Fox News anchor Shepard Smith angered his network’s viewers after he debunked a story the cable channel has been pushing that has been dubbed the “Hillary Clinton uranium scandal.”
Smith spent several minutes looking into the story, which has been repeatedly touted by U.S. President Donald Trump as well.
Coverage of Fox News on Globalnews.ca:
Several Republicans recently called for a special counsel in the case and this caused Smith to take a closer look at the Uranium One deal.
In Twitter posts, Trump has called for an investigation of the sale, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Tuesday he is evaluating whether to appoint a special counsel.
The basics behind the story are as follows:
- While Barack Obama was president, a Russian company bought a Canadian firm that owned some 20 per cent of U.S. uranium supplies.
- As Smith noted, “by law, when a foreign company wants to buy anything with potential national security implications, an inter-agency committee (the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS) of the federal government must approve it.”
- While Clinton was secretary of state at the time of the sale, her department has only one of nine votes on CFIUS, which is chaired by the Treasury Department and approved the sale unanimously.
- In addition, the State Department CFIUS seat was occupied not by her, but by Jose Fernandez, then-assistant secretary for economic, energy, and business affairs, who has said Clinton played no role in the decision.
- The sale was also approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and by then-president Obama.
Some Republicans have charged that the State Department under then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton approved the deal after her husband’s charitable foundation received a US$145-million donation from nine investors in the deal
But the story has been debunked by multiple media outlets already.
In fact, Reuters found that five committees in the U.S. House and Senate found no evidence that Clinton was behind the approval of the deal, according to congressional records.
READ MORE: Jeff Sessions considers special counsel to look into Clinton Foundation, uranium deal
Many were surprised when Smith took five minutes to explain the story on Fox News.
Smith showed a clip from the 2016 presidential election campaign in which Trump attacked Clinton over the uranium deal.
He then said the U.S. president’s statement was “inaccurate in a number of ways.”
Smith then spent several minutes using actual facts to tear away at claims of Clinton’s wrongdoing in the case.
Many Twitter users called for Smith’s firing as he went against his network’s conventional thinking.
- With files from Reuters
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