Supposedly, a couple of days before failed businessblob Donald Trump was sworn in as the 19th president of the United States, he ordered Navy SEALs to arrest Hillary Clinton for the crime of being Hillary Clinton.
I would like to dismiss this as an utterly absurd garbage lie that doesn’t merit any further examination, but I can’t, and I don’t think you should either. The January 6 terrorist attack on the U. S. Capitol demonstrated that there are people who act violently based on utterly absurd garbage lie.
As with so much QAnon nonsense, you can’t really pull at the threads on this one. Wasn’t “lock her up” a Trump campaign promise? Shouldn’t Trump have had Clinton arrested when he actually had the title of president? Why would Trump have the “motherload [sic]” of evidence of Clinton’s imaginary treason? And why send Navy SEALs to arrest a grandmother who supposedly doesn’t have the stamina to be president?
And yet we’re living in a time when publications like USA Today have to fact-check nonsense lies like that. I read Rick Rouan’s fact check through MSN:
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is the target of a conspiracy theory that claims she was arrested in New York by Navy SEALs acting on former President Donald Trump’s orders.
The claim by the website Real Raw News [link removed] cites “a source in Trump’s orbit” in saying Trump turned over supposedly incriminating evidence about Clinton that led to her arrest “under cover of darkness” by an eight-person team.
Clinton was taken to an undisclosed location before she is to be moved to Guantanamo Bay to face a military tribunal, the website wrote in a post that was shared across social media, including on Facebook.
There is no evidence that Clinton was arrested, and Trump has no control over or role in the U.S. military as a former president.
Real Raw News calls itself apolitical – “we have no dog in the fight, as they say” – but it peddles pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the military’s pursuit of former Vice President Mike Pence and Trump writing an indictment of former U.S. Attorney General William Barr.
Real Raw News did not respond to a request for comment, but its post derides fact checks of its work, saying it “stands by the story as written, and will present an update shortly.”
You can read the whole fish tale if you want, but I won’t be providing a direct link to that. Last I checked, there was no update to the update about Clinton supposedly being taken to Guantanamo. They also have tall tales about Delta Forces raiding Biden’s compound in the Ukraine and a foiled Deep State plot against Trump.
In his fact check, Rouan points out there is no evidence Clinton was arrested.
[Real Raw News] provides no evidence of Clinton’s arrest, citing only an anonymous source in “Trump’s orbit.” No credible mainstream media organization has reported that Clinton was arrested.
Clinton also was scheduled to appear on March 8 at multiple virtual events for International Women’s Day. That afternoon, she participated in a live chat with The Washington Post. That evening, she was to participate in a virtual fundraiser with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to benefit their political action committees.
Quite simply, the arrest is a lie, a hoax.
Clinton has also weighed in on the racism at Buckingham Palace after Oprah Winfrey’s eye-opening interview with Prince Harry Meghan Markle.
Maybe the Deep State decorated Clinton’s cell at Gitmo to look like her office or her study. Or maybe that’s a Clinton impostor we see on Zoom. Or, much more likely, the whole account of Clinton’s arrest is a complete fabrication that is essentially Trump fanfiction. This is a case of the simplest explanation being the right one.
If Hillary Clinton had really been arrested, The Hill would certainly mention it. Instead, they have to settle for a think piece from Douglas MacKinnon drawing false equivalences between Clinton and Trump, and taking Clinton quotes completely out of context (e.g., the one about the coal miners).
Rouan quite rightly points out in his fact check that the military, including the Navy SEALs who supposedly arrested Clinton, is under President Joe Biden’s control, not under popular vote loser Donald Trump’s control.
President Joe Biden is president because he won more votes in the Electoral College in 2020 (just like Trump did in 2016) and because President Joe Biden is undertaking all the duties and responsibilities of the presidency (which Trump never did).
Trump failed in his duties and responsibilities to our troops in many different ways. Diverting military funds to his dumb, racist border wall being just one of the most obvious ways Trump disrespected our troops.
To be fair to spur-addled draft dodger, there are two instances in which Trump was just not given a chance. Pentagon officials had determined that Air Force General Jacqueline Van Ovost and Army Lt. General Laura Richardson were the most qualified officers to head up a couple of very important combat commands. Maybe Oval Office Occupant Trump would have done the right thing. But, understandably, the Pentagon officials did not want the nominations of these highly-qualified officers derailed by Trump for some ridiculous and/or irrelevant reason.
According to Caitlin M. Kenney for Stars and Stripes,
Van Ovost has been nominated to lead U.S. Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, where she is the commander of Air Mobility Command. Richardson has been selected to be promoted to general and nominated to be the next commander of U.S. Southern Command based in Florida. She is the commanding general of U.S. Army North at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.
Their nominations come less than a month after The New York Times reported Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper decided not to recommend the two female officers for promotion because they feared the White House under former President Donald Trump would only approve of white men for those jobs.
Biden spoke about their individual military careers — both women are aviators -- and how they have helped blaze a trail for more women to follow them into military service.
Huh. Promoting qualified women to the highest echelons of the military might have positive effects for the military and the nation. Who would’ve thunk it? Probably not Trump. The position of commander-in-chief is still, for the time being, closed off to women.
I fault Rouan with at least one thing, though: not pointing out that there is no plausible legal reason to arrest Hillary Clinton for anything. If such a reason existed, Republicans would have found it by now, with all their investigations that start out noisily and wrap up quietly.
The wheels of justice move slowly, but at least we’d be hearing about court battles to keep her tax filings and other crucial Clinton documents hidden. The arrest hoax has legs because too many people believe the lie that Clinton has committed crimes, while ignoring the truth of Trump’s crimes.
Donald Trump is also out and about. The Trump Golf Count website seems to be lagging behind: his most recently recorded game on there is from December 30. Surely now that all pretense of doing any work has become unnecessary he would be hitting the links a lot more often.
Trump is the one who needs to go to jail. It’s true that he’s escaped accountability for many of his crimes. Trump will never be held accountable for his crimes against women and young girls. Nor will he ever be held accountable for his crimes against humanity.
But there’s still plenty of other specific crimes for which there is still time to prosecute the crook. Surely one of his tax frauds can land him in jail. Cruel family separations are one thing. But lying to financial institutions? That will not stand.