Things she said

At a September 2016 fundraiser Clinton said: “To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables… The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” She said the other half “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change,” and “Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.” [1]

In 1996, backing her husband’s 1994 crime bill, Clinton spoke of gangs of kids: “They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.” She did not name a race. In 2016 she said: “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.” PolitiFact rated mostly true the claim that she labelled Black youth that way, given the context. [1]

Bill Clinton told the NAACP in 2015 that the crime bill “made the problem worse” on mass incarceration. [2]

On 20 October 2011, between television interviews in Kabul, an aide told Clinton of reports that Muammar Gaddafi had been killed. She shared a laugh with a CBS reporter and joked: “We came, we saw, he died.” [1]

In March 2008 she said of a 1996 trip to Tuzla: “I remember landing under sniper fire… we just ran with our heads down.” CBS video showed her walking calmly and greeting a girl on the tarmac. A week later she said she “misspoke”: “So I made a mistake. That happens.” [1][2]

Clinton said her mother named her after Sir Edmund Hillary. He was unknown until his 1953 Everest climb; she was born in 1947. In October 2006 her campaign called it “a sweet family story” her mother told her. [1][2]

On 2 October 2016 the site True Pundit reported that Clinton asked of Julian Assange, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”, citing unnamed State Department sources. No document or named witness has backed it. Asked about it two days later, Clinton said she did not recall it and that any such remark “would have been a joke.” Snopes rated it unproven. [1]

PolitiFact found that some Clinton supporters spread the rumor that Barack Obama was not born in the United States late in the 2008 primary, but “the record does not show Clinton or her campaign ever promoting the birther theory, let alone starting it.” Two campaign volunteers who forwarded emails saying Obama was a Muslim resigned. [1]

A former McClatchy bureau chief said in 2016 that Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton ally, urged him in 2008 to check whether Obama was born in Kenya. Blumenthal called that false; McClatchy confirmed the meeting but found no proof he questioned Obama’s birthplace. [2]