#NeverTrumper Jeff Flake Was Foreign Lobbyist Working For Uranium Firm With Ties to Iran

by Joshua Caplan November 19, 2017

Since announcing he will not seek re-election in 2018, Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) is on a warpath against President Trump. While Flake is lamenting President Trump’s rhetoric and nationalist, populist policies, it’s important to remember the Arizona lawmaker has a checkered past as a foreign lobbyist who worked for a uranium mining firm with ties to Iran. 

Yahoo News reports:

[Flake] came back to Washington [from Namibia] in 1990 and launched a consulting firm, Interface Public Affairs; he signed up the Rossing uranium mine, one of the new nation’s economic drivers, as a client.

[..]

Flake signed on as the mine’s representative a month after Namibia achieved independence. His job was to ensure that sanctions enacted by state and local governments in the U.S. didn’t prevent the sale of Rossing “uranium to some of the utilities around the country,” he said.

[…]

More recently, the Rossing mine has come under scrutiny for its financial ties to Iran. While the firm Rio Tinto owns 69 percent of the mine, the Iranian Foreign Investment Co., which the Treasury Department describes as a “wholly owned” subsidiary of the Tehran regime, holds a 15 percent stake. Iran has held its share of the company since the 1970s, said Rio Tinto spokesman Illtud Harri.

Flake said he was unaware that Iran owned part of the mine. Indeed, his 1990 federal filing states that Rossing was not “owned,” “financed,” “controlled,” or “subsidized in part” or whole by a foreign government, although Iran and Namibia both held stakes in the mine.

Flake is in the news after being caught on hot mic saying Republicans are “toast,” if President Trump and Judge Roy Moore take over the party.

“[If we] become the party of Roy Moore and Donald Trump, we are toast,” Flake told Mayor of Phoenix suburb of Mesa Friday after taking questions at a town hall session.

Later, Flake tweeted a link to the story, saying “No news here. I’ve been saying this to anyone who will listen.”

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