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Trump is hyping a uranium scandal about Hillary Clinton

4 November 2017 18:01 (UTC+04:00)
Trump is hyping a uranium scandal about Hillary Clinton

By Trend

U.S. President Donald Trump keeps dishing about the Russia collusion scandal, cbc news reports.

The one that purportedly, but not actually, involves his former political rival Hillary Clinton; that concerned House Republicans enough to launch a probe; and that's now being fanned by right-wing media at a time when the White House is feeling heat from the Trump-Russia investigation.

The president's discredited allegations, which link Clinton to a bribery case and an Obama-era uranium deal, come after fresh indictments of Trump campaign associates.

Those charges resulted this week from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the election.

But what Trump calls a "modern-age" Watergate — a conspiracy theory that Clinton accepted bribes in exchange for allowing Russia's nuclear agency to claim American uranium — is unfounded, Russia and nuclear experts say.

It concerns what they consider an innocuous deal: The partial sale in 2010 of Uranium One — a Canadian company based in Toronto that happens to have mining rights in the U.S. — to Russia's nuclear authority Rosatom.

"The short answer is no, there's nothing particularly unusual about it," says Thomas Graham, a former national security adviser in Barack Obama's White House.

Trump described the Uranium One transaction quite differently.

"We had Hillary Clinton give Russia 20 per cent of the uranium in our country," he said in February. "You know what uranium is, right? It's this thing called nuclear weapons."

Wrong in so many ways, Graham says.

Uranium for reactors, not nuclear fuel

To begin with, the uranium was for commercial use in reactors. In fact, Graham says, "the United States has no way to turn uranium into nuclear fuel for weapons."

What's more, Clinton was, by all accounts, never directly involved in the foreign transfer of that company while she was secretary of state.

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