by Stu Cvrk
Could there POSSIBLY be an Iranian connection?
The Uranium One scandal was a 2010 controversy in which the Obama administration approved the takeover of Uranium One—a Canadian company with significant uranium mining assets in the United States—by Russia’s state-owned Rosatom corporation. Critics alleged a pay-to-play scheme, pointing to large donations (roughly $145 million) to the Clinton Foundation from individuals connected to Uranium One and its investors, as well as a $500,000 speaking fee paid to Bill Clinton by a Russian bank involved in the deal.
The conventional wisdom is that no evidence was uncovered of improper influence or criminal wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton or other U.S. officials in the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approval process, though the foreign donations and influence aspects have never been fully resolved.
Could the “conventional wisdom” be wrong (because it was manufactured to hide the reality), and could the truth of those elusive foreign connections involve Iran?
Let us take a deep dive and speculate using facts and logic.
URANIUM ONE ORIGINS AND PURPOSE
Uranium One started as a South African-Canadian mining company. It became a major uranium player after absorbing UrAsia Energy in February 2007. UrAsia’s chairman was Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining financier and longtime Bill Clinton associate. Giustra had negotiated Kazakh uranium mining rights beginning in 2005, and in September 2005 he and Bill Clinton traveled to Kazakhstan and dined with President Nazarbayev; UrAsia closed its Kazakh mining deals shortly after. UrAsia’s share value rose roughly seventyfold between 2005 and 2007, and Giustra donated $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation in 2006—an amount later dwarfed by further pledges once his UrAsia stake was sold into Uranium One two months later.
Rosatom’s stated purpose in acquiring Uranium One was straightforward from Moscow’s perspective: vertical integration of its state nuclear conglomerate into global uranium supply, part of a broader post-2008 push (noted in leaked State Department cables) to secure uranium sources after Russia felt constrained by import limits elsewhere.
THE CHRONOLOGY
2005–2007: Giustra/UrAsia secure Kazakh uranium rights; UrAsia merges into Uranium One (Feb. 2007); Giustra exits and begins large Clinton Foundation donations.
2009: Rosatom subsidiary ARMZ begins acquiring a stake in Uranium One (first tranche, ~17%).
June 2010: Rosatom announces a deal to acquire majority control. Because Uranium One held U.S. mining assets (Wyoming), the acquisition of Uranium One by Rosatom required review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States because uranium is considered a strategic asset with national security implications.
2010: CFIUS’s nine-member agencies unanimously approve the deal; no member raised a formal security objection. The committee approved the proposal, and in 2013 Russia assumed 100 percent ownership, renaming the company Uranium One Holding.
June 29, 2010: Renaissance Capital, a Kremlin-linked bank promoting Uranium One stock, pays Bill Clinton $500,000 for a Moscow speech shortly after the deal’s announcement.
2009–2013: As Rosatom’s stake grows in stages, Ian Telfer (Uranium One’s chairman) makes four donations totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation through his family foundation—donations the Foundation later admitted it failed to disclose despite a transparency pledge.
2013: Rosatom completes full ownership.
2017–2020: House Republicans open an investigation; DOJ appoints U.S. Attorney John Huber to review the matter (2017); the inquiry never becomes a special counsel probe and winds down by 2020 without public findings.
2023: Special Counsel John Durham’s final report did not include Uranium One.
2025–2026: Newly declassified FBI/DOJ records surface via the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), reportedly describing internal assessments that there was “significant evidence worth pursuing” on possible criminal activity tied to the Foundation and the sale—reigniting the controversy.
WHO MADE MONEY OFF THE DEAL
Frank Giustra: Sold his UrAsia/Uranium One stake in 2007, three years before the Rosatom deal review. Total lifetime Clinton Foundation giving exceeds $100 million; he sits on the foundation’s board. Fact-checkers note he had exited the company well before the CFIUS-reviewed transactions.
Ian Telfer: Remained Uranium One’s chairman through the Rosatom acquisitions; donated $2.35 million via his family foundation, undisclosed at the time.
Bill Clinton: $500,000 speaking fee from a Kremlin-linked bank in 2010.
Other Uranium One–connected donors: Nine individuals related to the company donated to the Clinton Foundation, though PolitiFact’s review found only Telfer’s donations fell clearly within the deal’s timeframe. Were the delayed donations merely set up to look like there was no Uranium One connection?
Russian side: Rosatom’s U.S. executive Vadim Mikerin was later convicted in a separate racketeering case (kickbacks, bribery, extortion) tied to Rosatom’s U.S. nuclear business—a scheme the FBI had informant evidence on as early as 2009, before CFIUS approved the deal.
