Brent Bozell: Media Involved in Cover-Up of ‘Uranium One’ Story

Former President Bill Clinton was paid the exorbitant sum of $500,000 for a single speech he gave in Moscow shortly before a Russian government-controlled company successfully acquired a Canadian company that controls 20 percent of the uranium in mines in the U.S. But television news networks are refusing to cover the story, and seem all of a sudden to have lost interest in Russia.

“This is a bombshell story of Watergate-like proportions,” Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center said on Monday in a statement. “What will it take for the media to deem it newsworthy?”

In a study of network news shows, the Media Research Center found that there was a total blackout of news on the Uranium One deal, and the failure of the Obama Administration to stop it, on both ABC and NBC in the last week, while CBS News spent just 69 seconds on the story.

CNN has ignored the story almost entirely, with almost every show for the past five days focused on Trump’s call to the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in an ambush in Niger.

The story is particularly striking in that it seems to show collusion between the Russians and … not Trump, but the Clintons, through the Clinton Foundation.

The owner of the Canadian firm, Uranium One, that the Russians were allowed to purchase, is a man named Frank Giustra, who is one of 11 members of the board of directors of the Clinton Foundation. According to Newsweek, people connected with Giustra and Uranium One gave a total of $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Meanwhile, the FBI was moving slowly on the racketeering investigation into the U.S.-based company Tenex, a subsidiary of the Russian government-owned atomic energy company Rosatom. And as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton did not raise objection to the sale of Uranium One to Tenex.

The successful acquisition of Uranium One by the Russian government was celebrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had spoken openly of his personal desire to get control of the world supply of uranium, used in nuclear weapons.

The story broke into the open last week on the website Circa and in The Hill, with news that the FBI had an informant, a man hired to lobby on behalf of Tenex, feeding the bureau information about bribery and kickback schemes, but that it was holding him to a nondisclosure agreement, and threatening him with reprisals if he broke it. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to release the informant from this agreement and allow him to testify to Congress about what he knows, and what he saw.

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But television news, which reaches the widest audience, for the most part refused to cover the story.

“This is beyond irresponsible journalism,” said Bozell. “The media are now complicit in a blatant cover-up.”

But how long can it last?

On Tuesday afternoon, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), announced that his committee would be investigating what happened, how the Russian-owned firm was allowed to gain control of one-fifth of the U.S. uranium reserves, and whether political corruption played a part.