Fox News was busy fabricating as usual, the spinning wheels going full blast, when news of the Mueller indictments hit the media Friday night. High Priest of Falsity Sean Hannity lost no time going on twitter and assuring the troops that “this is all a distraction” and that he personally would be setting things right on Monday.
Let’s do the change in the narrative that Hannity suggests. With all the shade throwing that Faux News has done recently on Hannity’s twin pillar stories, Uranium One and the Steele Dossier, a short refresher course was prepared by the Washington Post to sift through all the confusion. First, Uranium One. Washington Post:
In 2010, Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency, acquired a controlling stake in Uranium One, a Canadian-based company that had mining licenses for about 20 percent of U.S. uranium extraction capacity. The agreement was approved by the Obama administration when Clinton was secretary of state.
Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining financier and a major contributor to the Clinton Foundation, had sold a company, UrAsia, to Uranium One in 2007. Individuals related to Uranium One and UrAsia, including Giustra, donated to the Clinton Foundation, totaling about $145 million. Meanwhile, in 2010, Bill Clinton received $500,000 from a Russian bank to give a speech at a conference in Moscow.
Trump, during the campaign, tossed all of these separate facts together to falsely claim that Clinton “gave 20 percent of our uranium — gave Russia for a big payment.” But numerous fact checks have found no evidence for this claim. The original suggestion of wrongdoing was first raised in a book underwritten by an organization headed by Stephen K. Bannon, a key adviser to Trump.
Under law, no uranium produced in the United States can be exported. This is one of Donald Trump’s more blatant fabrications and will probably earn him Four Pinnochios. The Post continues with Hannity’s other urgent topic of interest, the Steele Dossier.
As the official declassified report stated:
“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.”
Hannity and Fox News generally is wildly conflating how the Clinton campaign paying for opposition research, as campaigns are wont to do, translates as Clinton collusion with Russia.
The DNC and Clinton campaign were revealed as the “Democratic donors” who paid Fusion GPS for Steele’s research.
Separately, a “Republican donor” who had earlier hired Fusion GPS for information on Trump was revealed to be the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website. But that earlier effort is unrelated to the Democratic-funded research that yielded the dossier.
The Trump White House has tried to use the connection between the dossier and Clinton to claim that this shows that rather than Trump colluding with Russia, Clinton colluded with Russia. (The theory appears to be that because Steele was getting information from Russian officials in part with funds provided by the Clinton campaign, the Russians were helping Clinton.)
Hannity says he’ll have all the details on Monday. We can hardly wait. And the Huckabee Sanders press conference in the afternoon should be epic.