CFIUS PLAYERS AND POTENTIAL CORRUPTION
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is a nine-member interagency body (State, Treasury, DOJ, DOD, Commerce, Energy, DHS, USTR, and OSTP), and it does not have unilateral veto power—that rests with the president, and any recommendation goes through consensus review by all nine agencies.
Hillary Clinton did not personally sit on the committee; Assistant Secretary of State Jose Fernandez represented State and has said Clinton was not involved in the matter, with several former State and DOJ officials saying it would be unlikely for her to have more than nominal involvement since these reviews are handled by career civil servants. How plausible are these denials (by Clinton appointees, no less) given what the Clinton Foundation received from Frank Giustra et al?
The corruption allegation (“use of high office to influence the decision”) rests almost entirely on inference from timing: donations flowed from Uranium One–linked figures during the review period, and Bill Clinton was paid by a Kremlin-linked bank around the same time. Official investigations conducted by the DoJ and FBI have conveniently found no criminal behavior. Given the manipulation by these investigating agencies in the Russia hoax and later scandals, including former FBI Director James Comey’s whitewashing of Hillary Clinton’s email server scandal in 2016, how plausible is it that “nothing was found”?
Interestingly, newly surfaced 2025–2026 FBI/DoJ memos are the most significant open question. Reporting by Just the News says they describe an internal assessment that “significant evidence worth pursuing” existed and that the Obama-era DoJ did not pursue it further.
Here is a very interesting quote from those emails, specifically from former US Attorney Cody Hiland, who was involved in the 2018 investigation: “[T]he intelligence summary regarding Uranium One … fails to account for the dynamic related to possible deliberately false statements that may have been made by U/O officials to CFIUS to induce the authorization to sell U/O to Rosatom (i.e. that Rosatom could not export uranium).”
Even more damning was this quote that implied a pending investigation that may have been quashed: “There are remaining investigative tasks that should be completed before making a final assessment of the U/O [Uranium One] matter…. [including interviewing] the foreign nationals specifically identified by [Redacted] as having made statements concerning the attempts to use the Foundation as a vehicle to influence the Secretary of State.”
Bottom line: there is a well-documented appearance of conflict (donations, speaking fees, timing) and documented Russian criminal conduct in the broader nuclear sector, but no investigation to date has yet produced hard evidence of a quid pro quo directly implicating Clinton’s CFIUS role. The newly declassified memos may change that picture depending on what they actually show when made public.
WHERE THE URANIUM WENT
There was one documented export, according to The Hill. NRC records show a shipment of yellowcake from the Russian-owned U.S. mines to Canada in 2012 through a third party, with the Obama administration later approving the transfer of a portion of that shipment to Europe. No exports have occurred since.
That 2012 Wyoming to Ontario (Canada) shipment is the one hard data point in the public record. NRC/CNSC incident reports (from a Blind River refinery spill investigation) show the yellowcake drum involved had been shipped from Uranium One’s Willow Creek Facility in Wyoming on May 29, 2012, to Cameco’s Blind River refinery in Ontario—that’s the “third party” as referenced in that report from The Hill. Cameco is Canada’s dominant uranium company and operates the world’s largest uranium refinery (Blind River) and Canada’s only conversion facility (Port Hope).
From there, the normal processing chain is:
- Blind River (Ontario)—refines yellowcake into uranium trioxide (UO₃)
- Port Hope (Ontario)—converts UO₃ into uranium hexafluoride (UF₆, “hex”) for light-water reactor fuel, or uranium dioxide for Canada deuterium uranium (CANDU) reactors
- Since Canada has no enrichment capability, the UF₆ is shipped onward—Cameco’s own description of its export pattern says its Port Hope hex is transported by truck or ocean freighter to enrichment plants in the United States, Japan, and Europe.
Uranium One’s U.S. production (Willow Creek/Christensen Ranch, Wyoming) was sold, like virtually all Western-mined uranium, under confidential long-term supply contracts to nuclear utilities—not sold as raw ore on a spot market to end-users directly (standard industry practice). The most likely commercial destinations are U.S. and allied nuclear utilities (U.S. reactors consume the vast majority of Wyoming ISR production domestically, since ISR-mined material rarely gets exported given the added cost/friction of export licensing).
Once Rosatom owned Uranium One outright (2013), commercial logic would suggest more of that output could be marketed through Rosatom’s global trading arm (TENEX-Techsnabexport or Rosatom’s international fuel-cycle business) rather than solely through U.S. utility contracts. This is a logical inference from Rosatom’s usual global marketing structure, not a documented shipment per se.
