As pundits and politicians grapple with Donald Trump’s conspiracy theory about an on-camera police assault in New York state, his former rival Hillary Clinton has taken her chance to mock him over the theory’s origins.
The theory that Mr Trump propagated by tweet this week holds that an elderly man pushed violently to the ground by two police officers at a protest in Buffalo, New York was not a peaceful protester, but a radical anti-fascist “provocateur” using a “scanner” to thwart the police and foment violence.
“I watched, he fell harder than was pushed,” wrote the president. “Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?” Mr Trump has attributed these unsubstantiated claims to a segment on far-right network OANN — a little-viewed news channel, sympathetic to the president, that is known to traffic in false stories flattering Russian government interests.
And when MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin pointed out that the OANN journalist behind the Buffalo segment is also long-associated with the Kremlin-owned Sputnik News, Ms Clinton dropped a tweet with three simple words: “You don’t say.”
Any Russian association with the Antifa/scanner theory is unflattering for the president, not least given his repeated assertions that he, his family, and his political apparatus have no connection to Russian agents or influencers.
Others on the right are trying to cleanse all evidence of such connections, from a Senate inquiry into Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation to the Justice Department’s move to clear Mike Flynn of lying to the FBI.
Ms Clinton has many times warned of the prospect of Russian meddling in the 2020 election, including in an interview last year when she claimed a woman in the Democratic primary — widely assumed to be Tulsi Gabbard — was “the favourite of the Russians”, and that Green Party candidate Jill Stein is “a Russian asset”.
The former presidential nominee has herself famously been the target of myriad conspiracy theories for more than two decades, and a flurry of new ones emerged to her detriment during the 2016 campaign.
Among them were stories that she and her husband had had scores of people murdered for crossing them, that she was involved in child sexual abuse ring run out of the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant, and that she had died and been replaced by the Democratic Party with a body double.
These claims, and many others like them, have been debunked.
