The background for this is the Uranium One - Rosatom story which John Solomon and Alison Spann keep hammering away at, at The Hill.
Hillary Clinton had to sign off on the Rosatom purchase of Uranium One giving the Russians control of 20% of our uranium. Rosatom is the Russian state nuclear corporation. But Rosatom wasn't supposed to be able to move uranium out of America.
Obama Inc. promised.
After the Obama administration approved the sale of a Canadian mining company with significant U.S. uranium reserves to a firm owned by Russia’s government, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission assured Congress and the public the new owners couldn’t export any raw nuclear fuel from America’s shores.
“No uranium produced at either facility may be exported,” the NRC declared in a November 2010 press release that announced that ARMZ, a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned Rosatom, had been approved to take ownership of the Uranium One mining firm and its American assets.
Those assurances held up about as well as the Iran Deal.
The NRC never issued an export license to the Russian firm, a fact so engrained in the narrative of the Uranium One controversy that it showed up in The Washington Post’s official fact-checker site this week. “We have noted repeatedly that extracted uranium could not be exported by Russia without a license, which Rosatom does not have,” the Post reported on Monday, linking to the 2011 Barrasso letter.
Except that Rosatom was able to do it anyway.
Yet NRC memos reviewed by The Hill show that it did approve the shipment of yellowcake uranium — the raw material used to make nuclear fuel and weapons — from the Russian-owned mines in the United States to Canada in 2012 through a third party. Later, the Obama administration approved some of that uranium going all the way to Europe, government documents show.
And from Europe, it could potentially go a lot of places.
How did they do it? As usual there were loopholes. And an effort to bypass Congress.
Rather than give Rosatom a direct export license — which would have raised red flags inside a Congress already suspicious of the deal — the NRC in 2012 authorized an amendment to an existing export license for a Paducah, Ky.-based trucking firm called RSB Logistics Services Inc. to simply add Uranium One to the list of clients whose uranium it could move to Canada.
The move escaped notice in Congress.
Of course it did. But it helps to have friends in high places.