Russian Money Talks. America Was All Ears.

The biggest Russian threat to Western institutions doesn't come from disinformation or the clever use of social networks but from a certain kind of money that, by its very nature, corrupts everything it touches. To understand how that works, it's worth re-examining a uranium story that has resurfaced as part of the U.S. political debate after Washington, D.C. publication The Hill ran an article about it on Tuesday.

The article, which prompted the Senate Judiciary Committee to open a probe into "Russian nuclear bribery," recounts how the Obama administration approved the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian company with some U.S. mining assets, to Russian state-owned nuclear power monopoly Rosatom, despite an ongoing Federal Bureau of Investigation corruption probe into the activities of a Rosatom official in the U.S. The Uranium One case and the bribery case of the official, Vadim Mikerin, were reported by the media separately but it's the linking of the two by The Hill that has caused a ruckus.