Hillary Clinton’s Three Most Absurd Claims While Running For President

Politicians say a lot of things and some tend to be factually incorrect — Hillary Clinton is no different. But the former First Lady and secretary of State has three statements from her two presidential bids that are shocking lies. Or as PolitiFact rated them — “pants on fire.”

“I’m the only candidate in the Democratic primary, or actually on either side, who Wall Street financiers and hedge fund managers are actually running ads against.”

Clinton said this comment on Meet the Press hosted by Chris Todd on April 3, 2016.

Her rival for the Democratic nomination has refused to take money from “big money” special interests, like the financial industry, and has ripped Hillary Clinton for her close ties to Wall Street. The quote above was in response to Sanders joking that her expensive paid speeches to Goldman Sachs must have been written in Shakespearean prose.

Of course, it’s not correct.

Still, it’s not as wrong as some in the Sanders camp might expect. Financial firms have run attack ads against Hillary Clinton. What makes her so wrong is that they’ve attacked everyone currently running for president.

The financial industry is not a monolithic special interest, despite being regularly caste in that mold. Some even support Bernie Sanders.

But this comment actually exposes another inconvenient truth: the Democrats are not the scrutinized targets of the financial industry’s wrath.

In fact, the most regularly attacked candidate is New York’s own Donald Trump. As previously reported by the Inquisitr, Trump said he believes that the economy is currently in a bubble, and in the center of the problem is the financial industry.

“I remember landing under sniper fire.”

Some of Hillary Clinton’s most audacious statements came from her 2008 race, like the one above. Back on March 17, 2008, she said this reminiscing about her trip to Tuzla, Bosnia, as First Lady.

If she were the host of the NBC Nightly News, an inaccurate statement like this would get her fired.

A video from CBS News of the trip revealed that the First Lady was under no duress. A child even came out to hand her a poem. After reviewing 100 media sources, the Washington Post confirmed there was no security threat to the First Lady at the time.

When confronted about the comments, Hillary Clinton doubled down at the time, saying, “There was no greeting ceremony, and we basically were told to run to our cars. Now, that is what happened.”

She retracted those remarks about a week later.

“[Sen. Barack Obama] basically threatened to bomb Pakistan, which I don’t think was a particularly wise position to take.”

Another Hillary Clinton claim from the 2008 race. She said this in a debate in Ohio, Cleveland, on February 26, 2008.

PolitiFact reports that Clinton isn’t the first person to make this claim; former Republican frontrunner John McCain also said this at the time. It appears to be a distortion from a far less controversial statement from Barack Obama.

During a speech in August 2007, he said, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

That statement eventually became an explicit policy of declaring an all-out war against a U.S. ally in the minds of Obama’s rivals. What Barack Obama was really doing was reaffirming that he would, under certain circumstances, order strikes against terrorists in Pakistan’s northern mountains without getting official permission from the Pakistani government.

That was already happening at the time.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign likely heard the comment from the Republican side, but failed to check such an extreme claim.

Politicians have to speak often on complicated issues, and all political leaders — almost all — occasionally say things that are indefensible after confronted with the facts, not just Clinton. Those comments receive the “pants on fire” rating on PolitiFact, and so far Clinton has three such statements, tied with Republican candidate John Kasich. Ted Cruz has seven, and Donald Trump is the king of the absurd, garnering 24 “pants on fire” ratings in his short political career.

There’s only one candidate currently running for president that has no such statement on record, despite over 20 years in Congress, and that’s Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination for president.

[Photo by Andrew Theodorakis/Getty Images]