







U.S. President Donald Trump [Xinhua]





If you've been following U.S. news at all for the past year or so, you no doubt have some passing knowledge of Trump's Russia scandal, the narrative of which runs something like this: through a combination of tactics – including the propagation of fake news stories, support of Wikileaks and its release of hacked DNC emails, and even attempts to infiltrate American voting systems – Russia swayed the 2016 Presidential election in Donald Trump's favor, and Trump and his team may have colluded, to use the media's favorite word for it, with Russia to effect said swaying.

But it's been almost a year now since Trump was elected, and solid evidence of any wrongdoing on his part vis-à-vis Russian interference has been uncomfortably scant for left-leaning media outlets. “Russian hacked our election” is an oft-repeated phrase among Democrats and their supporters, but it's been repeated so many times by now and with such little specificity that its vagueness has begun to seem like a deliberate attempt to avoid a deeper discussion of the issue. Indeed, it's arguable that the whole affair has done little more than drum up anti-Russian sentiments on the Left.

But recently, in a kind of two-can-play-at-that-game maneuver, the Right has been developing a Russian scandal for the Left. It began with an article written by John Solomon and Alison Spann that was published on The Hill on Oct. 17. The article is quite detailed, but the basics are this: In 2010, the Obama administration allowed a Russian company to purchase the rights to what amounted to 20 percent of America's uranium supply. The deal had to be approved by nine separate governmental departments, one of which was the State Department, headed at the time by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And this is where the controversy starts. It seems that throughout the negotiations, but also before they'd started, $145 million dollars were donated to the Clinton Foundation by nine people involved with the Russian company. Also, while the deal was being negotiated, Bill Clinton traveled to Russia and was paid half of million dollars to speak at a Russian bank that supported the deal. The implication, clearly, is that the Clintons were essentially bribed to allow the deal to go through.

The Left has come up with some rebuttals to the story. The most important may be that most of the donations to the Clinton Foundation from individuals involved with the Russian company were made before Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, and thus before she had any power to approve the deal. Furthermore, it’s important to keep in mind that the deal had to go through not just the State Department, but eight other departments as well. Clinton may have had some influence over the decision, but she certainly didn't have all of it.

This story is still evolving, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. But it won't be surprising if it leads to nothing. For a longtime the Right has been eager to deflect attention from Trump’s own Russian scandal, and this seems to be an obvious way of going about that. That Fox News, Trump's largest media ally, has been zealously pushing the story comes as no surprise. Also, the involvement of uranium gives the whole thing a certain flair that it would otherwise lack – especially in light of Russia's and America’s mutual nuclear history. But the uranium piece is really a red herring. It’s safe to say that Russia’s nuclear arsenal has been in no way affected by this deal.

Kyle Burnaby is a journalist from Cheyenne, Wyoming. He now lives in Bangkok.





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