Trump Campaign Goes Viral With False Claim Rep. Clyburn Called For Trump to Be Hanged

Ken MeyerDec 19th, 2019, 3:34 pm
 

The Trump Campaign and MAGA faithful on Thursday ran with the false claim that James Clyburn (D-SC) called for President Donald Trump to be hanged.

The Trump War Room Twitter account, which is run by the president’s re-election campaign, posted a clip of Clyburn from an interview on impeachment that he gave to CNN’s John Berman. With absolutely no context whatsoever, the account claimed that Clyburn said “hang him” about the president. “This hatred and anger is out of control!” the account exclaimed.

The claim that Clyburn called for Trump’s execution by hanging took off in conservative corners, generating significant outrage.

There’s a slight problem: the account’s description of the video is extraordinarily out of context and completely misleading. Here’s what Clyburn actually said when he told Berman he agrees with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her decision to hold the House’s articles of impeachment back from the Senate for the time being:

Clyburn: “The delay is made necessary because the majority leader of the Senate has made it very clear that he’s not going to be impartial, he’s not going to be fair, he will collude, if you please, with the White House – at least the White House’s attorneys – to decide how he will go forward. Why would the speaker of the house step into that without trying to determine exactly what the majority leader plans to do? So I applaud her for this. In fact, I was one of the ones arguing that this ought to be the case. And until we can get some assurances from the majority leader that he is going to allow for a fair and impartial trial to take place, we will be crazy to walk in there knowing he set up a kangaroo court.

Berman: “How long are you willing to wait?”

Clyburn: “As long as it takes. Even if he doesn’t come around to committing to a fair trial, keep those articles here. So keep it as long as it takes. If you know, and he’s told you what he’s going to do, let’s give him a fair trial and hang him. It’s the reverse of that.”

So there you have Clyburn saying Mitch McConnell would do “the reverse” of hanging Trump after a fair senate impeachment trial, because the majority leader has already announced that he’s going to coordinate with the White House the whole way. This undermines the entire premise of the Trump War Room’s claim, and plenty of Twitter users are pointing this out:

Watch above, via CNN.

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