No, Hillary Clinton did not “give Russia 20 percent of the uranium” in the US

Trump is referring to Russia’s nuclear power agency purchasing a majority stake in a Toronto-based energy company between 2009 and 2013. The company had mines and land in a number of US states with huge uranium production capacity — a move the US State Department signed off on.

 

  1. The mines, mills, and land the company holds in the US account for 20 percent of the US’s uranium production capacity, not actual produced uranium.
  2. The State Department was one of nine federal agencies and a number of additional independent federal and state regulators that signed off on the deal.
  3. President Obama, not Secretary Clinton, was the only person who could’ve vetoed the deal.
  4. Since Russia doesn’t have the legal right to export uranium out of the US, its main goal was likely to gain access to the company’s uranium assets in Kazakhstan.

.. the US only makes about 20 percent of the uranium it needs. An advantage in making nuclear weapons wasn’t the main issue because, as PolitiFact notes, “the United States and Russia had for years cooperated on that front, with Russia sending enriched fuel from decommissioned warheads to be used in American nuclear power plants in return for raw uranium.”

.. Trump has constantly pushed back against the intelligence community’s claims about Russia’s interference with the US election, and said that even if they’re true, he doesn’t understand all the fuss about it