President Donald Trump on Thursday revived his widely discredited claim that his campaign opponent, Hillary Clinton, sealed a deal to sell 20 percent of U.S. uranium to Russia while she was secretary of state.
Trump emphasized the danger posed by uranium, which at high enrichment levels can power nuclear weapons.
“We had Hillary Clinton give Russia 20 percent of the uranium in our country,” the president told reporters during a White House press conference. “You know what uranium is, right? This thing called nuclear weapons, like lots of things are done with uranium including some bad things.”
Trump raised the same allegation – which dates at least to 2015 – while he was battling Clinton for the presidency last fall. At the time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checker PolitiFact described the statement as “mostly false.” The Washington Post Fact Checker, separately, give it four Pinocchios.
The situation, according to PolitiFact (with an assist from reporting by The New York Times), played out like this: The Russian atomic energy organization, Rosatom, over a period of years during the Obama administration acquired a Canadian company that owned roughly 20 percent of U.S. uranium production capacity (rather than actual uranium) via mines and other resources in several states. The chairman and several other people connected to the Canadian company had made large donations to the Clinton Foundation, founded by former President Bill Clinton.
As secretary of state, Clinton served on a committee of high-level Obama administration officials who reviewed the Rosatom deal given its national security implications, the Times reported. That, though, focused on U.S. dependence on foreign uranium rather than any potential proliferation danger posed by the uranium.
Trump spent much of his press conference Thursday discussing his team’s relationship with Russia, which has been a thorn in the side of the young administration. U.S. intelligence agencies determined that the Kremlin meddled in the presidential election, including through hacking of Democratic National Committee emails. National security adviser Michael Flynn then lost his job this week after it was found he and Moscow’s ambassador to the United States had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia prior to Trump’s inauguration – which Flynn failed to disclose to the White House and FBI.
Good relations between two nuclear-armed nations should be viewed as a good thing, Trump noted.
“If Russia and the United States actually got together and got along — and don’t forget, we’re a very powerful nuclear country and so are they,” he said. “There’s no upside. We’re a very powerful nuclear country and so are they. I have been briefed. And I can tell you one thing about a briefing that we’re allowed to say because anybody that ever read the most basic book can say it, nuclear holocaust would be like no other.”
