Mega-Thread: Mueller investigation

[Skroe]

Is it?

Revisit history and think back on what people would have thought about selling access to a strategic supply of fuel/munition component to a hostile nuclear armed foreign power. Increase level of thinking difficulty if you apply red scare laws, cold war scenarios, etc. A few decades ago, Hilldog and her rapist husband would have been executed on grounds for treason.

Please, enlighten this community on the "fake facts".

Ypu're a liar. How's that for enlightening.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.4cdd498a45f8

“How is it that our government could approve a sale of 20 percent of our uranium at the same time that there was an open FBI investigation?”
— Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), interview with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto, Oct. 26, 2017

“Knowing what you know about Russia, was it really a good idea for the Obama administration and the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to approve a deal giving the Russians control of 20 percent of our uranium supply? . . . Why did Hillary’s office and the Obama administration sign off on giving the Russians a fifth of our uranium? . . . Why is that a good idea to give a hostile power 20 percent of our uranium supplies? It’s insane though. . . . How would Hillary Clinton not know if a Russian company was getting 20 percent of our uranium supply? What was she doing?”
— Tucker Carlson, on Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Oct. 23

More than a year ago, the Fact Checker labeled as false various claims that Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, had made about Hillary Clinton’s alleged role in the approval of the sale of a Canadian company, Uranium One, with mining rights in the United States to Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear energy agency. We’ve delved deep into the tale and also recently wrote an update since Rep. Devin Nunes, head of the House Intelligence Committee, announced that Congress would launch a new probe.

Here, we are going to take a closer look at a key claim: that the sale involved “20 percent of our uranium.” Look at how often Tucker Carlson brought up this line in a recent show, saying it was “insane” for Clinton not to realize that “a Russian company was getting 20 percent of our uranium supply.”

Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump White House aide, even suggested that Clinton should be tried and potentially executed because “the Russians infiltrated our national security to corner the uranium market, and they succeeded.”

We have noted repeatedly that extracted uranium could not be exported by Russia without a license — which Rosatom does not have — but even so, this 20 percent figure is especially misleading. At the Fact Checker, we have described it a bit more precisely as “mining licenses for about 20 percent of U.S. uranium extraction capacity.” But we were out of date; it turns out “20 percent” is an especially stale number.

The Facts

The original 20 percent figure comes from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, one of the agencies that approved the deal in 2010. It stated that as of 2010 the licenses “represent approximately 20 percent of the currently licensed uranium in-situ recovery production capacity” in the United States.

In-situ recovery (ISR) is one of two ways to obtain uranium from underground; it’s the main method in the United States. It’s generally used for low-grade ore that would be otherwise too expensive to mine. A solution is pumped into the ore deposit to dissolve the uranium. The resulting liquid is then pumped back out, dried so it becomes “yellowcake” and placed in 55-gallon drums before it is taken to a uranium conversion facility for eventual use in a nuclear power reactor.

But the 20 percent number was a 2010 estimate that has now been overtaken by events, such as additional mining licenses being issued. The Energy Information Administration has a current list of ISR projects, and the Uranium One assets now represent much less than 20 percent production capacity because other U.S. operations have been approved.

“The NRC has licensed additional in-situ uranium facilities since the 20-percent figure was estimated (and it was an estimate),” an NRC spokesman said in an email. “Our current estimate would be closer to 10 percent.”

The spokesman added: “Note also that even the original figure does not include conventional mines, and was nowhere near saying they controlled 20 percent of U.S. uranium reserves.”

Uranium One has already sold some U.S. assets and may be looking to unload more, an industry official said. That’s because the U.S. holdings were incidental to the Rosatom purchase of Uranium One; it was more interested in the company’s holdings in Kazakhstan, the world’s leading uranium producer.

Production capacity is one thing, but the reality is actual production. In fact, so much Kazakh uranium is flooding the market that uranium prices have dropped and production in the United States has plummeted. The industry official said total U.S. production in 2017 is expected to be less than 1,000 tons — and production in 2016 was just 1,126 tons. By contrast, Uranium One’s mines in Kazakhstan alone extracted nearly 3,000 tons in 2016.

