But The Hill's indefatigable John Solomon has kept on it, and he finds new reasons for concern, now that the FBI seems to be stonewalling release of multiple memos concerning its handling of the case. He writes :

Uranium One – the scandal where then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton allowed 20% of America's uranium supply to fall into the hands of the Russians – pretty much has fallen off the front pages, superseded by the Russia-Russia-Russia canards of the left and now the Kavanaugh hearings.

Eight years after its informant uncovered criminal wrongdoing inside Russia's nuclear industry, the FBI has identified 37 pages of documents that might reveal what agents told the Obama administration, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others about the controversial Uranium One deal. There's just one problem: The FBI claims it must keep the memos secret from the public. Their [sic] excuses for the veil of nondisclosure range from protecting national security and law enforcement techniques to guarding the privacy of individual Americans and the ability of agencies to communicate with each other. Sound familiar?

Here the FBI's field agents had a magnificent informant, William Campbell, who managed to insinuate himself right into the heart of Russia's state nuclear company as a consultant and who uncovered amazing corruption operations surrounding a uranium trucking company (a case where cash was passed around in suitcases), really getting the goods on Russian payoffs and bribery here in the U.S. As if that were not enough, he also got wind of a scheme from Russian nuclear officials to funnel millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation through the U.S.-based lobbying firm APCO.

All of this was, he confirmed, was part of a "Russian nuclear dominance strategy." ZeroHedge has some invaluable background on that here.

Although Solomon and others don't report it, the Russian masterplan made sense to execute on economic grounds, given the parlous state of the U.S. uranium industry, which was so layoff-ridden by the Obama administration's other policies (which included flooding the market with used uranium from unrelated disarmament projects as well as the shutdowns of U.S. nuclear plants, plus the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, and uranium producer Kazakhstan's constant currency devaluations, which made their uranium exports cheap) that the U.S. was down to about five working companies and fewer than 1,000 workers. That was easy pickings for the Russians, and all they had to do was get a Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) board's permission to buy up U.S. uranium companies. Hillary Clinton, of course, sat on that board and had unusual influence on it.

As Solomon notes:

The evidence was compiled as Secretary Clinton courted Russia for better relations, as her husband former President Clinton collected a $500,000 speech payday in Moscow, and as the Obama administration approved the sale of a U.S. mining company, Uranium One, to Rosatom. The sale – made famous years later by author Peter Schweizer and an epic New York Times exposé in 2015 – turned over a large swath of America's untapped uranium deposits to Russia.

There is still the mystery of whether all of this information that the FBI meticulously gathered, and paid its informant $51,000 for, which is a good-sized payoff for any law enforcement agency, ever got to the White House.

If it did, and President Obama as well as Hillary Clinton ignored it, then it looks like corruption of the highest order.

If it didn't – by what sort of incompetence could this be on the FBI side? It certainly wasn't from the FBI field agents, who did an amazing job and paid their informant in an amount that correctly corresponded to his contribution. It would have had to have been someone at the top, probably protecting the president, even though telling him would have still protected him, since the news would not have presumably gotten out. The FBI director at the time was Robert Mueller.

Did he have a Strzok-type agent so intent on allowing President Obama and Hillary Clinton to collect that Clinton Foundation money? Or did he protect Obama himself from even a hint of knowledge? If he did, what did he think his job was?

I am of the thinking that he did tell them, and there wasn't another Strzok operating for solely partisan protection purposes. Knowing the players, I suspect that Obama ignored the report, and so did Hillary Clinton, both convinced they had the next election in the bag.

Either way, notes Solomon, it's not assuring. It was either a Strzok; Strzok himself; or Mueller, who needs to answer questions on this. Then a special counsel may be needed to go after the real culprits if not the protection racket.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.