GOP front-runner Donald Trump took heat for his claim back in November that he had seen a video of Muslims in Jersey City celebrating the attacks that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Now it’s Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s turn to run the same gauntlet. During last night’s Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire Clinton lashed out at Trump for his “discriminatory messages” about Muslims, then made this bald claim:
He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists. [Emphasis added]
Team Hillary has already circled the wagons, telling PolitiFact that what Clinton meant was not that “this is already happening — only that it could be happening, or that it may in the future.”
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But the same claim could be made for Muslims in New Jersey celebrating a terrorist attack on America or Americans.
PolitiFact, meantime, rated Clinton’s claim false, while going to great lengths to intimate that Trump’s incendiary anti-Muslim rhetoric could indeed be used as a recruitment tool, as many “scholars” on the Left have suggested.
*UPDATE* I just obtained a video clip of Jennifer Palmieri, director of communications for the Clinton campaign, explaining to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos the subtle nuances of the candidate’s claim last night. In it Palmieri concedes that Clinton was “not referring to a specific video,” which is a way of saying she was lying without using those words.
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