HHS Official Shared Meme Calling For Hanging of Obama and Clinton
Ximena Barreto, an official in the Department of Health and Human Services, shared an extremist right-wing meme on her Twitter page calling for the hanging of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama prior to Trump administration appointment.
Per a report from CNN’s KFile team, Baretto also promoted the Seth Rich and Pizzagate conspiracy theories and shared vehemently anti-Muslim posts on her personal Twitter account, @RepublicanChick. Additionally, Baretto frequently voiced her far-right punditry on YouTube and blog posts before her time in HHS.
“Fact: Our forefathers would have hung [Clinton and Obama] for treason,” reads the post that Baretto shared roughly around this time last year.
Her posts somehow get worse from there, as an August 2017 retweet claims Obama is a “Muslim terrorist” — a regurgitation of a popular far-right conspiracy. She went on to personally tweet that Obama is a “pansy and traitor.”
Baretto’s Seth Rich claims include sharing the hashtags “#KilledByTheDNC #HillaryBodyCount #ClintonBodyBags,” all of which are a reference to the unsubstantiated — yet, still popular — idea that the Clintons murdered numerous people, including the former DNC staffer who actually died in a robbing.
As for her anti-Muslim rhetoric, KFile found that the HHS staffer tweeted “#BanIslam” five different times, which were presumably references to Donald Trump’s push for a ban on all Muslims entering America.
Another one of her posts promoted the anti-Semitic conspiracy that the Rothschilds, a Jewish banking family, runs the world: “Macron is just a political puppet of the Rothschilds, just like Obama and Hillary are Soros Puppets!”
However, according to KFile‘s Andrew Kaczynski, HHS has allowed Baretto to return to work after she apologized for the controversial posts. She also issued a statement voicing regret over the comments: “In the heated and hyper-passionate political campaign environment, I made generalized comments regarding race relations & radical Islam. I fully understand that these emotionally-charged comments were hurtful, & I deeply apologize to members of both communities.”
[images via screengrab]
