A new ad from the Trump campaign called “Corruption” contains a bevy of explosive charges.
Check out the script:
Pretty hard-hitting, right? The only problem is that compiling unsubstantiated claims, misleading statements and one outright falsehood, the Trump campaign has produced an ad that is breathtaking in its dishonesty.
It is certainly true that the Clintons went from what Hillary Clinton termed “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001 to earning more than $10 million in 2015 and $28 million the year before, as well as owning at least three homes — two in New York, one in Washington — valued in the millions.
But the ad suggests the couple became rich because of “staggering amounts of cash” given to the Clinton Foundation. This is false. The Clintons, according to the foundation’s tax records, do not receive any income from the foundation. And according to the Clinton’s personal tax records they receive most of their income from books and paid speeches.
Neither the narrator, nor any background text in the ad identify the criminals, dictators and countries that “hate America” that have allegedly given to the foundation. To be sure, the relief effort in Haiti following the catastrophic 2010 earthquake — an effort that was, in many ways led by Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation — has been a mixed-success. Some aspects of the overall relief effort have been criticized for poor planning and cronyism but because the ad does not specifically say how Haitians were “exploited,” we can’t issue a verdict.
The charge that Clinton personally gave American uranium rights to the Russians is, at best, misleading. The US government did, indeed, approve a deal that allowed a Russian state agency to purchase a controlling stake in Uranium One, a Canadian company with significant uranium assets in the US. The company, at one time, included investors who had contributed to the Clinton Foundation.
The State Department did approve the transaction. But it was one of nine US agencies, including Treasury, Commerce, Defense, energy and Homeland Security, as well as at least one state regulator, that had to sign off on the deal.
Overall this ad is false.