those investors sold out years before Uranium One became a target of Russia’s state-owned uranium company. The State Department was just one of nine departments that reviewed the deal and didn’t have veto power over approval—in fact, the entire committee had no ability to block the deal. So Hillary Clinton is being investigated over a deal in which she had no control and from which she drew no benefit.
In an exclusive interview with Mother Jones, Clinton said such an investigation would have devastating consequences for the justice system in America. “If they send a signal that we’re going to be like some dictatorship, like some authoritarian regime, where political opponents are going to be unfairly, fraudulently investigated, that rips at the fabric of the contract we have, that we can trust our justice system,” Clinton said. “It will be incredibly demoralizing to people who have served at the Justice Department, under both Republicans and Democrats, because they know better. But it will also send a terrible signal to our country and the world that somehow we are giving up on the kind of values that we used to live by and we used to promote worldwide.”
That signal has already been made. It could not be clearer—though there’s a fair chance they will try.
Trump has made it clear that he believes the whole purpose of the Justice Department is to torture people he doesn’t like. The only frustration he’s expressed has been exactly because they haven’t moved quickly enough in persecuting the people he points to. With Attorney General Jefferson Sessions himself caught up in the mix, and appearing before the Senate to admit that he lied about his own knowledge of Russia connections—again—it’s the perfect time to go for the most confusing option Republicans can create.
The New York Times and Washington Post reported this week that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had asked top prosecutors to examine whether to appoint a special counsel to probe the sale of a uranium company to Russian interests while Clinton was secretary of state. Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have alleged links between the sale of the company and donations to the Clinton Foundation, even though nine different federal agencies signed off on the deal in 2010.
The Uranium One deal was investigated at the time. While Republicans treated the news that the FBI had already looked into the transaction at the time as big news during a press conference to announce that they would be creating not one, or two, but three committees to investigate this deal that didn’t remove one ounce of uranium from the United States. However, the investigation, which featured some unflattering things to say about both sides of the investment, was publicly discussed at the time.
In any case, Republicans have a secret witness ready to bolster investigation take two.
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.
The funny thing about this secret witness to what Clinton did wrong, is that he seems to have no evidence that Clinton did anything wrong. Instead, he’ll testify about his involvement in the FBI investigation.
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.
Why are congressional Republicans pretending that they were unaware of the FBI investigation, and pulling in a witness who may have nothing to say about Clinton, but a lot to say about how the previous investigation was conducted? Because the real target of the Uranium One investigation isn’t Hillary Clinton. It’s the guy who lead the FBI at the time of the Uranium One deal.
“Mueller can’t be a special prosecutor when he himself is under investigation,” Stone said. “Mueller is guilty of obstruction and cover up in Uranium One.”