Former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Andrew McCarthy said Monday on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that former President Barack Obama’s administration should have prosecuted the American subsidiary of the Russian atomic energy company for racketeering before it was able to acquire the Canadian company Uranium One and get control of 20 percent of all uranium in the U.S.

McCarthy, a contributing editor at National Review, noted that the Obama administration’s Justice Department knew at the time about the illegal activities conducted by Tenam USA, the U.S. arm of Tenex, a subsidiary of the Russian nuclear energy company Rosotam. At the time, the Justice Department already knew about Tenam USA’s racketeering enterprise, which allowed felony extortion, money-laundering, and fraud, McCarthy noted. The events in question also occurred under 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

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Nevertheless, the Obama administration allowed 20 percent of the United States’ uranium reserves to fall under Russian control to take place in 2010. And “the bottom line,” McCarthy said, was that the Obama administration “green-lighted a very dubious transition, which enabled the Putin regime in Russia to acquire … 20 percent of the U.S. uranium stock.”

“The Obama Justice Department had an active prosecutable racketeering investigation against a subsidiary of Rosatam, that is the American arm of this Russian government-controlled company that was trying to expand Putin’s energy interests in the United States,” he said. “The Justice Department had a racketeering case that it could easily have prosecuted at that point, but did not bring the case under circumstances where bringing it would surely have scotched the deal that allowed Russians to acquire our uranium.”

Instead of immediately prosecuting those involved in the scheme, Obama’s Justice Department largely kept the matter out of the spotlight and continued investigating the scheme for four more years, The Hill said last week in its bombshell report. Tenam’s Russian general manager, Vadim Mikerin, was the subject of the Justice Department’s racketeering investigation.

“And then they quietly brought the case about four years later — probably right as the statute of limitations was about to run on some of the major crimes in the case,” McCarthy said. “But mainly because by then it was clear that the Russian reset strategy of the Obama administration was a failure, once Russia annexed Crimea and was about to invade Ukraine. And at that point, they finally brought the case.”

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Indictment documents from November 2014 revealed that Mikerin “did knowingly and willfully combine, conspire confederate and agree with other persons … to obstruct, delay and affect commerce and the movement of an article and commodity [enriched uranium] in commerce by extortion.” Mikerin and other defendants reached plea deals in August 2015 just before Labor Day, and Mikerin was sentenced on December 15 of that year with little fanfare.

“As you can imagine, a case like this in the Justice Department is one of these things that they celebrate with press conferences and all the bells and whistles … and the big, high-profile prosecutions,” McCarthy said. “Here, they did everything under the radar. They took, you know, they pled the case out, they allowed the pleas to be announced just before Labor Day. They arranged the sentencing would take place just before Christmas. Nothing got publicized.”

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“They basically did a minor conspiracy count for what was a major conspiracy prosecution. And they obviously thought no one would ever look into it,” he added.