An
FBI informant gathered extensive evidence during his six years
undercover about a Russian plot to corner the American uranium market,
ranging from corruption inside a U.S. nuclear transport company to Obama
administration approvals that let Moscow buy and sell more atomic
fuels, according to more than 5,000 pages of documents from the
counterintelligence investigation.
The memos, reviewed by The
Hill, conflict with statements made by Justice Department officials in
recent days that informant William Campbell’s prior work won’t shed much
light on the U.S. government’s controversial decision in 2010 to
approve Russia’s purchase of the Uranium One mining company and its
substantial U.S. assets.
Campbell documented for his FBI handlers
the first illegal activity by Russians nuclear industry officials in
fall 2009, nearly an entire year before the Russian state-owned Rosatom
nuclear firm won Obama administration approval for the Uranium One deal,
the memos show.
Campbell,
who was paid $50,000 a month to consult for the firm, was solicited by
Rosatom colleagues to help overcome political opposition to the Uranium
One purchase while collecting FBI evidence that the sale was part of a
larger effort by Moscow to make the U.S. more dependent on Russian
uranium, contemporaneous emails and memos show.
“The attached
article is of interest as I believe it highlights the ongoing resolve in
Russia to gradually and systematically acquire and control global
energy resources,” Rod Fisk, an American contractor working for the
Russians, wrote in a
June 24, 2010, email to Campbell.
The
email forwarded an article on Rosatom’s efforts to buy Uranium One
through its ARMZ subsidiary. Fisk also related information from a
conversation with the Canadian executives of the mining firm about their
discomfort with the impending sale.
“I spoke with a senior
Uranium One Executive,” Fisk wrote Campbell, detailing his personal
history with some of the company’s figures. “He said that corporate
Management was not even told before the announcement [of the sale] was
made.
“There are a lot of concerns,” Fisk added, predicting the
Canadians would exit the company with buyouts once the Russians took
control. Fisk added the premium price the Russians were paying to buy a
mining firm that in 2010 controlled about 20 percent of America’s
uranium production seemed “strange.”
At the time, Campell was working alongside Fisk as an American consultant to Rosatom’s commercial sales arm, Tenex.
But
unbeknownst to his colleagues, Campbell also was serving as an FBI
informant gathering evidence that Fisk, Tenex executive Vadim Mikerin
and several others were engaged in a racketeering scheme involving
millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks, plus extortion and money
laundering.Justice Department officials confirmed the emails and
documents gathered by Campbell, saying they were in the possession of
the FBI, the department's national security division and its criminal
division at various times over the last decade. They added that
Campbell's work was valuable enough that the FBI paid him nearly
$200,000, mostly for reimbursements over six years, but that the money
also included a check for more than $51,000 in compensation after the
final convictions were secured.
The information he gathered on
Uranium One was more significant to the counterintelligence aspect of
the case that started in 2008 than the eventual criminal prosecutions
that began in 2013, they added.
Justice
Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said Monday that the agency
plans to brief members of Congress next week on Campbell's work, the
counterintelligence investigation into Russian uranium and the nuclear
bribery case. Some issues related to the case are also being reviewed by
senior Justice officials, she added.
"The Department of Justice
has authorized the confidential informant to disclose to the chairmen
and ranking members of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the House
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as staff, any information or
documents he has concerning alleged corruption or bribery involving
transactions in the uranium market. Until the informant publicly speaks
to what he knew or knows about these matters, we are unable to respond
further," she said.
Campbell’s undercover work helped FBI
counterintelligence chronicle a Russian uranium strategy modeled after
Moscow’s success in creating natural gas monopolies in eastern Europe
that strengthened Russia’s economy and geopolitical standing after the
Cold War, the officials said.
Part of the goal was to make
Americans more reliant on Russian uranium before a program that
converted former Soviet warheads into U.S. nuclear fuel expired in 2013,
according to documents and interviews. Russia’s ambitions included
building a uranium enrichment facility on U.S. soil, the documents show.
The
FBI task force supervising Campbell since 2008 watched as the Obama
administration made more than a half dozen decisions favorable to the
Russians' plan, which ranged from approving the sale of Uranium One to
removing Rosatom from export restrictions and making it easier for
Moscow to win billions in new commercial uranium sales contracts. The
favorable decisions occurred during a time when President Obama and
Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton were pursuing a public "reset" to improve relations with Moscow, a plan that fell apart after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Campbell
also produced leads for the FBI about suspicious activity inside Iran’s
and South Africa’s nuclear industries, the documents show.
And
most importantly, it developed concrete evidence that Tenex — at its
Russian leadership’s behest — had engaged in a massive racketeering
scheme. That evidence led to indictments in 2014 and the convictions of
several figures in 2015.
The defendants who pled guilty included
Mikerin, the very man Russia sent to the United States to lead its
uranium strategy, as well as the head of the American trucking company
that moved Russia’s uranium around the United States.
Multiple
congressional committees recently got permission from the Justice
Department to interview Campbell after The Hill reported last month the
existence of his informant work.
Lawmakers want to know what the
FBI did with the evidence Campbell gathered in real time and whether it
warned Obama and top leaders before they made the Russia-favorable
decisions, like the Uranium One deal.
Since Campbell’s identity
emerged in recent days, there have been several statements by Justice
officials, both on the record and anonymously, casting doubt on the
timing and value of his work, and specifically his knowledge about
Uranium One.
The more than 5,000 pages of documents reviewed by The Hill directly conflict with some of the Justice officials’ accounts.
For instance, both Attorney General
Jeff Sessions
in testimony last week and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in a
letter to the Senate last month tried to suggest there was no connection
between Uranium One and the nuclear bribery case. Their argument was
that the criminal charges weren’t filed until 2014, while the Committee
on Foreign Investment in the United States' (CFIUS) approval of the
Uranium One sale occurred in October 2010.
“The way I understand
that matter is that the case in which Mr. Mikerin was convicted was not
connected to the CFIUS problem that occurred two to three years before,”
Sessions testified to the House Judiciary Committee last week, echoing
Rosenstein’s letter from a few weeks earlier.
But investigative
records show FBI counterintelligence recorded the first illicit payments
in the bribery/kickback scheme in November 2009, a year before the
CFIUS approval.
Campbell also relayed detailed information about
criminal conduct throughout 2010, including the coordinates for various
money laundering drops, according to his FBI debriefing reports. The
evidence Campbell gathered indicated Mikerin’s corruption scheme was
being directed by and benefitting more senior officials with Rosatom and
Tenex back in Russia, the records show, a claim U.S. officials would
make in court years later.
“There is zero doubt we had evidence
of criminal activity before the CFIUS approval and that Justice knew
about it through [the natural security division],” said a source with
direct knowledge of the investigation.
Republican members of
Congress have been angered by the Justice Department’s first answers
because they conflict with the evidence already gathered in their probe.
“Attorney
General Sessions seemed to say that the bribery, racketeering and money
laundering offenses involving Tenex’s Vadim Mikerin occurred after the
approval of the Uranium One deal by the Obama administration. But we
know that the FBI’s confidential informant was actively compiling
incriminating evidence as far back as 2009,” Rep.
Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) told The Hill.
“It
is hard to fathom how such a transaction could have been approved
without the existence of the underlying corruption being disclosed. I
hope AG Sessions gets briefed about the CI and gives the Uranium One
case the scrutiny it deserves,” added DeSantis, whose House Oversight
and Government Reform subcommittee is one of the investigating panels.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman
Chuck Grassley
(R-Iowa) sent a similar rebuke last week to Rosenstein, saying the
deputy attorney general’s first response to the committee “largely
missed the point” of the congressional investigations.
“The
essential question is whether the Obama Justice Department provided
notice of the criminal activity of certain officials before the CFIUS
approval of the Uranium One deal and other government decisions that
enabled the Russians to trade nuclear materials in the U.S.,” Grassley
said.
Flores said Sessions stands by his testimony. "The Attorney
General’s testimony is accurate. The criminal case in which Mikerin was
convicted and the factual and legal requirements needed to make that
case did not address the CFIUS matter," the Justice spokeswoman said.
Similar
misinformation surfaced last week in articles by Reuters and Yahoo News
in which officials were quoted as casting doubt that Campbell had any
information about the Uranium One deal, because Tenex was a different
division of Rosatom than the ARMZ subsidiary that bought the mining
firm.
But Campbell’s FBI informant file shows Uranium One came up
several times in 2010 as the sale was pending, partly because Tenex was
Rosatom’s commercial arm and would be charged with finding markets for
the new uranium being mined and enriched both in the United States and
abroad.
