Clinton, through her surrogates, is just trying to divert attention from the dishonest behavior of herself and her husband.
Advertisement
Brookover also said that he “wasn’t sure” who had sent the tweet, that Donald Trump doesn’t plan on making an apology for the offensive tweet, but rather the campaign had tweeted out a “corrected image” and plans to “move on”. “Now, not only won’t he apologize for it, he’s peddling lies and blaming others”.
Clinton’s campaign put out a statement addressing the controversy, saying Trump “should be condemning hate, not offering more campaign behaviour and rhetoric that engages extremists”. On Monday, he lashed out at journalists for continuing to report on the original tweet. Scavino’s statement said it was lifted from an “anti-Hillary Twitter user where countless images appear”.
He said that the star, which he described as a sheriff’s badge “fit with the theme of corrupt Hillary and that is why I selected it”.
“As the social media director for the campaign, I would never offend anyone and therefore chose to remove the image”, he added. In November 2015, he tweeted a chart of bogus crime data from the fictional “Crime Statistics Bureau”, which wildly overstated how many white people were killed by black people.
The news website Mic traced back the image used in Trump’s tweet and discovered it was identical to an image tweeted on an Internet message board for neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski dismissed the controversy in an interview with CNN’s Brianna Keilar on “State of the Union” Sunday.
Trump’s latest trouble is especially loaded because it’s not the first instance of him tweeting or retweeting something linked to white supremacists.
Obama formally endorsed Clinton only on June 9, after she had secured a narrow but clear victory over Senator Bernie Sanders, whose upstart bid for the Democratic nomination dogged the former first lady throughout the five-month state-by-state process.
The original tweet, at 9:37 a.m. Saturday, the day Clinton was meeting with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, showed a red Star of David shape against a backdrop of $100 bills.
Still, he later deleted the tweet and replaced it with a new image that used a circle instead of a star. And many Democrats are angry that the Republican General Assembly passed House Bill 2, which requires transgender people to use restrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate in public buildings.
Trump adviser Ed Brookover claimed the image was harmless, telling CNN there’s “nothing to see here”.
“The imagery is the classic trope of Jews and money implying that she’s raising Jewish money, or something along those lines”, complained Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.
“Crooked Hillary Clinton is “guilty as hell” but the system is totally rigged and corrupt!” he fumed on Twitter on Monday. “On the day after the passing of Elie Wiesel, arguably one of the most important moral figures of the 20th century, there is a chance for him to speak with similar clarity about what is in bounds and out of bounds”.
“Trump has previously retweeted neo-Nazi accounts including one named “@WhiteGenocideTM”.
Trump has also been slow to disavow anti-Semitic white supremacists who have expressed staunch support for his candidacy.
And when pressed on the anti-Semitic vitriol and death threats some of his supporters unleashed online against reporter Julia Ioffe over a profile she wrote about Trump’s wife in GQ magazine, Trump said he didn’t “know anything about that”.
Advertisement
Trump’s camp issued a statement doubling down on its message.
