MSNBC's Joy Reid grills a GOP operative about Clinton and the Uranium One deal, rests her case

Joy Reid goes on the offensive on Clinton, Uranium One — (Image credit: Screenshot/Twitter/MSNBC)

At the end of President Trump's multiple Sunday morning tweets about a "Witch Hunt for evil politics" by Democrats, in which he mentioned a series of supposed misdeeds by 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, including "the Uranium to Russia deal," Trump said the "the facts are pouring out" about "GUILT by Democrats/Clinton" and urges somebody to "DO SOMETHING!" On her Sunday morning MSNBC show, Joy Reid did something, and she couched it as a series of "fact-based questions" for her guest, Republican strategist and Washington Examiner contributor Jennifer Kerns.

Specifically, Reid appeared annoyed at the rash of new stories last week about a 2010 deal in which a Russian company purchased a controlling stake in Uranium One, a Canadian company with uranium mineral rights in the U.S. House Republicans opened an investigation into Clinton's role in the seven-year-old deal on Tuesday. Reid's "fact-based questions" were actual questions, and she kind of gave Kerns a chance to answer them, but her rundown of the Uranium One flap was really an indictment of what appears to be a questionable effort to bring Clinton back into the news as Special Counsel Robert Mueller prepared to make Trump's possible Russia collusion top news again.

"There's actually nothing about the deal that's controversial," Reid concluded. "The only reason we're talking about it, per your admission — which I think is very honest — the RNC would like us to be talking about this now." Which isn't quite fair — as former Trump campaign chief Corey Lewandowski suggested in his slip Saturday morning about the "continued lies of the Clinton administration," Fox News has been very eager to talk about the story, too. Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.