Core values were at stake. Why didn’t Mr. Obama say anything?

James Freeman writes in the Wall Street Journal,

…Presidents traditionally try to avoid criticizing their successors. Mr. Obama suggested before leaving office that he would only comment publicly when “core values may be at stake.” Since leaving the White House he has occasionally addressed issues of federal policy including immigration, health care and climate change. But Mr. Obama has had little or nothing to say about the issue that has so fascinated many of his fellow Democrats: the claim that Donald Trump somehow colluded with the Russians to rig the 2016 election.

This column noted in April that Mr. Obama’s decision not to address the issue in his post-presidency was fairly strong circumstantial evidence that, having had unparalleled access to the relevant intelligence, he didn’t think there was anything to it. After all, if our former commander-in-chief believed that a foreign government had essentially staged a silent coup in the United States, how could this not rise to the level of a threat to core values?

…A report today in The Hill suggests that Mr. Obama may not simply have concluded that there was nothing to the allegations against the Trump campaign. He may have also decided that a close inspection of U.S.-Russian relations would not be kind to the Obama Administration–and especially to its State Department during the early years of his presidency.

According to The Hill:

“Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.
Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.”

This bombshell suggests that the ugly transactions revealed by “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer were even uglier than they appeared when he broke the news in 2015. Back then the story appeared to be the Clintons helping out their wealthy friends to cut a sweet uranium deal with a Kazakh dictator while failing to properly disclose donations to the Clinton Foundation. As if that didn’t smell bad enough, now we have a report that the Russians were also trying to funnel cash to the Clintons. The Russians eventually got what they wanted from the U.S. government—control of a large uranium stockpile.

And the story gets worse, according to The Hill. Today’s report says that even after uncovering the Russian schemes, a part of the Obama Administration that was not being run by a Clinton didn’t act on the information:

“Rather than bring immediate charges in 2010, however, the Department of Justice (DOJ) continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions.”

Most Americans would agree that core values were at stake. Why didn’t Mr. Obama say anything?

Read more here.