Uranium One’s U.S. business has shrunk so quickly that it now represents a tiny part of U.S. production. In 2016, its Willow Creek facility extracted just 23 tons. That’s 2.3 percent of all U.S. production. In 2015, the project represented 3.6 percent of U.S. production and in 2014, 11.3 percent. In 2013, it was still 20 percent. Two other Uranium One facilities currently are not being mined.

This chart shows how Uranium One’s U.S. production compares with total U.S. production, and how U.S. production compares with worldwide production, based on information from the World Nuclear Association. “Uranium production in the U.S. is so small that I would rarely, if ever, use a statistic like that. It’s meaningless,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “Twenty percent of bubkes is still bubkes.”

Furthermore both the US and Russia have (a) far, far more uranium than they need to make more nuclear weapons, and (b) fast breeder reactors that would allow them to quickly make even more if need be.

Fun fact about Russia - Vladmir Putin was desperate to cut The ~3000 warheads Russia had in the active stockpile under START I to 1550 under NewSTART (the succesor treaty). So much so that he acceded to rather ridiculous demands on the US part. In fact, if Putin had his way, the US and Russia would cut down to below 1000 warheads.

Why?

A nuclear warhead sitting in storage is useless. It is a gigantic annual money sink just existing. But it gets even worse when you attach them to ballistic missiles. If the US and Russia ever actually nuked each other, it would be the greatest single act of simultaneous rocket launching in human history. All these ballistic missiles amount to basically space vehicles. And Russia and the US spend an enormous amount of money assuring that they're reliable so if the order launch came, they could actually get off the ground. The stakes are a fair bit higher than say, with your civilian space launch rocket, where if there is an engine problem, they can just reschedule the launch to the next day.

Russia's nuclear arsenal has been the crippling wall against it's conventional military expansion for nearly 20 years. As a function of it's defense budget, it is twice as large as the US spends, because the US has a highly homogeneous system (one ICBM, one SLBM, one ballistic missile submarine, one bomber, two bombs), while Russia has an complex and highly heterogeneous system it inherited from the USSR.

If you want to see a reflection of this expansion, consider the state of the US and Russian strategic Arsenals. The US has 1550 warheads on 800 launchers (the maximum allowed by treaty). Russia has 1550 warheads on about 450 launchers. It can't afford more than that. It would love to cut down to as few as 200 launchers. But it can't do so unless the US agrees to the same, which it won't, because that would constitute unilateral disarmament on Russia's part.

Put together, the Uranium claim is ridiculous from both angle. It's ridiculous from the angle of it somehow being a big share of stockpile -it isn't. And it is ridiculous from the perspective that the Russians need or want it. They don't. They would love less.

[Adam Jensen]

And we have The Pizza King himself.... whats his face. Who cares.

Dude.

How could you forget Herman Fucking Cain? He might have had no business being up there, but at least his campaign was hilariously incompetent and entertaining.

[Skroe]

Dude.

How could you forget Herman Fucking Cain? He might have had no business being up there, but at least his campaign was hilariously incompetent and entertaining.

And he grossly irresponsible by being such a patronizing simpleton as to promise a tax code, the 9-9-9 plan, straight out of a Dominos Pizza menu.

As fun as he is, crap like that feeds the the stupid people and the paranoid nutjobs in the party's worst impulses.

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Was Papadopoulos in London last week?

Evidently yes he was! (look at the date)


That photo of him being passed around was taken outside Harrods, right near the Ecuadorian Embassy.


Who could he have been meeting at the Ecuadorian Embassy? Sounds familiar.



Ah right. Julian Assange.

[Deleted]

Evidently yes he was!

Surely he needed an FBI waiver to go to London. Me thinks some people might be quite worried right now if they met with him.

[Skroe]

The New York Daily News wins with the cover of the month.



"Smashing Trumpkins".

Rofl.

[Shalcker]

I stopped at... ‘the emails Russia had, could have been the ones she deleted’... seriously?

At that point (in March/April 2016) that would be the only "emails" Russians could theoretically dangle to Papadopoulos. No other "emails" were talked about back then.

