Eric Lipton
speaker
759 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 5 Aug
Eric Lipton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And so for the military, it's just vital to have access to a sufficient supply of tungsten.
at a time when we're at a war in the Middle East and we are helping in Ukraine.
And so, therefore, we have to have a steady supply of it.
But China has been cutting off our supply to Tungsten as part of a trade retaliation against President Trump and his tariffs.
So there's been an effort to try to increase the United States' access to tungsten and a bunch of other critical metals.
And the Trump administration has been pouring an enormous amount of federal dollars into expanding our supply to these critical metals.
And that's what we examined in our investigation.
My colleague Paul Son and I looked at this.
Kazakhstan is situated in between Russia and China, happens to have a really large supply of it sitting in the ground.
It's one of the largest untapped supplies of tungsten in the world sitting there that the Soviets had first thought about exploiting, but the Soviet Union collapsed before they were ever able to do it.
And so this site is there waiting for someone to grab its potentially $80 billion worth of tungsten in the ground there.
And so this is how the United States then got involved.
Both the Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and the President Trump became involved in negotiations in late 2025 with the president of Kazakhstan about potentially giving a small American-based company the right to open up a mine there and to extract that tungsten and to send a bunch of it to the United States.
I mean, the small company currently goes by the name of Kaz Resources.
The chief executive there and founder does have some experience in the mining sector, but they are not a kind of like a Freeport McMoran, you know, huge global mining operator.
They're a very small operation that does not have a great deal of experience in actually pulling tons of metal out of the ground.
And they needed to raise capital.
They needed to raise money.
And they've come to the federal government to raise billions of dollars in financing to actually build the mine.
At the same time as they were asking for help from the United States government to get access to this mining site, they were also asking for help from the Commerce Department's associated financing arms to actually help cover the cost of building the mine.
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