IS THERE AN IRANIAN CONNECTION?
So far, there is no documented evidence—in any congressional investigation, NRC export record, or FBI file that has surfaced—that any Uranium One material reached Iran. In fact, the probability that Uranium One-derived material specifically ended up in Iran is low based on the public record—though “low” is not the same as “zero” since neither NRC disclosures (withheld as proprietary) nor downstream tracking of the Canadian/European shipments that Iran has regularly received over the years has been made fully public. The fact that “we don’t have a documented final destination” is a real evidentiary gap, not a clean exoneration of anyone.
The most plausible mechanism by which Iran could have received Uranium One product is through commodity fungibility, not smuggling or theft.
Uranium markets don’t work like tracked serial-numbered goods. Once yellowcake is refined and converted, it’s a fungible commodity—one country’s UF6 is chemically indistinguishable from another’s. The global trade runs heavily on “swaps” and “book transfers”: a producer with material in Location A can contractually deliver to a customer in Location B while someone else’s equivalent material physically moves the other direction because it’s cheaper than shipping the actual atoms across the world. This is completely standard and legal in the industry.
Given that, the realistic pathway isn’t “a truck full of Wyoming yellowcake crosses into Iran.” It’s something more like this: Rosatom, once owning Uranium One’s U.S. production, could have counted that output toward its own global supply obligations—freeing up an equivalent quantity of Russian-origin uranium that Rosatom’s fuel arm (TVEL) was already contractually supplying to Iran. That’s a real, legal, and well-documented Russia-Iran nuclear relationship, not speculation—TVEL has supplied fuel for Iran’s Bushehr power plant for years, openly and under IAEA safeguards, as part of the original construction deal for that reactor.
That is the most logical mechanism by which “Uranium One-linked material” could be economically connected to Iran, as that swap/displacement logic is the most defensible one because it’s how the commodity accounting works and nobody has any obligation to disclose it.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
There are International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) “safeguards” involved in managing Iran’s uranium imports. Uranium destined for Iran’s declared enrichment facilities (Natanz, Fordow) is subject to material accounting under IAEA safeguards precisely to prevent unaccounted diversion. Significant undeclared quantities moving in would risk detection. That said, were any of these safeguards compromised since Rosatom acquired Uranium One in 2013?
The answer could easily be yes, as Iran has historically restricted or denied IAEA access to certain facilities, particularly those suspected of weapons-related (possible military dimensions) activities. One example is the Parchin military site, which was long restricted with limited, managed access granted only after years of delays and under the 2015 JCPOA framework. Environmental sampling subsequently found man-made uranium particles inconsistent with Iran’s explanations. Note: Iran has generally argued that military sites are off-limits or require special authorization, asserting a distinction between civilian and military facilities (a position the IAEA rejects for safeguards purposes).
What does all this mean? Let us connect the dots:
- Uranium One was sold to Rosatom (Russian-owned).
- Uranium ore from Uranium One (later Rosatom) could have been transported almost anywhere through “global trade of a fungible commodity.”
- Russia had/has a long-standing nuclear exchange relationship with Iran.
- Uranium ore from Rosatom could have bypassed the clearly incomplete IAEA safeguards in Iran. The Kremlin would gain significant blackmail leverage over key US decision-makers by facilitating this transfer.
- The newly discovered Uranium One-related emails being pursued by Sen. Grassley et al. could potentially expose a cover-up by some of the same players involved in the Russia hoax. There are no such things as coincidences.
Note: circling back to the beginning, CFIUS members/State Department personnel involved in the original Uranium One sale would only be culpable if they had contemporaneous knowledge that diversion to a sanctioned/prohibited end-user was likely and approved anyway. There is a long row to hoe before that can be proven, but stranger things have happened lately.
Photo: SAINT PETERSBURG, RUSSIA - 2025/10/09: Logo of the Rosatom seen the St. Petersburg International Gas Forum at the Expoforum. The St. Petersburg International Gas Forum (SPIGF), at Expoforum centered on the plenary session "Gas Market 20252035: New Contours in a Fast-Moving Environment," which brought together top executives and officials to discuss global gas trends and international cooperation amid geopolitical shifts. The four-day forum (Oct 710) also featured over 110 business events, 21 thematic tracks, and exhibitions like InGAS Stream 2025 showcasing industry innovations. (Photo by Maksim Konstantinov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a
variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational
experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. He is a graduate
of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal
education that serves as the key foundation for his geopolitical
commentary.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/06/looking-back-at-the-uranium-one-scandal/
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