[Skroe]

At that point (in March/April 2016) that would be the only "emails" Russians could theoretically dangle to Papadopoulos. No other "emails" were talked about back then.

You're lying again.

No other "emails" were talked about back then because the DNC hack, which had happened earlier, was not yet public knowledge. But Russian intelligence, which committed the hack, offered them up through an intermediary.

This has been stated, by this point, around 50 times in this thread. It is the proof of collusion.

But as I said, we're dealing with our internal problem first. Russia's punishment has only begun.

[Shalcker]

Criminal charges are being filed against members of Trump's campaign staff, as we speak. No such charges are outstanding or hinted at in any respect regarding Democratic candidates, past or future. Pulling a "both sides are bad" in this case is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate and distract from the actual events ongoing, by making baseless and unwarranted allusions to bad behaviour by the Democrats which, in your argument, would be equally bad. But those things you're alluding to are figments of your own imagination, not the reality we're living in, where this is occurring among the Republican President's past campaign staff.

Podesta resignation due to his clear connection to Manafort is mostly in Democratic camp though.

In fact, quoting from twitter, "virtually every charge is before Manafort worked for Trump but while he was working for Podesta".

[Deleted]

Looks like the FBI is now interested in Farage.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...ump-and-russia

[Deleted]

Looks like the FBI is now interested in Farage.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...ump-and-russia

This is better than a Le Carré spy novel. Farage is somehow linked to Assange, who is in turn somehow connected to the Kremlin as well. If there's a deep state, then it's a destructive alt-right one with only one goal: to destabilize western society and sow chaos.

[Shalcker]

No other "emails" were talked about back then because the DNC hack, which had happened earlier, was not yet public knowledge. But Russian intelligence, which committed the hack, offered them up through an intermediary.

DNC emails aren't Hillary emails; DNC isn't mentioned anywhere in document.

Less wishful thinking please.

[Deleted]

This is better than a Le Carré spy novel. Farage is somehow linked to Assange, who is in turn somehow connected to the Kremlin as well. If there's a deep state, then it's a destructive alt-right one with only one goal: to destabilize western society and sow chaos.

This is from an old story :

'On 9 March 2017, an ordinary Thursday morning, Ian Stubbings, a 35-year-old Londoner, was walking down the street near his office in South Kensington when he spotted a familiar face. He turned and saw a man entering the redbrick terrace which houses the Ecuadorian embassy, where the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been holed up since 2012. And the familiar face? It was Nigel Farage, the man who spearheaded Britain’s exit from the European Union.

“I thought ‘hang on a moment’,” Stubbings says. “‘That looks a bit dodgy.’ I knew the building was the embassy because I often see camera crews outside. But there was no one else around. I was the only person who’d seen him. And I didn’t know what the significance was – and I still don’t actually – but I thought: that’s got to be worth telling and I was the only person who’d witnessed it.”

So, at 11.22am, he tweeted it. His handle is @custardgannet and he wrote: “Genuine scoop: just saw Nigel Farage enter the Ecuadorian embassy.” Moments later, a reporter from BuzzFeed, who happened to follow him on Twitter, picked it up and tweeted him back, and Stubbings told her: “No press or cameras around.”


No press or cameras around, that is, until BuzzFeed turned up just in time to catch Farage leaving, 40 minutes later. “Nigel Farage Just Visited the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,” the headline said. “Asked by BuzzFeed News if he’d been visiting Julian Assange, the former Ukip leader said he could not remember what he had been doing in the building.”

[ati87]

I wonder if the FBI is going to round up other European nationalists that have frequently colluded with Russians. Boy is that list long. Let's hope Mueller picks up the trash for us as well

Interesting enough if the size and scope of this investigation is large enough this may move the EU looking into the dealings of certain right-wingers who for some magical reason are pro unhealthy Russia just like the trump campaign.

[Shadowmelded]

Looks like the FBI is now interested in Farage.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...ump-and-russia

I think that's an old article.

