Donald Trump read from an article ripped from Sputnik News, the Kremlin-backed news outfit, that misattributed quotes to a Hillary Clinton adviser to make the case at a Monday rally that her advisors thought she could have “done something” about the Benghazi attacks.
Speaking in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump held an article print-out in the air and made reference to Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal.
“He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’’ Trump said, as quoted by Newsweek. “This just came out a little while ago.”
“Clinton was in charge of the State Department, and it failed to protect U.S. personnel at an American consulate in Libya. If the GOP wants to raise that as a talking point against her, it is legitimate,” Trump read from the article before dropping it on the ground dramatically.
But the words Trump was reading didn’t come from Blumenthal. Instead, he was reading a brief excerpt of an article from Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, which Blumenthal had emailed to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman whose hacked emails have been published in part this week on Wikileaks.
Sputnik News seemed to realize their attribution mistake, taking the article off the web Monday, the same day it was published.
Trump, on the other hand, used the words inaccurately attributed to Blumenthal to prosecute a case on stage against Clinton. The crowd chanted “Lock her up!” in response to Trump’s account.
As the Washington Post’s Phillip Bump notes, there’s no way to know where Trump got the Sputnik article from.
Watch below, via Right Side Broadcasting:
And so we have a preview of a Trump administration’s rapid response, thankfully a dry run without nuclear codes.
If this is what Trump meant when he mentioned Blumenthal in Sunday’s debate, he had the info a day before the Russians leaked it…
GOP : It’s possible that maybe perhaps Hillary could have used her email to do something bad. After numerous investigations we didn’t find anything, but still, it was possible something bad could have happened. Lock her up!
Media : Trump has direct ties to Russian propaganda machine
GOP : * yawn *
You can run, and you sure can lie…
I’ll be interested to see if this makes into onto the TV news segments.