Campbell himself was directly solicited by his colleagues
to help overcome opposition to the Uranium One deal, the FBI informant
files show. In an
Oct. 6, 2010, email with the subject line “ARMZ + Uranium One,” Fisk forwarded a news article outlining Republican efforts to derail the sale.
“The
referenced article may present a very good opportunity for Sigma
[Campbell’s company] to try and remove the opposing influences, if that
is something you can do,” Fisk wrote the informant, who was also a paid
consultant for the company at the time.
The next day, Mikerin was
sent an 11-page report laying out the larger Russian nuclear strategy
and what Russia wanted to do inside the U.S. to gain advantage in the
uranium market. The report cited specific concerns about the political
pressure opposing Uranium One if it wasn’t overcome. Campbell
intercepted the document.
“Some Republicans truly fear the entry
of Russia into the U.S. market, as demonstrated by the fact that they
are taking steps to block the purchase of Uranium One,” the report
warned Mikerin. “This effort bears watching as it may provide clues as
to the likely political reaction if a Russian entity was going to
participate in the construction and operation of a uranium enrichment
plant in the U.S.”
After Rosatom’s sale was approved, Uranium One
officials would have direct contact with Tenex and Mikerin, some of
which was witnessed by Campbell, the documents show.
For
instance, Mikerin forwarded to Campbell an email in 2012 from a Uranium
One executive suggesting the planned construction of a new nuclear
reactor near Augusta, Ga., might prove a good opportunity for both
Uranium One and Tenex to expand their business, the documents show.
Campbell’s
debriefing files also show he regularly mentioned to FBI agents in 2010
a Washington entity with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton that
was being paid millions to help expand Tenex’s business in the United
States. The entity began increasing its financial support to a Clinton
charitable project after it was hired by the Russians, according to the
documents.
Campbell engaged in conversations with his Russian
colleagues about the efforts of the Washington entity and others to gain
influence with the Clintons and the Obama administration. He also
listened as visiting Russians used racially tinged insults to boast
about how easy they found it to win uranium business under Obama,
according to a source familiar with Campbell’s planned testimony to
Congress.
Uranium One was a large enough concern for the
informant that he confronted one of his FBI handlers after learning the
CFIUS had approved the sale and that the U.S. had given
Mikerin a work visa despite the extensive evidence of his criminal activity, the source said.
The
agent responded back to the informant with a comment suggesting
“politics” was involved, the source familiar with Campbell’s planned
testimony said.
Justice officials said federal prosecutors have no
records that Campbell or his lawyer made any allegations about the
Uranium One deal during his debriefings in the criminal case that
started in 2013, but acknowledged he collected evidence about the mining
deal during the FBI counterintelligence investigation that preceded it.
In
recent days, news media including The Washington Post and Fox News
anchor Shepard Smith have inaccurately reported another element of the
story: that Uranium One never exported its American uranium because the
Obama administration did not allow it.
However, the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission authorized Uranium One to export through a third
party tons of uranium to Canada for enrichment processing, and some of
that product ended up in Europe, NRC documents state.
A Uranium
One executive acknowledged to The Hill that 25 percent of the uranium it
shipped to Canada under the third-party export license ended up with
either European or Asian customers through what it known in the nuclear
business as “book transfers.”
But the recent leaks that have most
concerned congressional investigators occurred in a Yahoo story late
Friday, in which Justice officials anonymously questioned Campbell’s
credibility and suggested they had to alter their criminal case against
Mikerin in 2015, eventually striking a plea deal, because they feared he
would be a “disaster” as a trial witness.
The FBI informant
file, however, paints a different picture. After Mikerin pleaded guilty
and was sentenced to 48 months prison in December 2015, the FBI took
Campbell out to a celebratory seafood dinner and delivered a handsome
reward:
a check for $51,046.36 dated Jan. 7, 2016, a copy of which was obtained by The Hill.
A
source directly familiar with the FBI’s evidence said the primary
reason prosecutors working under Rosenstein, then the U.S. attorney in
Maryland, changed course in the case was because of concerns their
initial indictment miscast Campbell’s role in the investigation.
The
original indictments and affidavits portrayed Campbell as a “victim”
who became a confidential witness after the Russians tried to “extort”
him in summer 2009 into a kickback scheme, court records show.
