URANIUM ONE, DONALD ZERO:

The story starts with Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining financier and donor to the Clinton Foundation; Giustra's company, UrAsia; and Uranium One, a uranium mining company headquartered in Toronto.

In 2007, Giustra sold UrAsia to Uranium One, which was based in South Africa and chaired by his friend, Ian Telfer. Giustra said he sold his personal stake in the deal in fall 2007, shortly after the merger with Uranium One, in the midst of Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign and before Clinton realized Barack Obama would win the nomination and she would become his secretary of state.

In 2009, Russia's nuclear energy agency, Rosatom, began buying shares in Uranium One as a part of a larger move to acquire mines around the world. Rosatom first bought a 17 percent share of Uranium One, which has holdings in the United States. In 2010, the Russians sought to increase their share to 51 percent. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the deal. In 2013, Russia assumed 100 percent ownership.

The deal gave Russia control of about 20 percent of U.S. uranium extraction capacity, according to a 2010 CNN article about the deal. In other words, Russia has rights to the uranium extracted at those sites, which represents 20 percent of the U.S. uranium production capacity.

The State Department was one of nine agencies comprising CFIUS, which vets potential national security impacts of transactions where a foreign government gains control of a U.S. company. It was established by Congress in 2007 after the controversy over the planned purchase of seaports by a company in United Arab Emirates. The other agencies were the departments of Treasury, Defense, Justice, Commerce, Energy and Homeland Security, and two White House agencies (Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and Office of Science and Technology Policy).

The CFIUS can approve a deal, but only the president can suspend or stop a transaction. If the committee can't come to a consensus, a member can recommend a suspension or prohibition of the deal, and the president makes the call.

Due to confidentiality laws, there are few details made public about the deal or about Clinton's role in it, factcheck.org found. The Clinton campaign said Clinton herself was not involved in the State Department's review and did not direct the department to take any position on the sale of Uranium One. Matters of the CFIUS did not rise to the level of the secretary, the campaign said.

Jose Fernandez, then-assistant secretary of state for economic, energy and business affairs, sat on the committee. Fernandez told the Times: "Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter." Fernandez did not respond to our requests for comment.

"Hillary's opposition [to the Uranium One deal] would have been enough under CFIUS rules to have the decision on the transaction kicked up to the president. That never happened," Schweizer wrote in "Clinton Cash."

At the time the sale was underway, the Obama administration was attempting to "reset" its relations with Russia, with Clinton leading the effort as secretary of state. But there is no evidence approval of the sale was connected to the reset policy. The national security concern that the United States faced when CFIUS considered the deal concerned American dependence on foreign uranium sources, the Times reported.

Yet the Uranium One deal was not on the radar of Michael McFaul, even though he was aware of many CFIUS cases in his role as the National Security Council's senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs from 2009 to 2012 (and as a prime architect of the administration's reset policy). McFaul, now senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, said Fernandez could not "dictate the outcome of any decision single-handedly," as he was one of nine members.

"Knowing how the CFIUS process works and how the bureaucracy at the State Department works, I cannot imagine that such an issue would be reviewed by the secretary of state. There is a hierarchy in place precisely to protect the secretary's time for only the most important of issues and meetings," McFaul said.

Tweet   @brothersjudd