Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and the stain on Trump's shirt formerly known as Rudy Giuliani have all made the claim in the last few days that perhaps, just perhaps, Hillary Clinton's emails killed a guy. Or, specifically, that Iran executed a scientist who had once defected to the United States before returning to Iran because that scientist was mentioned in released Clinton emails. Except he wasn't mentioned by name. And he was commonly known to be a defector before the emails were ever written. And the man's name and status were reported in the press at the time, readily available to anyone with access to a newspaper.
To put that in Trump-speak:
In this context, "many people" means a handful of exceedingly stupid people and conspiracy theorists, a group well represented in the Donald Trump campaign.
Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler seems exasperated with the Trump campaign—and who wouldn't be—labeling this most recent Trump talking point "among the stupidest claims made so far in this campaign."
There’s an easy way to figure this out before you make a fool of yourself on the radio or on Twitter: Simply check the newspaper clips.
We have assembled below the mentions of Shahram Amiri, the executed scientist, in The Washington Post in 2009 and 2010, and then placed the emails to Clinton in the timeline. You will note that the emails in question do not even mention his name — which appeared frequently on the front page of The Post and other newspapers at the time.
So it is not just the usual brand of conspiracy theory offal the Trump campaignusually offers (oh, Mike Pence, can you fall any farther?), but high-octane megabunk. Complete uberdrivel. The burps and burbles of internet sleuths who could not be bothered to so much as Google a man's name in their quest to build a conspiracy theory suggesting that his death was all Hillary Clinton's fault.
But is it among the stupidest claims made so far in this campaign? The jury's out. This campaign has also seen Donald Trump claim he is a smart guy, and a self-made man, and a business genius. He claims to surround himself with "the best people,” and we all can see how that's been going.
The only thing that seems certain is that a President Trump's foreign policy and intelligence teams would be made up of the most amazing lunatics and paste-eaters to ever be assembled, all of them culled from whoever President Trump saw in his Twitter feed on any given morning. In a campaign full of policy reversals, asinine claims, and outright lies, Trump's affinity for conspiracy buffs has been one of the few constants of his campaign.