What the Uranium One deal was really about.

The Clinton Foundation was a pay-to-play slush fund, sure. There's probably something there if you can prove a quid pro quo. I doubt it will happen, but of course the Clintons were that corrupt. They always were, all the way back to the Arkansas days.

But the Uranium One deal itself was neither scandalous nor unusual. It didn't "give Russia 20% of our uranium." It had nothing to do with nuclear weapons, either. It was just about the low-quality, mostly-worthless uranium mines in the United States, and using their output as nuclear-power fuel. Approving the deal itself was reasonable, because there never was any national security risk from it.

The possible bribery is a scandal, if that happened. The mere fact that the deal was approved, isn't. If anything, the defensible reason for approving it, was that the Russians were throwing away a bunch of money and not really getting much of value in return. America's uranium mines produce very low-quality ore and aren't terribly competitive on the international market.

Meanwhile, the United States continues to have an arrangement with the Russians (as we have for many years), under which Russia ships us their old decommissioned bombs for use as nuclear-power fuel, and in return we ship them raw uranium ore to be processed into more fuel. There's a decent chance you're reading this right now on a computer powered by an American nuclear plant burning Soviet-era warhead cores.