The private company pushing the Donald Trump administration to fast-track sales of nuclear-power technology to Saudia Arabia is the latest incarnatation of a long-running entity that periodically pitches “impossible” nuclear projects, one executive wrote in an email published this week by the House Oversight Committee.
The details are part of a second interim staff report released Monday by committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who is investigating allegations by White House whistleblowers that the politically connected firm IP3 wants the administration to approve sales of nuclear reactors and fuel to Riyadh — possibly uncoupled from the strict nonproliferation agreements usually required for such deals.
Appended to the committee’s report are a series of partially redacted emails from unidentified executives with nine nuclear companies identified only by number. The emails show that some in the industry have been backing away from IP3, which parts of the federal government worry wants the White House to play fast and loose with export control laws and nonproliferation standards.
“Politely put, IP3 is the Theranos of the nuclear industry,” an unidentified executive from “Company 5” wrote in an internal email dated Feb. 10, 2019. “It used to be known as Alex Copson Partners and has been around in some form since the mid-1990s.”
Theranos is the disgraced medical company that shut down in 2018 after peddling so-called revolutionary blood-testing technology that several independent inquiries exposed as quackery.
IP3 is led by CEO Michael Hewitt, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral who split from the eponymous Alex Copson Partners around 2016 to form the new company. Both companies once included on the payroll former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who resigned in disgrace from that post in 2017 after admitting he lied about contacts with the Russian government prior to Trump’s inauguration.
The Company 5 executive said Copson, in the “mid-late 1990s,” pitched the idea of shipping radioactive waste to “some small Pacific island,” and that he possibly had “inappropriately enticed local officials to consider the proposal.”
As for IP3’s efforts to broker a deal for a U.S.-built Saudi Arabian nuclear-power fleet, “DOE and [the Department of] State have been all over this issue for years,” the Company 5 executive wrote. “The professional staff do not like the idea of IP3 running around them.”
A senior executive with an outfit identified as “Company 1” wrote in an internal email on Feb. 27, 2018, that “IP3 has a questionable reputation to some people in the USG [U.S. Government] and elsewhere.”
