Hillary Clinton’s claim that Republican front-runner Donald Trump is becoming “ISIS’ best recruiter” has drawn a backlash from fact-checkers — and a sharp rebuke from Trump himself.
“It’s nonsense. It’s just another Hillary lie. She lies like crazy about everything,” Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Clinton made the claim during Saturday night’s lightly viewed Democratic debate in New Hampshire.
Via Fox News:
“They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists,” she said.
Like Trump’s claim that “thousands” of Muslims in America celebrated 9/11, this claim by Clinton was swiftly vetted by fact-checkers — and found to be lacking concrete evidence.
PolitiFact rated the claim “false,” as did the Washington Post Fact Checker and the Associated Press fact checker.
The Clinton campaign, unable to provide any evidence that ISIS was using Trump in recruitment videos, walked back the claim by focusing on the terror group’s social media activity.
“She didn’t have a particular video in mind, but he is being used in social media,” Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri told ABC News’ “This Week.”
“If you go back and look at social media, if you look at what’s going on, they are definitely pointing at Mr. Trump,” Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, said on “Meet the Press.” But he cited no ISIS videos.
Embarrassingly for Hillary, there is a recent ISIS recruiting video that actually features three American political figures, Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton (who is labeled a “fornicator”), but no mention of Trump.
A propaganda video the ISIS terror army released last month in several languages used the image of former U.S. President Bill Clinton as a rallying point, calling him a ‘fornicator’ whose wishes were carried out by America’s military in the last decade of the 20th Century.
The four-minute video, titled ‘No Respite,’ urges male Muslims to take up the cause of the ISIS ‘caliphate’ and counter the influence of America.
“This is what happens when you’ve got someone who is basically being rewarded for sticking with a philanderer,” Republican strategist T.J. McCormack said on Fox News, Monday. “That’s why they’re burying these debates,” he added. “There’s going to be one actually on Sunday night during the NFL play-offs. They don’t want anybody to see this embarrassment.”
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