While no evidence whatsoever has been forthcoming regarding Donald Trump’s campaign working with Russia to impact the 2016 elections, there is a well-documented Russian scandal that involves Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama.

Could it be all this smoke-and-mirrors intrigue is little more than cover for compromising national security for cash to the Clinton Foundation?

Many of you have probably not heard about or forgotten the U.S. government deal (what Donald Trump would call a “bad deal”) to sell Russia’s atomic energy agency the world’s largest producer of uranium and bringing Vladimir Putin close to controlling most of the global uranium supply.

It happened in 2013, prompting Pravda to boast, “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”

As the New York Times (no friend of Trump) reported in 2015: “But the untold story behind that story is one that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president [Bill Clinton] and a woman who would like to be the next one [Hillary Clinton].”

The deal involved a cartel of Canadian mining barons who have been major donors to the Clintons and their foundation. The group built, financed and eventually sold off for a large profit to the Russians a company called Uranium One.

I don’t think I need to tell my smart readers that uranium is an essential ingredient in nuclear weapons and that Russia has more of them than anyone else in the world.

The cartel sold to the Russians mines in Kazakhstan and one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Now, get this! Because uranium is a strategic asset — perhaps the most important one — the deal had to be approved by a committee of representatives of a number of U.S. government agencies. Among the agencies that signed off on the deal was the U.S. State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton.

Again, I quote the New York Times story from 2015: “As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.”

But it gets worse, according to that Times report: “And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.”

This is an example of an inside deal, brokered by high U.S. government officials and former officials, for personal benefit that clearly compromised national security to the self-same Russians who today are vilified by Obama and Clinton.

How much cash are we talking about for the Clintons? Just one of those Canadian mining barons donated $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Again, I quote the New York Times: “At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company’s assets to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show.”

I don’t want to give the Times too much credit here, because many of the connections between Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation were discovered by Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution and published in his best-selling book, “Clinton Cash,” and also reported in Jerome Corsi’s “Partners in Crime: The Clintons’ Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal Profit.”

I love this line from the New York Times, which bends over backwards not to draw obvious conclusions: “Whether the donations played any role in the approval of the uranium deal is unknown. But the episode underscores the special ethical challenges presented by the Clinton Foundation, headed by a former president who relied heavily on foreign cash to accumulate $250 million in assets even as his wife helped steer American foreign policy as secretary of state, presiding over decisions with the potential to benefit the foundation’s donors.”

I think the point is this deal was a bad deal, in opposition to American national security interests, it had no business being approved by a self-interested party that helped broker it through personal connections and is a prima facie case for self-dealing at the expense of U.S. interests.

So who took money from Russia? Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Who served Russia’s strategic interests at the expense of the U.S.? Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Who let it all happen under his watch as president? Barack Obama.

All this took place during a time when Obama and Clinton were pushing friendlier relations with Russia. It was the so-called “reset,” famously referenced by Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign when he thought he was off-microphone and told the Russian president he would have more flexibility to deal after the election. Maybe this is what it was all about.

How scandalous was it? Here’s what the chief executive of Russia’s nuclear agency, Sergei Kiriyenko, said in its wake: “Few could have imagined in the past that we would own 20 percent of U.S. reserves.”

I still can’t imagine it. And I doubt Trump can either.

What Putin does is project power around the world using his one and only real tool — energy resources. He works closely with Iran, which covets nuclear weapons. Putin helps build their enrichment facilities.

While Russians expressed their thanks for the deal by directly and indirectly filling the Clinton’s personal bank accounts, political war chests and enhancing their lifestyles, they immediately turned around and annexed Crimea and threatened Ukraine.

The Obama and Clinton response turned fierce — at least in terms of threatening talk.

In effect, if Putin began to look more kindly at Donald Trump, who is to blame him?

But, ask yourself, would Trump have made that deal? I think he should speak out on it and bring this scandal back into the national discussion. It couldn’t be more relevant.

The deal began to take shape back in 2005 when, as the Times reports, “in Kazakhstan, where the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra orchestrated his first big uranium deal, with Mr. Clinton at his side. The two men had flown aboard Mr. Giustra’s private jet to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where they dined with the authoritarian president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. Mr. Clinton handed the Kazakh president a propaganda coup when he expressed support for Mr. Nazarbayev’s bid to head an international elections monitoring group, undercutting American foreign policy and criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, his wife, then a senator. Within days of the visit, Mr. Giustra’s fledgling company, UrAsia Energy Ltd., signed a preliminary deal giving it stakes in three uranium mines controlled by the state-run uranium agency Kazatomprom.”

Two years later, UrAsia merged with Uranium One, a South African company with assets in Africa and Australia, in what was described as a $3.5 billion transaction. The new company, which kept the Uranium One name, was controlled by UrAsia investors including Ian Telfer, a Canadian who became chairman. Through a spokeswoman, Giustra, whose personal stake in the deal was estimated at about $45 million, said he sold his stake in 2007.

“Soon, Uranium One began to snap up companies with assets in the United States,” reported the Times, and still, no one in Obama’s administration seemed to take notice or express concern. In April 2007, the company announced the purchase of a uranium mill in Utah and more than 38,000 acres of uranium exploration properties in four Western states, followed quickly by the acquisition of the Energy Metals Corporation and its uranium holdings in Wyoming, Texas and Utah. That deal made clear that Uranium One was intent on becoming “a powerhouse in the United States uranium sector with the potential to become the domestic supplier of choice for U.S. utilities,” the company declared.

By 2008, Giustra was holding a star-studded fundraiser for the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, a project aimed at fostering progressive environmental and labor practices in the natural resources industry, to which he had pledged $100 million. Useful idiot celebrities such as Elton John, Shakira, Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Robin Williams encouraged more contributions that totaled $16 million in pledges.

Here’s what Bill Clinton said that night: “None of this would have been possible if Frank Giustra didn’t have a remarkable combination of caring and modesty, of vision and energy and iron determination. I love this guy, and you should, too.”

But this is much more than a story about personal enrichment by the Clintons.

It is ultimately about bad deals jeopardizing American national security and serving the Russians’ national interest.

So why are we even talking about Trump’s relationship with Russia?

Why is the Obama administration wiretapping Trump?

Why wasn’t the Obama administration keeping an eye on its own State Department and other agencies that were engineering a potential military coup for Moscow?

Am I crazy, or is everyone else blind?

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND. He is the author or co-author of 13 books that have sold more than 5 million copies, including his latest, “The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians, and the End of the Age.” Before launching WND as the first independent online news outlet in 1997, he served as editor in chief of major market dailies including the legendary Sacramento Union. http://lasvegastribune.net/political-analysis-real-russian-scandal-...