Longtime Donald Trump confidante Roger Stone said Monday that the Orlando terrorist attack was a good opportunity for his candidate to question whether top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin could be a “terrorist agent.”
“I also think that now that Islamic terrorism is going to be front and center, there’s going to be a new focus on whether this administration, the administration of Hillary Clinton at State, was permeated at the highest levels by Saudi intelligence and others who are not loyal Americans,” Stone said on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily.” “I speak specifically of Huma Abedin, the right-hand woman, now vice-chairman or co-chairman of vice—of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”
Stone also published a lengthy post on Breitbart’s site laying out similar baseless allegations.
For years, far-right pundits have circulated unsubstantiated rumors about Abedin’s alleged family ties to proponents of Sharia law and to Saudi officials. In 2012, then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) earned rebukes from the State Department and some in her own party for claiming that several of Abedin’s relatives were “connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations.”
Stone cast suspicion on Abedin’s ties to the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, a think tank founded by her father that studies minority Muslim communities around the globe in the service of securing their rights.
“She has a very troubling past,” Stone said. “She comes out of nowhere. She seems to have an enormous amount of cash, even prior to the time that she goes to work for Hillary. So we have to ask: Do we have a Saudi spy in our midst? Do we have a terrorist agent?”
Stone said people would only focus on Abedin’s backstory “if Trump himself raises the question.”
Trump seemed open to using the fatal shootings at the Pulse LGBT nightclub as an occasion to question the faith and patriotism of certain Democrats. In a Monday appearance on “Fox and Friends,” he suggested that President Barack Obama may be working with Muslim terrorists in secret.
People “cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words radical Islamic terrorism,” Trump said. “There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”
