One week after The Hill reported on a massive Clinton Foundation pay-for-play scheme resulting in Russia’s ability to mine 20 percent of American uranium and sell it back to U.S. nuclear power plants, a new report has surfaced claiming Russia was trying to infiltrate U.S. politics by targeting the State Department.
As Hillary Clinton began her tenure as Obama’s Secretary of State in January, 2009, the FBI observed several attempts by Russia to gain access to the former First Lady and her team at State.
The Hill‘s John Solomon and Alison Spann report the schemes included a female “sleeper” Russian spy posing as an American accountant with the fake name “Cynthia Murphy,” who gained employment with a top New York-based DNC financier and close friend of Hillary Clinton, Alan Patricof, after the Russian agent lived for nearly 10 years in New Jersey posing as a mundane suburbanite.
Murphy was arrested and deported as she worked her way closer to Clinton’s State Department. The FBI did not believe the Russian spy was going to risk taking a job inside the State Department out of fear that the in depth vetting process would expose her true identity. Instead, she aimed for a job in the private sector as close as possible to State.
Patricof did not return a call to his office Friday seeking comment. But in 2010 he told The Washington Post after the spy case broke he believed he had been a victim of the spy ring, saying Murphy had worked for him but that he only talked accounting and not government or politics with her.
“It’s just staggering,” he told the Post about the idea of being targeted by Russia. “It’s off the charts.”
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill declined Saturday to say if the secretary was ever alerted or briefed to the Russian spy effort, instead suggesting that any focus on the spy case was a partisan effort to distract from the controversy around Moscow and President Trump. –The Hill
Lobby Racket
The FBI was also curious about Russian state-controlled Uranium One hiring the Podesta Group to lobby the Obama administration. “At the time it was hired, the firm was providing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in pro bono support to Bill Clinton’s global charitable initiative, and it legally helped the Russian company secure federal decisions that led to billions in new U.S. commercial nuclear business, records show.”
Bill’s $500K Speech and Russian meetings
The Feds were also “surprised by the timing and size” of a $500K speech Bill Clinton gave to a Kremlin-linked bank in the summer of 2010 – the same day he met with Vladimir Putin at the Russian leader’s house.
Angel Urena, the official spokeswoman for the former president, told The Hill that Bill Clinton never discussed the issues pending before his wife’s department when he was in Russia and that the money he collected for himself and his charitable efforts never influenced his wife’s decision-making.
The Hill reported last week that Obama’s FBI, headed by Robert Mueller, discovered that “Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow” – a deal which would grant the Kremlin control over 20 percent of America’s uranium supply, as detailed by author Peter Schweitzer’s book Clinton Cash and the New York Times in 2015.
The Hill also reported that Bill Clinton sought permission from Hillary Clinton’s state department in 2010 to meet with a Russian nuclear official, as well as fourteen other Russians.
Another investigation, via The Hill:
Away from Bill Clinton’s check and the breaking news of a spy ring, the FBI had another major investigation underway where the Clinton name was surfacing.
Since 2009, the FBI had an undercover informant gathering evidence of a massive bribery and kickback scheme inside the Russian nuclear energy firm TENEX and its American arm TENAM.
Years later, FBI agents would help the Justice Department bring charges against the Russian nuclear industry’s point man in the United States, TENEX director Vadim Mikerin, as well as a Russian financier and an American trucking executive whose company moved Russian uranium around the United States.
But as the informant gathered evidence of the bribery scheme in early 2010, he began to hear a familiar name crop up in conversations. The Russians kept talking about ways they could win access to or favor with the Clintons, and the informant kept reporting it back to his FBI handlers.
The informant has never been publicly identified, but his lawyer told The Hill on Friday he can shed significant light to Congress on what the Russians were doing to try to win favorable treatment from the Obama administration.
“I can confirm that my client while working undercover for the FBI and in the employ of the Russian energy firm TENEX witnessed numerous, detailed conversations in which Russian actors described their efforts to lobby, influence or ingratiate themselves with the Clintons in hopes of winning favorable uranium decisions from the Obama administration,” attorney Victoria Toensing said.
“Unfortunately, he cannot at the present time disclose the specifics of that evidence he reported to the agents in real time because of an NDA he signed with the bureau. But we are working with Congress to find a means in the future for him to transmit the important information he possesses,” she added.
The lobbying work was perfectly legal, focusing on agencies like State, Commerce and Energy that supervised the U.S.-Russia nuclear relationship. But once again, a connection to the Clintons emerged.
One of the firms TENEX hired in 2010 was providing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in support to the Clinton Global Initiative, starting in 2008.
