President Donald Trump no doubt shocked more than a few people on Saturday when he posted a video report citing a number of “mysterious deaths” linked to former President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Clinton.
The video referenced several high-profile deaths linked in public speculation to the Clintons, including John F. Kennedy Jr., DNC staffer Seth Rich, former White House Counsel Vince Foster, and former White House intern Mary Mahoney.
In July 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr.—widely seen as a potential rival to Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate seat in New York—died in a plane crash.
Mary Mahoney, a former White House intern during the Clinton administration who some believed could have been a key witness during the impeachment proceedings, was fatally shot during a robbery at a Washington, D.C., Starbucks in July 1997.
The video also covers the July 1993 death of White House Counsel Vince Foster, who was found in Fort Marcy Park near the George Washington Parkway in Virginia, in what was ruled an apparent suicide.
In 1998, James McDougal, a key witness for prosecutors in the Whitewater land scandal and a former financial associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton, died of cardiac arrest while serving time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Worth, Texas, shortly before he was scheduled to testify.
In 2015, former Clinton White House Executive Chef Walter Scheib was found dead following what authorities described as an accidental drowning. Scheib had gone missing while hiking a trail in Taos, New Mexico, and his body was discovered submerged in a mountain drainage area carrying surface runoff.
In July 2016, DNC staffer Seth Rich was shot and killed in Washington, D.C., while walking home from a bar. Some have speculated that Rich was the source of the leaked Democratic National Committee emails published by WikiLeaks—messages that significantly harmed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The following month, in August 2016, Shawn Lucas—a Bernie Sanders supporter who served a lawsuit against the DNC alleging it had rigged the primary process in Clinton’s favor—was found dead in his home.
For several years, there have been scores of rumors of the “Clinton body count” — deaths some have deemed as highly suspicious at the time of people who were linked in some way to the former first family — but there has never been hard evidence presented against the Clintons in a court of law that tied them to any of the fatalities.
But the fact that the video clip was posted by the current president and a long-time rival of Hillary Clinton was noteworthy.
Snopes began covering the ‘Clinton body count’ conspiracy theory before the turn of the 21st century, writing in 1998, “Since 1994, various respected news outlets have been confronted with versions of the ‘Clinton Body Count’ list, run their own investigations of a few of the claims, and found nothing to substantiate what they looked into. Those investigations would culminate in yet another story about an oddball conspiracy rumor.”
The last time in recent memory that #ClintonBodyCount trended online was following the reported suicide of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein while in custody in a New York City jail cell.
Democrats and Clinton allies immediately condemned Twitter for allowing the conspiracy to trend, Newsweek reported at the time.
