Donald Trump peddles false conspiracy theories tying Bill, Hilary Clinton to several high profile deaths

Among a litany of social media posts shared by Donald Trump on Saturday, the sitting president dredged up a 2016 video rehashing old, false claims implying that former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton are tied to several deaths.

Mr Trump has made thousands of false or misleading statements about his political opponents across his two terms in office, and he has repeatedly vowed to use the power of the federal government to punish his foes.

Democrats have long warned that such baseless rhetoric could lead to violence.

The video, overlaid with the caption, “THE VIDEO HILLARY CLINTON DOES NOT WANT YOU TO SEE,” perpetuates the long-standing “Clinton body count” conspiracy theory, which claims that the Clintons are responsible for the deaths of several individuals who could be seen as political opponents.

The claims, however, are false.

A narrator in the video that Mr Trump shared points out that John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane crash while seen as the Democratic front-runner in a New York Senate race, which Mrs Clinton eventually won.

The video also refers to the murder of Clinton White House intern Mary Mahoney, who was shot during an attempted robbery at a Washington Starbucks when she tried to grab the shooter’s gun, according to the shooter’s testimony. The false implication of the video shared by Mr Trump, by contrast, is that the Clintons were somehow involved.

At another point in the video, the narrator says that Vince Foster, a deputy White House counsel in the Clinton administration, “supposedly killed himself.”

Mr Trump has called Foster’s 1993 death “very fishy” and said he believes he was murdered, but none of the five investigations into his death found evidence of that.

Whitewater investigation witness James McDougal suspiciously “suffered a heart attack” before he was able to testify to a grand jury, the narrator claims. However, The Washington Post reported at the time of his death that Mr McDougal had already provided testimony in previous months and was unlikely to have been called as a witness in any public proceedings.

The video also dredges up the bogus conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, who was shot dead near his Washington home in 2016, leaked thousands of committee emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign.

US intelligence indicates that Russia was behind the WikiLeaks email dump that damaged Mrs Clinton’s campaign. Mr Rich’s parents also reached a settlement with Fox News after they sued the network for emotional distress over a false story inaccurately claiming that investigators had found evidence that Mr Rich was the leaker.

As of Saturday afternoon, the video had been shared more than 6,000 times from Mr Trump’s Truth Social account. It was also shared by the official X account for Mr Trump’s political operation.

Representatives for Mr Trump, Mr Clinton and Mrs Clinton did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This isn’t the first time Mr Trump has attempted to tie the Clintons to baseless murder theories.

In 2019, for example, Mr Trump spread an unfounded theory on social media suggesting that financier Jeffrey Epstein’s death might be tied to Mr Clinton.

Mr Trump’s Justice Department announced that Epstein died by “apparent suicide” while held in a federal detention centre in New York.

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