Newly declassified FBI and DOJ records have revived scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation’s ties to the Uranium One deal — records that closely track and reinforce investigative reporting first brought to national attention by Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer.
Schweizer posted on X in response to Just the News’s reporting on the internal memos, saying, “We broke the Uranium One story back in my 2015 book Clinton Cash. Now it emerges that while federal investigators believed there was ‘significant evidence worth pursuing related to criminal activity,’ Obama officials shut the investigation down.”
Records obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee detail that federal investigators believed there was “significant evidence worth pursuing related to criminal activity” involving the Clinton Foundation and the U.S. government’s approval of the Uranium One sale to Russian state-owned nuclear company Rosatom, a deal that resulted in the Russian government acquiring roughly 20 percent of America’s uranium production capacity.
According to internal FBI and DOJ records, the investigation, which began in January 2016 with full field and preliminary investigations launched out of the FBI’s Little Rock, New York, and Washington offices, was progressively hindered by DOJ and FBI leadership, including then Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and then FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. The case stalled due to leadership delays, and by early 2018, internal disagreements emerged among prosecutors over whether the statute of limitations had expired, a point of contention between local field offices and senior officials, with some arguing that flawed legal interpretations prematurely ended investigative efforts.
A 2018 email from Jonathan Ross, then-First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and now U.S. Attorney in Arkansas, wrote there was “no legal barrier in continuing the present investigation,” citing a timeline of payments to the Clinton Foundation made “continuously from 2007 through 2014.” Ross raised concerns that a flawed statute of limitations opinion from a respected colleague had discouraged local investigators from pursuing the case. He recounted that the prosecutor believed the statute expired on February 1, 2018, and when asked about 18 U.S.C. § 3287 — which can extend statutes in wartime fraud cases — responded, “No. I’ve never heard of it.”
The newly declassified FBI timeline noted that DOJ officials failed to consider if “acts of concealment,” such as email deletions in 2015, could have extended the statute, and that prosecutors should have evaluated potential violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, major fraud against the United States, and bank fraud statutes.
Then-U.S. Attorney Cody Hiland, now a federal judge, supported Ross’s interpretation in his communications with other U.S. attorneys, writing that agents still believed the case was worth pursuing and expressing frustration that a 2018 opinion from DOJ leadership had cast a “permanent pall” over the investigation. Hiland urged that additional steps — including interviews with key figures such as Frank Giustra and Ian Telfer — be completed before closing the case.
Giustra and Telfer were both associated with Uranium One. Giustra, a Canadian mining financier who helped create the company, later donated over $100 million to the Clinton Foundation through initiatives he co-founded. Telfer, who served as Uranium One’s chairman during the Rosatom acquisition, contributed $2.35 million to the foundation. Both had financial ties to the company prior to its sale, which required approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), where then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a seat.
As reported in The New York Times in 2015, donations from Uranium One stakeholders to the Clinton Foundation flowed around the time the deal was under consideration. Bill Clinton also received a $500,000 speaking fee from a Kremlin-linked bank promoting Uranium One stock.
The Uranium One matter was originally explored during the Obama administration, which sought closer relations with Russia under its “reset” policy. But even as the sale advanced, the FBI had already developed evidence, including recordings and documents, indicating that Russian officials were engaged in a racketeering and bribery scheme tied to the U.S. uranium market. Some of that evidence came from Douglas Campbell, an FBI informant who said he witnessed Russian nuclear executives planning to route millions to entities associated with Bill Clinton during the CFIUS review process.
Though U.S. Attorney John Huber was tapped by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2017 to review allegations regarding Uranium One, his work never rose to the level of a special counsel, and documents now show the investigation wound down quietly by 2020, despite internal disagreements about remaining investigative leads. The 2023 report by Special Counsel John Durham later stated his office did not interpret its mandate as including Uranium One.
Meanwhile, the implications of the Uranium One deal and related Obama-era nuclear agreements continue to impact U.S. energy policy. These policies helped facilitate America’s long-term reliance on Russian-enriched uranium. In November 2024, Russia imposed new restrictions on uranium exports to the United States, highlighting the strategic vulnerability created by this dependency. In response, Congress passed the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act.
Schweizer has consistently framed the Uranium One deal around the central question of whether donors “made large foundation contributions to the Clintons” and in return “got favorable treatment” from Hillary Clinton’s State Department. He has also contended that the Clintons created a “system that said, ‘We are going to get paid while we are in political office,’” in which foundation donors “stood to gain from this deal being approved.” Schweizer has further emphasized that violations involving the misuse of a nonprofit for personal enrichment — unlike typical corruption charges — do not carry a statute of limitations.
The Clinton Foundation did not respond to a request for comment, according to Just the News. While internal memos show that career investigators raised concerns about delays and statute of limitations arguments, the public record does not include explanations from DOJ or FBI leadership about the decision to wind down the investigation.
