The Justice Department will let an FBI informant testify to Congress in Clinton uranium investigation

Late Wednesday, the Justice Department announced that it has released an FBI informant from his confidentiality agreement so he can testify before Congress about a Russian company's 2010 deal to purchase a Canadian firm, Uranium One, that holds the rights to 20 percent of the U.S. uranium supply. On Tuesday, House Republicans launched two investigations involving Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate — one on the FBI's handling of its Clinton email investigation and the other, by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), into any role Clinton played in the Uranium One deal.

Clinton, then secretary of state, headed one of the nine U.S. agencies that had to sign off on the Uranium One deal, which came under new scrutiny when The Hill reported that the FBI was investigating possible racketeering and extortion by Vadim Mikerin, a U.S. subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian firm trying to purchase Uranium One. The informant who can now testify to Congress was a source in that story. On Tuesday, Trump unironically called the handling of the Uranium One sale "Watergate, modern age," CNN notes in its rundown of the new revelations.

The unidentified informant's attorney says the man has "a lot of information about corruption surrounding this matter," and was "stunned when the uranium deal was approved," CNN's Tom Foreman reports. If the man testifies, he added, "we'll get to hear it all first-hand and see how well his statements stand up to questioning."

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