The @deepdives project is again calling for research into the Wikileaks archives here: Deep Dives Research Challenge | The Wikileaks Archive. (I didn't resteem the post during its seven-day window, so hopefully this link can be an adequate substitute.)

Because of my research into lobbying connections, the Wikileaks archive of John Podesta emails was of most interest to me. Podesta served as President Bill Clinton's chief of staff and later as Hillary's campaign chairman. He also founded a lobbying firm in Washington with his brother Tony called the Podesta Group.

Wikileaks has compiled a group of over 1,000 emails involving John Podesta and members of Hillary's campaign that are related to nuclear energy. The nuclear energy issue is important because of the positions both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders took on that issue during the Democratic primary. At the time, Sanders was stirring meltdown fears, describing a nuclear power station in New York as “a catastrophe waiting to happen.” He called for the plant's phasing out and his campaign platform was focused instead on the alternative energies of solar, wind, and geothermal. Hillary Clinton took the opposite position, calling for investment, modernization, and more regulation in the nuclear energy industry. Turns out she had some friends financially involved in that industry.

One ironic bit of information came from an email to campaign staffers proposing ideas on ways to “hit” Sanders on the campaign trail and in debates, including the excerpt below regarding his support for what's described as an environmentally racist waste removal bill pertaining to nuclear energy that Hillary's husband later signed into law:

One close friend of the Clinton's involved in the nuclear energy industry is billionaire Frank Giustra. He's the founder of Lionsgate Entertainment and is also a Clinton Foundation partner, heading up the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative (CGSGI). In an unclassified Memorandum of Understanding from the Clinton Foundation dated December 12, 2008 (which was obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act), this admission is made: “CGSGI works with the mining industry, local and national governments, and other non-governmental organizations to enable sustainable growth in countries where the mining sector plays a significant role.”

Why is Giustra involved with such an initiative? For three decades, he financed mining companies via the firms of Yorkton Securities and Endeavour Financial. He then formed UrAsia Energy, a company he eventually sold to another company of particular interest when discussing the Clintons: Uranium One.

A Canadian firm mining for uranium in several countries, Uranium One owned uranium resources in the United States. As mentioned above, it acquired Giustra's UrAsia Energy in 2007. The company went on to acquire several other mining ventures, including a 49 percent interest in Zarechnoye from ARMZ, a subsidiary of Russia's state-owned uranium monopoly, Rosatom. Two years later, Rosatom began acquiring interest in Uranium One. A full merger was planned, but that required approval from various governments, as well as several agencies of the US government, including the State Department.

According to the Washington Examiner, “As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton sat on a cabinet-level committee tasked with reviewing commercial transactions with foreign entities that may have affected national security. Because Uranium One, then a Canada-based firm, owned a significant portion of uranium deposits in the U.S., its transfer to a state-owned Russian atomic agency placed the deal before the committee in 2010. Hillary Clinton's State Department was among the agencies that signed off on the controversial takeover amid a policy 'reset' with Russia.”

The story comes full circle when noting that John Podesta's lobbying firm (which he founded with his brother but for which he does not work as a lobbyist) was paid by Uranium One to influence members of the State Department, where Hillary Clinton was acting Secretary of State. Acquisition approval was granted by the State Department in 2009.

But that's not the end of the story. Around the time of the approval granted by Clinton's State Department, several large donations were made to the Clinton Foundation by individuals connected to Uranium One, including Frank Giustra, his wife Alison Lawton, former UrAsia and Uranium One Chairman Ian Telfer, and mining industry investors Frank Holmes, Neil Woodyer, Paul Reynolds, and the firm of GMP Securities.

Note that Giustra's estranged wife, Alison Lawton, is also included on the venn. In addition to her own work for the government of British Columbia, she also produced films to be used in lobbying efforts for Lloyd Axworthy, the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister.

Perhaps the most interesting but overlooked detail on the venn, however, is Shawn Whitman who lobbied for Uranium One after working as Chief of Staff for Senator John Barrasso. This matters because Senator Barrasso had written a letter to President Obama with concerns about Russia's ownership of Uranium One's US uranium resources. A stipulation of the sale made by regulators was that uranium could not be exported out of the US, a condition that Senator Barrasso said “satisfied” him.

Not surprisingly, this stipulation has not been honored. The Hill later reported that, “NRC memos reviewed by The Hill show that it did approve the shipment of yellowcake uranium — the raw material used to make nuclear fuel and weapons — from the Russian-owned mines in the United States to Canada in 2012 through a third party. Later, the Obama administration approved some of that uranium going all the way to Europe, government documents show.”

SEAC = Social Entrepreneurship Advisory Council