Hillary Clinton will now become a part of political history books as she and her husband finally ride off into the sunset of political life…or so we think.
While she says she will never run for office again, Mrs. Clinton is well-known for saying one thing and doing another. Her relationship with the truth is strained to say the least, but as these 9 examples will show, she has no problem telling the public tall tales regardless the seriousness of the subject matter.
Hillary’s 9 biggest whoppers:
1. Clinton lied about the cause of the 2008 financial crisis. “We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s,” Clinton said. “That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.”
Actually, as the Daily Wire has previously explained, the economy Ronald Reagan inherited from Jimmy Carter was in worse shape than the Great Recession, and the financial crisis was actually caused by Clinton’s husband’s policies forcing banks to give out loans to people with bad credit.
2. She falsely denied her previous support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. When GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump called out Clinton for previously calling TPP “the gold standard of trade deals,” Clinton flatly said “no” and accused Trump of living “in your own reality.” The former Secretary of State attempted to worm her way out of it by claiming that she had “hoped it would be a good deal” but couldn’t support the finalized version.
This is a lie. The Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler points out that in 2012, Clinton’s full quote on TPP was: “This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field. And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world’s total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment.”
As Kessler notes, Clinton’s statement was crystal-clear at the time; she did view the TPP as a good deal, not that she “hoped” it would be a good deal.
3. Clinton lied about the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk. After falsely accusing Trump of painting “such a dire negative picture of black communities in our country,” Clinton brought up a blatant falsehood about stop-and-frisk.
“Stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional and, in part, because it was ineffective,” Clinton said. “It did not do what it needed to do.”
Clinton’s statement flies in the face of publicly available evidence. As the Daily Wireexplained here, not only is stop-and-frisk not racist, it has proven to be an effective means of reducing crime, as “murders declined almost 80 percent and major felonies by almost 75 percent from the early 1990’s to 2013 thanks to ‘proactive policing,’ which includes the practice of stop-and-frisk.”
4. Clinton claimed that violent crime is on the decline. It’s not. Following Clinton’s aforementioned falsehood about stop-and-frisk, she then unleashed yet another untruth: “In fact, violent crime is one-half of what it was in 1991. Property crime is down 40 percent. We just don’t want to see it creep back up. We’ve had 25 years of very good cooperation.”
The Daily Wire debunked this, as the FBI recently released a report showing that violent crime increased by 3.9 percent from 2014 to 2015, including a 10.8 percent increase in murders, 5.8 percent increase in rapes and 4.6 percent increase in aggravated assaults. Clinton used 1991 as the baseline year to hide the recent increase in violent crime.
5. Clinton continued to pander to the Black Lives Matter movement by peddling the myth of systemic racism. Here is what Clinton had to say about it:
Too many young African-American and Latino men ended up in jail for nonviolent offenses. And it’s just a fact that if you’re a young African-American man and you do the same thing as a young white man, you are more likely to be arrested, charged, convicted, and incarcerated. So we’ve got to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system. We cannot just say law and order. We have to say — we have to come forward with a plan that is going to divert people from the criminal justice system, deal with mandatory minimum sentences, which have put too many people away for too long for doing too little.
The statistics prove Clinton wrong. There is this 1985 study:
“Even allowing for the existence of discrimination in the criminal justice system, the higher rates of crime among black Americans cannot be denied,” wrote James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein in their classic 1985 study, “Crime and Human Nature.” “Every study of crime using official data shows blacks to be overrepresented among persons arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for street crimes.” This was true decades before the authors put it to paper, and it remains the case decades later.
“The over-representation of blacks among arrested persons persists throughout the criminal justice system,” wrote Wilson and Herrnstein. “Though prosecutors and judges may well make discriminatory judgments, such decisions do not account for more than a small fraction of the overrepresentation of blacks in prison.”
