Not so. The agreement was made
7 years ago. Gates, a Republican, was the Secretary of Defense. He stayed as asked by President Obama.
His department did not object. Six other departments besides State were involved as already stated.
This only came up as the election season started and Republicans realized Hillary was running. Breitbart contributor Schweizer wrote a biased, politically motivated book to stir up the masses. They failed to mention Gates, of course. The FBI already looked and found nothing to charge in 2015.
Then Hannity and Trump dredged it up to sling mud as the Russian investigation is heating up.
Since Russia can't export the uranium from the US, their true interest in buying the company was the uranium mining in Kazakhstan. The only national security issue for the US was that we were not too dependent on foreign uranium for our needs. (and wouldn't it be wise to develop wind and solar energy to make sure that happens?)
As Politifact points out
here:
The national security issue at stake in the Uranium One deal was not primarily about nuclear weapons proliferation, the Times reported, because 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.
Instead, it concerned American dependence on foreign uranium sources. While the United States gets one-fifth of its electrical power from nuclear plants, it produces only around 20 percent of the uranium it needs.
All this was before Russia hacked the DNC and tried to interfere with the US election.
So the problems I see is:
1. One has to assume that money that goes to the Clinton foundation goes into their pockets instead which is not been shown and
2. that Bill Clinton, who has not been President since Jan. 2000 had some power to make the deal go through (and he didn't have that power) and
3. that the Secretary of State had more power than other of the group of 9 and the President and the Nuclear Energy Regulating agency to make the deal go through. But she was not at the table for it, and the role of the State department on that committee is to look at the foreign relations aspect of it as a deal, not the security of of it. That goes to Homeland, Defense and the DOJ (Attorney General).
Considering the fact that Hillary couldn't prevent or push the deal if others objected, nor was she at the table in the decision about it...it makes the issue of Bill getting $500,000 for speech in Russia non sequiter. And that story changed.
