Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Breitbart News senior editor-at-large Peter Schweizer, author of “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” discussed the Clintons’ involvement with the Uranium One deal.

That deal allocated Russia 20 percent of the United States’ strategic uranium reserves.

Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time of the U.S. government’s approval of the deal, has denied involvement in that approval process. That claim according to Schweizer “stretches credulity” and warrants an investigation.

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: Peter Schweizer originally broke this story in a book called “Clinton Cash,” he’s been covering it ever since and he joins us now. Peter, thanks for coming on.

SCHWEIZER: Tucker, thanks for having me.

CARLSON: So, this is a kind of confusing cover to the story. The person who apparently has first-hand evidence that the Russian government tried to get the Clintons to support the deal has been prevented from speaking even to Congress, how can that be and what’s the justification for that?

SCHWEIZER: Well, that’s a great question, Tucker. What we know, apparently based on the reporting is that he has been put under a gag order by the Department of Justice and has been told that if he speaks about this publicly, not only will he face financial penalties in the form of a fine, that he could actually go to jail, that his liberty would be at risk, which is mystifying to me. I mean, why do we not want to know the details about this? That’s what’s so troubling, is it reeks of cover-up. It just stinks. There’s no other word for it.

CARLSON: As a legal matter, how can the Justice Department from a previous administration told the Congress of the United States, elected officials that they can’t talk to an American citizen about allegations of bribery that put our national security at risk? How does that work?

SCHWEIZER: Well, it really shouldn’t work and can’t work and what I mean is the Department of Justice today under President Trump, Attorney General Sessions, could tomorrow come back and say we are removing this gag order, that we believe that there’s a compelling national interest to know. We want this individual to testify before Congress. We want the public to know exactly what went on.

So, this is not something that’s unbreakable, but it just simply takes a request from the Department of Justice to remove that gag order. If that gag order is not removed, I think it’s doubtful this businessman will want to go public, because he doesn’t want to be put in legal jeopardy.

CARLSON: So, back to the core question, the approval of this deal, Uranium One purchased by a Russian company giving the Russians in effect control of 20 percent of our uranium supply. The office of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said basically she had nothing to do with the approval.

SCHWEIZER: Right.

CARLSON: Is that true? How could that be true?

SCHWEIZER: It’s not true and it’s interesting with the Podesta emails that came out, the leaked emails, what you find is how they tried to cover this up. One of the assistant secretaries, a gentleman named Fernandez came forward and said, oh, I was the one that really made the decision. She was not involved in that decision. But if you look in the Podesta emails, you see exactly how it went down.

Fernandez is communicating with John Podesta and is saying let me know what I can say, how I can be helpful. So, she was intimately involved in this decision and this is the important thing to keep in mind, Tucker, Hillary Clinton in 2008 when she ran for president went into detail — she actually had a plan on toughening CFIUS, this body that would prove these kinds of controversial deals.

So, she is very knowledgeable on this subject and she’s a hawk on this issue. So, for her to pretend like, I don’t really know what was going, I was not involved, just stretches credulity and that’s one of the reasons we need to have an investigation and really to this point, Tucker, we have not had a Congressional hearing on this. We have not had a grand jury as far as we know. It’s just shocking to me that there has been no investigation on this whatsoever.

CARLSON: And just to be clear, the dots that we are connecting are not very far apart. So, the chairman of this Uranium Company, Uranium One is also on the board of the Clinton Foundation and close friend of the Clintons.

SCHWEIZER: Yes. That’s right.

CARLSON: John Podesta’s company, the Podesta group lobbied on behalf of this company. Uranium One. Am I getting these facts wrong?

SCHWEIZER: You are exactly right, Tucker. Here’s the bottom-line. As this deal was coming for approval in 2010, the Clinton Foundation received from nine shareholders in this uranium company that was sold to the Russians. None of them all of a sudden decided they were going to donate large amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation, more than $145 million. And by the way, a lot of those donations were never declared publicly by the Clintons, they were hidden.

CARLSON: Right.

SCHWEIZER: So, it stinks on so many levels. Here’s the other important national security implications, Tucker. This deal was predicated on the fact that when the Russians got control of this uranium, it would not be exported out of the United States, that was part of the agreement.

CARLSON: Right.

SCHWEIZER: The New York Times has now reported that that’s not true. Yellowcake from these uranium mines are being exported out of the United States and we don’t even really know where they are going.

CARLSON: That is right.

SCHWEIZER: That and of itself demands investigation.

CARLSON: Yes. About 20 percent of it, they’ve reported has gone to some unknown destination which is ominous. Peter Schweitzer again, the person who broke this story in the beginning and it has been on it ever since. Thank you.

SCHWEIZER: Thanks, Tucker.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor