He’s not backing down. Donald Trump adviser Al Baldasaro confirmed on Tuesday, August 16, an alarming comment he’d made earlier this summer, saying that he indeed believes Hillary Clinton should be shot. His entreaty is not for assassination, he clarified, but for the Democratic presidential candidate to be put in front of a firing squad.
“The liberal media took what I said and went against the law and the Constitution and ran with it, and they said that I wanted her assassinated, which I never did,” the New Hampshire state representative told The Republican/MassLive.com. “I said I spoke as a veteran, and she should be shot in a firing squad for treason.”
In July, Baldasaro sat down with Boston radio station WRKO-AM’s “The Kuhner Report” to bash Clinton, 68, for her handling of Benghazi and the subsequent email scandal that ensued.
“She is a disgrace for the lies that she told those mothers about their children that got killed over there in Benghazi,” he said at the time. “She dropped the ball on over 400 emails requesting backup security. Something’s wrong there. I wish they’d made the documents public on why Ambassador Anderson was there. In my mind I want to think, were they moving guns? Were they doing something there? How did they know he was even there? Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”
When The Boston Globe gave Baldasaro a chance to take back his words shortly afterward, he insisted that he did not regret what he’d said, telling the paper that “without a doubt” he stood by his call for Clinton to be shot to death.
Baldasaro’s controversial remarks eerily mirror the behavior of Trump himself, who has in recent weeks told his supporters that President Barack Obama is the “founder of ISIS.”
“Normally you want to clean up; [Obama] made a bigger mess out of it. He made such a mess,” Trump said during a rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Wednesday, August 10, referring to the U.S. involvement in the war with Iraq. “In fact, in many respects, you know they honor President Obama. ISIS is honoring President Obama. He is the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder of ISIS, OK? He’s the founder. He founded ISIS.”
Trump also named Clinton as the “cofounder” of the terrorist organization, and refused to take back his incendiary words during a later interview with CNBC.
The Republican presidential nominee has also placed blame of the Brexit vote on Obama and Clinton. On Tuesday, August 9, Trump suggested that maybe “Second Amendment people” could find a way to stop Clinton, which many people interpreted to be a call for her assassination.
