Following Anti-Semitism Charges, Trump Super PAC's Absurd Counter-Attack on Clinton
Completely ignoring Donald Trump’s own sordid history with white supremacists and neo-Nazis, a super PAC supporting the presumed Republican presidential candidate recently launched a website absurdly attempting to link Democratic rival Hillary Clinton with the Ku Klux Klan.
On Thursday, the pro-Trump, anti-Clinton group Crippled America sent an email request to donors asking for money to air an advertisement on Clinton and the 2013 Benghazi attacks, Raw Story reports. The email was sent from KKKlinton.com, a website showcasing the Clintons' friendship with the late Sen. Robert Byrd, a reformed KKK member who eventually disavowed the hate group. The site includes a video touting the relationship between Clinton and Byrd, along with a pop-up that reads, “This image is of Hillary Clinton kissing Senator Robert Byrd who was, until his death, an avid racist who Hillary Clinton praised at his funeral and throughout her Husband’s presidential runs.”
The video includes a clip of former President Bill Clinton saying, “they mention that he [Byrd] once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan and what does that mean. I’ll tell you what it means, he was a country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn’t have done, and he spent the rest of his life making it up. And that’s what a good person does.”
Byrd joined the KKK in the 1940s, and later called his association with the group the “albatross around my neck.”
“I know now I was wrong,” Byrd once said. “Intolerance had no place in America.”
The Clintons did indeed praise Byrd for realizing the error of his ways, but they weren’t the only ones. Even the NAACP released a statement after his death praising the senator for his change of heart.
“Senator Byrd reflects the transformative power of this nation,” former NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous said. “Senator Byrd went from being an active member of the KKK to a being a stalwart supporter of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and many other pieces of seminal legislation that advanced the civil rights and liberties of our country.”
The PAC makes no mention of Trump’s extensive relationships with white supremacists, including his sluggish disavowment of antisemitic conspiracy theorist and former KKK grand wizard David Duke. Over the weekend, Trump made headlines retweeting an image of Clinton with the Star of David next to her head. Surrogates for the Republican frontrunner refused to apologize for the since-deleted post.
