On Thursday’s edition of Hannity, former White House deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka suggested that Hillary Clinton deserves to be tried for treason and executed.
“If this had happened in the 1950s, there would be people up on treason charges right now,” Gorka said. “The Rosenbergs, okay, this is equivalent to what the Rosenbergs did, and those people got the chair. Think about it — giving away nuclear capability to our enemies, that’s what we’re talking about.”
Hannity didn’t push back on Gorka’s comments. Instead, he immediately moved on to addressing another guest.
Gorka’s comments came in response to recent reporting from The Hill about how Russian nuclear officials were “engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States” when the so-called Uranium One deal was struck in 2010 — activities that drew the attention of the FBI even before the deal was approved.
The Uranium One deal gave the Russian government control over a share of the U.S.’s uranium mining capacity. Furthermore, in the years leading up to 2010, the Clinton Foundation received $145 million from Uranium One investors.
As secretary of state, Clinton was one of nine cabinet members sitting on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is tasked with reviewing deals like Uranium One. Clinton’s position on that committee and the donations to her foundation — in combination with the recent reporting from The Hill — has led Trump supporters to allege that she might have been engaged in corrupt dealings. On Tuesday, House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) announced that his committee is launching a new investigation into the matter.
But there’s no evidence that Clinton was up to anything corrupt. As the Washington Post detailed on October 24, it doesn’t appear Clinton and other officials on CFIUS were looped in about the FBI’s investigation, which was ongoing when CFIUS was reviewing Uranium One. What’s more, after Trump made Uranium One an issue on the campaign trail last year, Snopes detailed how the Uranium One deal wasn’t actually Clinton’s to veto or approve, and how the timing of the overwhelming majority of the aforementioned donations to her foundation didn’t match the timeline of the uranium deal being approved.
Gorka, nevertheless, suggests that Clinton’s connection to the Uranium One deal is on par with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s conspiracy to share nuclear weapon designs with the Soviet Union — a conspiracy for which the Rosenbergs were executed in June 1953. And not only is the former White House official willing to say so publicly, but his doing so on the president’s favorite news network didn’t even cause a stir.