Attorney General Jeff Sessions is considering whether to appoint a special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, at the urging of House Republicans upset about the sale of a controlling stake in Uranium One to a Russian agency, among other things, and reportedly to get back in President Trump's good graces.

On Tuesday, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a founder of the House Freedom Caucus, asked Sessions why the Justice Department hasn't already appointed a special counsel for Clinton, and Sessions said DOJ prosecutors are looking into the matter but would "use the proper standards," adding: "You can have your idea but sometimes we have to study what the facts are and to evaluate whether it meets the standards it requires." Fox News news anchor Shepard Smith decided it was time to lay out the facts about the Uranium One deal Tuesday afternoon, in what was hard not to see as an implicit rebuke of the anchors on the opinion side of his network.

Fox's Shep Smith takes apart the Uranium One conspiracy his Fox News colleagues have been relentlessly hyping pic.twitter.com/HZBlBtFvo4 — Media Matters (@mmfa) November 14, 2017

Smith started with the accusation, first made by Breitbart editor at large Peter Schweizer, then repeated by Trump and other conservatives: "Nine people involved in the deal made donations to the Clinton Foundation totaling more than $140 million. In exchange, Secretary of State Clinton approved the sale to the Russians — a quid pro quo." He noted that this accusation is "inaccurate in a number of ways," then spent the next few minutes methodically explaining how. By the end, it's hard to see how there's any there there. We'll see what the Justice Department decides. Peter Weber