In a nuclear claim, Donald Trump says Hillary Clinton ‘gave up’ one-fifth of U.S. uranium to Russia
Trump says Clinton “gave up 20 percent of America’s uranium supply to Russia.”
The reference is to Russia’s nuclear power agency buying a controlling interest in a Toronto-based company. That company has mines, mills and tracts of land in Wyoming, Utah and other U.S. states equal to about 20 percent of U.S. uranium production capacity (not produced uranium).
Clinton was secretary of state at the time, but she didn’t have the power to approve or reject the deal. The State Department was only one of nine federal agencies that signed off on the deal, and only Obama had the power to veto it.
For a statement that contains only an element of truth, our rating is Mostly False.
Donald Trump claims — falsely — that Hillary Clinton gave Russia 20% of US uranium
Clinton was the nation’s top diplomat when the sales took place, and the Obama administration was still trying to reset relations with Moscow at the time, PolitiFact noted.
However, Clinton did not represent the State Department on the panel of agency officials who approve deals such as the Uranium One transaction. The representative at the time, former Assistant Secretary Jose Fernandez, told the Times, “Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any C.F.I.U.S. matter,” referring to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
The national security question raised by the transaction at the time centered on whether it would make the United States reliant on foreign sources of uranium, not on the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the Times reported. The United States and Russia had exchanged enriched and raw uranium for years, according to the Times.
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