Appearing on ABC News This Week via telephone, Donald Trump scoffed at Hillary Clinton’s claim ISIS is “going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.”
“Knowing the Clintons and knowing Hillary, she made it up,” Trump declared. Fact-checkers at PolitiFact, CNN and (gasp!) even Vox pointed out there is no evidence to support Hillary’s accusation.
(Trump should have mentioned the irony of Hillary Clinton now preemptively blaming future terror attacks on a video of an American doing something that enrages Muslims.)
But shortly after Trump described Clinton’s troubled relationship with the truth, Stephanopolous, the former top-level Clinton White House staffer and donor to the Clinton Foundation, challenged Trump, asking him if he wanted to go down that road, considering the number of times media fact-checkers disputed his assertions.
“I’ll go down that road and people may call me out but they turn out to be wrong,” Trump said.
Stephanopolous and Trump returned to the candidate’s claim that he had seen thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the collapse of the Twin Towers, that it had been on television and that it was widely covered.
“There were plenty of people cheering,” he added. “It was in Jersey and all over the world. There’s an obvious problem and I think it’s disgusting.”
Trump referred repeatedly to a Washington Post article “that they tried to retract.” In the 15th paragraph of a September 18, 2001 article, the Post wrote:
In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.
Pablo Guzman of CBS News, who reported about a report of eight men celebrating the attacks and seeming to be prepared to watch them with binoculars and a model of the World Trade Center, said recently that the reports were “mostly anecdotal. People called into police and news. When you tried to follow up it wasn’t quite like we were told — it was a game of telephone.”
Later in the interview, Trump repeatedly disputed that Russian leader Vladimir Putin ever killed any reporters: “If he killed reporters, it would be terrible, but I haven’t seen any proof. He totally denies that he kills journalists.”
A 2012 report described the number of mysterious, unsolved murders of Russian journalists:
Let’s look back on the president-and-then-PM’s first 12 years of power (using International Press Institute figures).
In 2011, three journalists dead (including newspaper editor Khadzhimurad Kamalov, shot 14 times as he left his office). In 2010, two killed; in 2009, five more (including a young reporter from Novaya Gazeta, caught in a hail of bullets). Add four for 2008, one in 2007 and then 2006 as Anna Politkovskaya, the most famous victim of them all, is murdered. But she wouldn’t forget Yevgeny Gerasimenko – found in his Saratov flat with a plastic bag pulled over his head and computer missing – and nor should we.
Two Russian journalists died in 2005, and three in both 2004 and 2003; but 2002 was a wicked year, with eight lost (including Valery Ivanov, battling editor, shot in the head) and 2001 added another victim. Putin’s reign of power in 2000 began with six dead reporters and editors: a grim portent, looking back, of bad things to come.
But maybe they’re all coincidental!