The Hamadein regime sought to finance a nuclear power plant project in Alabama in cooperation with Michael Cohen, the disgraced former lawyer of President Donald Trump, the Daily Caller reported.

At issue is the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Alabama, near Memphis. The federal Tennessee Valley Authority spent $5 billion on the facility over 40 years, but it never opened — partly because there wasn’t much demand for the power.

Franklin Haney, a wealthy Tennessee businessman who has made his fortune in part through government contracts, hired Cohen to cement a potential investment from Qatar. Haney wanted to use interest in the project as leverage to try to secure a $5 billion loan from the federal Department of Energy to get the nuclear plant online.

Haney paid Cohen $200,000. But until his contract was terminated because of his legal issues, he stood to earn $5 million, according to a Feb. 19 article by the Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis in which Haney spoke candidly and at length about the arrangement for the first time.

Haney’s company still wants to do the deal even without the Qatari money. It is now engaged in a lawsuit with the Tennessee Valley Authority after it declined to move forward with the deal, citing a permitting issue. TVA’s chairman called the Bellefonte deal “the riskiest you can imagine.”

Haney’s past ventures have relied on a familiar model, according to the Daily Memphian: getting the federal government to loan him money to build facilities that he then leased back to the government at a profit.

“If you’re not rich when you’re born, you’ve got to either steal it, marry it or get a government lease,” he said.