As well as the following data:
Mac Donald writes in The War On Cops, “The statistics on the race of criminals as reported by the crime victims match the arrest data. As long ago as 1978, a study of robbery and aggravated assault in eight cities found parity between the race of assailants in victim reports and in arrests–a finding replicated many times, among a range of crimes.”
She also points out that criminologist Alfred Blumstein determined in 1993 that “blacks were significantly underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their presence in the arrest data.”
In other words, the notion of systemic racism oppressing blacks is nothing more than a phantom pursued by race-baiters like Clinton to pander to the Black Lives Matter crowd.
6. Clinton also claimed that violent crime was decreasing in New York City. This, too, is false. Here is the exchange Trump and Clinton had about this:
CLINTON: Well, it’s also fair to say, if we’re going to talk about mayors, that under the current mayor, crime has continued to drop, including murders. So there is…
TRUMP: No, you’re wrong. You’re wrong.
CLINTON: No, I’m not.
TRUMP: Murders are up. All right. You check it.
CLINTON: New York — New York has done an excellent job. And I give credit — I give credit across the board going back two mayors, two police chiefs, because it has worked. And other communities need to come together to do what will work, as well.
Trump is correct on this and Clinton is not. Heather Mac Donald has noted that as the stop-and-frisk practice came to a halt in New York City, “homicides rose 20 percent” in 2015 and “gun crime was experiencing its first two-year consecutive increase in nearly two decades.”
There’s also this:
New York murders in 2014: 328. New York murders in 2015: 352. So Trump wins that fact check, too.
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 27, 2016
7. Clinton portrayed herself as a leading figure in slapping sanctions on Iran. This couldn’t be further from the truth. “I voted for every sanction against Iran when I was in the Senate, but it wasn’t enough,” Clinton said. “So I spent a year-and-a-half putting together a coalition that included Russia and China to impose the toughest sanctions on Iran.”
However, a 2014 report from The Daily Beast revealed that Clinton’s State Department “repeatedly opposed or tried to water down an array of measures that were pushed into law by Democrats and Republicans in Congress” that involved putting sanctions on Iran. For instance:
The most egregious example of the administration’s effort to slow down the sanctions drive came in late 2011, when Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez openly chastised top administration officials for opposing an amendment to sanction the Central Bank of Iran that he had co-authored with Sen. Mark Kirk. Leading administration officials including Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman publicly expressed “strong opposition” (PDF) to the amendment, arguing that it would anger allies by opening them up for punishment if they did not significantly reduce their imports of Iranian oil.
Clinton’s top deputies fought the amendment at every step of the legislative process. Clinton’s #2 at the State Department, Bill Burns, even joined an emergency meeting with top senators to urge them to drop the amendment. They refused. The amendment later passed the Senate 100-0. Menendez said at the time that the administration had negotiated on the amendment in bad faith.
It’s difficult for Clinton to seriously portray herself as a champion of Iran sanctions when her State Department repeatedly opposed them.
8. Clinton lavished praise on the Iran deal for supposedly stopping Iran’s nuclear program when it really didn’t. “My successor, John Kerry, and President Obama got a deal that put a lid on Iran’s nuclear program without firing a single shot,” Clinton said. “That’s diplomacy. That’s coalition-building. That’s working with other nations.”
In actuality, Iran openly flaunted the fact that they were violating the agreement’s cap on their nuclear program, and yet Obama delegated authority to a joint commission that provided permanent exemptions to Iran on their violations. Obama and Kerry knew this, yet declared that Iran was in “full compliance” with the deal.
9. Clinton continues to lie about her private email server. “I made a mistake using a private e-mail,” Clinton said. “And if I had to do it over again, I would, obviously, do it differently. But I’m not going to make any excuses. It was a mistake, and I take responsibility for that.”
But she really hasn’t taken any responsibility for it because no form of punishment has been handed out to her, and the fact that she tried to delete the evidence suggests that she never viewed it as a mistake. Instead, Clinton continues to repeatedly lie about it.
This list was previously published on The Daily Wire by Aaron Bandler