This is better than a Le Carré spy novel. Farage is somehow linked to Assange, who is in turn somehow connected to the Kremlin as well. If there's a deep state, then it's a destructive alt-right one with only one goal: to destabilize western society and sow chaos.

Oh there's another link btw. Cambridge Analytica (linked to Bannon and the Mercers, brought in by Kushner, who reached out to Assange to help with the 33k emails) played a pretty big part in the Brexit campaign.

[ati87]

It's an issue all over Europe. Local governments might not be willing to deal with it just yet but they would easily cooperate with a foreign corruption probe.

I mean let's face it, this case will at some point have to deal with money laundering and that means several EU banks will be involved and asked to cooperate.
It's is a horrible fact that while small farmers and entrepreneurs are suffering from the EU sanctioning their Russian market, many of our banks are making a fortune illegally circumventing those sanctions.

I can guess which banks

Deutsche Bank and every UK bank

But you know Le Pen used to get allot of loans from Russia because no French bank would fun her since a corruption scandal a few years ago (not that that little fact mattered she still was a snowflake that played the victim card)

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-...-viktor-orban/

I would start with these people and every party that seems to want to destroy the EU. Since we know that Russian trolls are stoking our village idiots up I would want to know how much and what we can do to protect our selfs from this idiots. Ofc they will never admit that they are getting manipulated but that's another problem on itself

[rogueMatthias]

Looks like the FBI is now interested in Farage.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...ump-and-russia

THE Nigel Farage?

This is better than a Le Carré spy novel. Farage is somehow linked to Assange, who is in turn somehow connected to the Kremlin as well. If there's a deep state, then it's a destructive alt-right one with only one goal: to destabilize western society and sow chaos.

We're definately talking about the same Farage?

I wonder if the FBI is going to round up other European nationalists that have frequently colluded with Russians. Boy is that list long. Let's hope Mueller picks up the trash for us as well

This is too funny. When I laugh that half the posts in this thread read like hilarious wish-fulfilment fan fiction, this is a great example.

Nigel Farage is just an idiot. They wouldn't let him on the muppet show because they thought he was TOO MUCH of a muppet.

You're all talking like he's "Nigel Farage, international man of mystery" LOL. WTF guys, grasping at straws much.

[Vizardlorde]

THE Nigel Farage?

We're definately talking about the same Farage?

This is too funny. When I laugh that half the posts in this thread read like hilarious wish-fulfilment fan fiction, this is a great example.

Nigel Farage is just an idiot. They wouldn't let him on the muppet show because they thought he was TOO MUCH of a muppet.

You're all talking like he's "Nigel Farage, international man of mystery" LOL. WTF guys, grasping at straws much.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

[Machismo]

Is it?

Revisit history and think back on what people would have thought about selling access to a strategic supply of fuel/munition component to a hostile nuclear armed foreign power. Increase level of thinking difficulty if you apply red scare laws, cold war scenarios, etc. A few decades ago, Hilldog and her rapist husband would have been executed on grounds for treason.

Please, enlighten this community on the "fake facts".

Do you have any evidence to back up those claims?

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He was the POTUS, she was just an intern. The power dynamic between the two was such that it made it complicated to discuss how much choice she would have had in the matter.

And yet, people still supported Trump through it all...

Man,. I'm glad I didn't support a guy who admitted to sexual assault, and sexualized his own daughters.

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She did sell, as in approve of the sale, of upwards to 20% of a strategic nuclear asset to a hostile foreign power. In return, CF received 145 million, BC 500k personally at a time which "surprised FBI officials". All of which was happening during an active extortion and bribery investigation which gag orders had to be issued and in which the sale was approved from SoS to POTUS.

Imagine the media reaction if Trump approved the sale of 20% uranium to Rosatom? It would be the fappening 2.0 for the perpetual victim cucked alt-left and like minded losers.

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It does leave the country for enrichment.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_C...ct_allegations

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Stop being a rapist apologist

And you supported a candidate who colluded with that hostile foreign power.

What does that make you?

[Skroe]

Teapot Dome.
Watergate.
Iran-Contra.
Trump-Russia.

[GennGreymane]

Anything new since yesterday?