In
fact, Campbell was an informant deeply controlled by FBI
counterintelligence starting when he signed a nondisclosure agreement in
January 2008, more than a year before Mikerin engaged him in the
criminal activity, the FBI’s records show.
Campbell was inserted
inside Mikerin’s world specifically to look for criminal activity and
other harmful national security actions by the Russians, starting with
undercover work he performed as a consultant contracting with a lobbying
firm in 2008 and then inside Tenex starting in 2009, according to
documents and memos.
Campbell’s regular debriefings dating to
2008 show the nature of some of his undercover work, including making
surreptitious recordings and collecting documents well before the first
money laundering started inside Tenex in 2009. He also had a long
history of collaboration with U.S. intelligence, including the FBI, that
predated his case, sources told The Hill.
To facilitate his
cover, Campbell made a cash payment in summer 2009 to a Russian
consultant after he secured the Tenex consulting contract. His Russian
colleagues demanded he hire the overseas consultant to better learn the
company's strategy and how the Russians preferred to receive their
consulting reports, sources said.
The transaction later worried
prosecutors in the criminal case because they feared it might muddy
their case of extortion against Mikerin because the voluntary payment
was made only shortly before the kickback demands started, the sources
said.
The prosecutors also faced another concern about the case unrelated to Campbell, the sources said.
When
Fisk — one of the main targets of their bribery investigation — died in
2011, the FBI did not execute a grand jury subpoena to capture all of
his evidence. Instead, agents asked his widow for permission to
voluntarily search his computer hard drive and remove the documents the
agents wanted.
The hard drive was subsequently discarded before
the criminal charges were filed, leaving it unavailable for defense
lawyers to search, the sources said. Defense lawyers pounced on the
revelation late in the case, court records show.
At the time,
Fisk was a larger than life figure inside the Russian nuclear industry,
having headed the trucking firm that moved uranium across the United
States on behalf of Rosatom. Campbell helped the FBI document that both
Fisk, starting in 2004, and a successor, starting in 2011, at the
trucking firm were paying bribes to the Russians, the records show.
During
2010, Fisk was transitioning from the trucking firm to become a key
strategist for Tenex and Mikerin, advising them on the Russian nuclear
industry’s aggressive push to expand its business in the United States.
Sources
said the recasting of the prosecution in 2015 had much to do with
avoiding exposing the extensive nature of the FBI counterintelligence
operations that involved Campbell.
“This isn’t really about his
credibility or work, which generated leads we relied on well into 2016.
Often times, CI investigations are focused first on monitoring and
stopping activity that threatens U.S. security and the consequences to
later criminal case are a secondary concern,” said one source familiar
with the probe. “That’s the reality of a dirty business.”
Asked
whether the criminal side of the Justice Department knew about
Campbell’s work, including its origins to 2008 and its possible ties to
Uranium One, a source with direct knowledge said the prosecutors
acquired all of Campbell’s emails as part of a 2015 agreement he signed.
Justice also had access to Campbell’s emails recovered from Fisk’s
computers in 2011 as well as documents Campbell gave during debriefings
that started in 2008, the source added.
The sources familiar with
the full body of Campbell’s work said they expect he can provide
significant new information to Congress.
“Will he be able to
prove that we knew Russia was engaged in criminal conduct before Uranium
One was approved? You bet,” the source said. “Were the Russians using
political influence and pulling political levers to try to win stuff
from the U.S. government? You bet. Was he perfect? No one in this line
of work is. But we were focused on much larger issues than just that.”
Campbell
endured significant stress during his time undercover and suffered a
handful of episodes related to drinking, resulting in two misdemeanor
reckless driving charges and one misdemeanor driving under the
influence, his lawyer said.
Attorney Victoria Toensing told The
Hill that the FBI was fully aware of the drinking incidents and
continued to use her client for many years after.
“Until he began
working undercover for the U.S. government in his early 60s, Mr.
Campbell had an unblemished driving record,” she said. “However, the
pressure of living a double life and being threatened by the Russians if
he violated their trust took a toll.
“Additionally, there were
numerous occasions where he was required to meet socially with the
Russians, who were prodigious imbibers of vodka. Any refusal by him to
participate could have compromised his cover. Mr. Campbell has not had
any driving or drinking issue since 2014 when he ceased working
undercover."