For the past two and a half years, Americans have become increasingly frustrated over the Trump administration’s inability to reveal the truth about former President Barack Obama’s dirty dealings with Iran and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the Uranium One deal and with her government email scandal. According to John Soloman of The Hill, President Trump is set to declassify the documents that will shed some light for Americans on all three of these serious national security issues.
John Soloman of The Hill writes- My sources tell me President Trump is putting the finishing touches on a White House initiative to declassify documents that have remained hidden from the public for far too long.
This welcome effort to provide more public transparency and accountability almost certainly will focus early on the failings of the now-debunked Russia collusion probe. And I’m sure it will spread quickly toward other high-profile issues, such as the government’s UFO files that have been a focus of clamoring for decades.
But my reporting indicates three sets of documents from the Obama years should be declassified immediately, too, because they will fundamentally change the public’s understanding of history and identify ways to improve governance.
The first includes the national security assessments that the U.S. intelligence community conducted under President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concerning the Russia nuclear giant Rosatom’s effort to acquire uranium business in the United States.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) — made up of Secretary Clinton and eight other senior federal officials — approved Rosatom’s purchase of mining company Uranium One’s U.S. assets in fall 2010, even as the FBI was gathering evidence that the Russian company’s American arm was engaged in bribery, kickbacks and extortion.
Sources who have seen these classified assessments tell me they debunk the last administration’s storyline that there were no national security reasons to oppose Rosatom’s Uranium One purchase or Vladimir Putin’s successful efforts to secure billions of dollars in new nuclear fuel contracts with American utilities during the Obama years.
Under Obama, sensitive foreign acquisitions almost routinely were rubber-stamped by CFIUS, and the approval process sometimes was delegated by Cabinet officials on the CFIUS committee to lower-ranking aides.
A second body of documents crying out for declassification is Obama’s private correspondence with Iranian leaders — in particular, the Oct. 7, 2014, the cable he penned to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, setting the terms for the controversial Washington-Tehran nuclear deal reached in early 2016.
My sources tell me that letter conflicts with what the Obama administration was telling the American public as it tried to sell the deal politically, and it shows a level of courtship, concession and trust with Tehran that exceeded the U.S. intelligence assessments at the time.
The 2014 letter was preceded by at least three other private communications between Obama and officials in Tehran, including two in 2009 and one in 2012. All need to be declassified and released for Americans to better understand the merits of Obama’s approach with Iran.
The final Obama-era tranche that requires declassification concerns Hillary Clinton’s email controversy — a highly classified set of documents that FBI agents identified as important and necessary in the investigation into whether she violated the law by transmitting classified emails on her unsecured private server.
Trump has an unprecedented opportunity to close the loop on these controversies and to give Americans more transparency and visibility into what happened, as well as how we can make government better when national security is at stake.
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