If you carefully read that WP piece, you'll see they pretty much confirmed Trump and Schweitzer's allegations yet gave Trump "four Pinnochios" anyways.
I had a similar impression after reading the WP “fact checking” article and others on the issue however there is an important point to note when discussing this issue with any liberal friend or relative.
It does not appear disputable that as Secretary, Clinton had any greater role in this deal than any of the other agency heads involved in the final approval. And there were 8 other agencies/departments involved.
Apparently, and again this doesn’t seem in dispute either, all 9 involved had a say yes, however final approval or denial was Obama’s responsibility.
So the sound byte “Clinton gave 20% of our uranium to Russia” is not entirely accurate. It would be more accurate to say “Obama, with Clinton’s and 8 other departments’ approval gave 20% of our uranium production capacity to Russia”. But that’s not as catchy a sound byte.
Make no mistake I don’t give her a pass on this and indeed her (charity’s) involvement with the (former) head of the company bought by a Russian company stinks to high heaven. But again, 8 other agencies were involved in the decision making process (or really recommendation process) and also again, it was Obama’s final call not Hillary’s.
I’m convinced she gave a wink and a nod to this deal, however where is there evidence that the heads of the other departments/agencies had any ties to Russia? And what of Obama?
He (Obama) at the time was promoting this Russian “reset” to ease tensions after the whole Ukrainian debacle. So that was his and obstensibly Clinton’s motivation as well. It’s hypocrisy, big time, to be now demonizing Russia when back at that time everyone in the administration was so pro-Russia, again to repair relations after Ukraine.
However this was the political climate at the time and thus can be reasonably argued that there was nothing more nefarious to the deal than that. It still shows poor leadership but not on Clinton’s part alone but on everyone involved from all 9 departments and Obama himself. Again contrary to the sound byte implication.
As usual in politics the problem with an individual or group (like the Democrats) can’t really be summed up in a sound byte. And I would say the President does himself a disservice to continue to lay all this on Clinton. She’s not the only one to blame (because the deal does suck for the US no matter who is to blame).
She’s just the only one out of that group who gave approval who was running for president. So in that sense it’s a good thing to hammer her on. But we must be careful with these facts or else the larger issue (Clinton’s incompetence and possible compromise) gets lost and twisted by the “fact checkers”.