In today’s hyperpartisan world, it’s often hard to figure out truth from reality, facts from fake news. And the confusion starts at the top. As Sen. Jeff Flake, one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, said yesterday, we have a President of the United States who routinely calls “fake things true and true things fake,” and then his 140-word screeds get repeated throughout the conservative echo chamber – Fox News, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc.

So it is with the renewed interest in the Uranium One story, a Canadian company with holdings in the US that was sold to a Russian conglomerate seven years ago. I’m a former journalist with a high regard for verifiable facts, and this one drives me crazy. Enemies of the truth – which currently translates to Trump and his supporters – have taken nuggets of the story to concoct a “pay-for-play” scandal involving Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and lately the FBI and the Obama Administration. The gist of their claim is that Hillary Clinton approved the sale of 20% of this country’s uranium reserves to Russia in return for millions of dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation. The stories are usually accompanied by outrage that she would so carelessly jeopardize national security for cash payments.

The problem is that the facts just don’t support their claim. And most of the stories making these false allegations conveniently leave out critical information that, if disclosed, would turn this “scandal” into a “dog bites man” story. Ho hum.

So in the interest of putting this story in its proper perspective, here is my take on this latest Clinton-uranium hysteria.

The first thing you need to know is that the US produces very little uranium. In fact, we’re a net importer of uranium. Over 90% of the uranium used to fuel US nuclear reactors is imported from foreign countries, mostly Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia and yes, even Russia. (See www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=26472)

The hysterical stories about this “scandal” claim that Clinton sold 20% of our uranium “reserves” or “supply” or "stockpiles" (reporters use the words interchangeably but they mean different things). In fact what the Russians purchased was about one-fifth of our uranium “capacity” – mostly land in the northwest from which uranium could (theoretically) be extracted. But in fact the US facilities that the Russians now own account for only 11% of the total output of US uranium production. So when you see stories claiming the Russians bought 20% of the US uranium reserves, well, in reality it's about half that.

That small amount of uranium produced by the Uranium One mines gets even smaller when compared with the amount of (mostly imported) uranium the US uses to fuel its nuclear plants: it’s about 1/100th of the amount of uranium the US consumes annually. This is one of the reasons why when the possible sale to the Russians first arose seven years ago, few people thought it was a very big deal or had any serious implications for national security.

One more thing about the US uranium that the Russians now own: none of it leaves the United States for Russia. Not a single ounce. Russia does not have a license to export uranium from the US to Russia. So the worst that can happen as a result of this deal is that the US is now buying 1/100th of the uranium it needs from a Russian-owned company instead of a Canadian-owned company. (Do you see a scandal yet?)

So here are the details of the sale. It starts with a Canadian-based company called Uranium One. Uranium One had mines, mills and tracts of land in Wyoming, Utah and other states. It also owned two mines in southern Kazakhstan.

In 2009, Russia’s nuclear energy agency, Rosatom, bought a 17% share of Uranium One, and three years later, as part of its strategy to dominate the world uranium market, sought to secure enough shares to give it a majority stake.

While Uranium One’s US holdings may have been attractive, it was the company’s mines in Kazakhstan that the Russians were most interested in controlling.

Even though the deal would not result in any uranium leaving the United States, Rosatom’s majority stake meant that the sale needed the approval of US regulators, namely the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS. The membership of CFIUS is made up of nine federal agencies – State Department, Attorney General, Treasury, Defense, Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, the Office of the US Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Approval would also have to be given by the independent US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Utah’s nuclear regulator.

CFIUS and the other regulators approved the deal, somewhat routinely, in 2010, and Russia assumed a majority share of Uranium One. Three years later, CIFUS again unanimously approved a deal granting sole ownership of Uranium One to the Russian company. Notably, Clinton was no longer Secretary of State when that deal was approved.

None of this raised any eyebrows until 2015 when an editor of Breitbart News alleged in a book (financed by Trump advisor Steve Bannon) that Hillary Clinton okayed the deal in return for $145 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation from Uranium One owners and investors. The story gained traction when the New York Times (rather oddly) used the book as the basis for a front-page “expose” in April 2015.

But the story was more sizzle than steak. A major point the book and the Times article failed to make is that the bulk of the Uranium One donations to the Clinton Foundation - $131.3 million – come from one individual, Frank Giustra, the original founder of the company that eventually became Uranium One. But Giustra, a well-known philanthropist who contributes to many charitable organizations, sold all of his stakes in Uranium One in the fall of 2007, at least 18 months before Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State and three years before the Russian deal. In other words, there couldn’t be a quid-pro-quo or "pay to play" for something no one knew would happen for another three years.

Of the other eight Clinton Foundation donors connected to Uranium One, only one – Ian Telfer, the company's chairman – made donations during the time the Russian uranium deal was being considered.

Ok, so maybe there’s reason to suspect Telfer’s donations were made to grease the deal (he says he never discussed his business with Clinton). What it really shows is that Clinton should have disbanded the Foundation while Secretary of State to avoid the appearance of just such potential conflicts. Dumb.

But the donations look suspicious only if Clinton played a pivotal role in approving the Uranium One sale. She did not. As I said, there were eight other agencies that could have vetoed the deal but gave the green light, along with other independent regulators. So why do the headlines put all the blame on Clinton instead of say the Treasury or Energy Departments? Defense? And people in the State Department say that while Clinton had a seat on CFIUS, a deal like the Uranium One sale would have been handled at a level far below the cabinet secretary. Indeed, there is no evidence that Clinton played any role at all or was even aware of the sale at the time it was approved.

The whole story resurfaced this week when The Hill published a flimsy, confusing story alleging that a Russian official who oversaw the American operations of Rosatom was being investigated for corruption by multiple U.S. agencies while the Uranium One deal was up for approval — information that apparently was not shared with U.S. officials involved in approving the transaction. The article alleges kickbacks and bribes without saying who the bribes were supposedly paid to or how much money is involved. It makes the claim from an unnamed informant that “Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit (emphasis added) former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow.” But the weak phrase “designed to benefit” is a long way from saying that money from Russians was knowingly received by the Clintons to seal the deal, or whether any money at all was actually donated from these sources to the Clinton Foundation. The story also makes the dubious claim that the FBI and Justice Departments withheld information about the investigation from Administration officials to ensure the deal would go through, when in fact law enforcement officials issued three separate press releases in 2014 about its investigation and results. (The Wall Street Journal covered the story two years ago so this was hardly a scoop.) And there is no indication that if the members of CFIUS had been made aware of the investigation it would have made any difference.

But in today’s post-facts world, this is all that’s needed to launch a major Congressional investigation and create a media frenzy, at least on the conservative cable channels (and on a certain Twitter feed). Why are most legitimate news organizations ignoring it? Because there’s no there there. Maybe at some point there will be, but until there is, let’s move on.

Fake News and the Clinton-Uranium Deal

Dennis Bailey