Donald Trump advisor Roger Stone takes back claim that Hillary Clinton met with Florida officials to rig the 2016 presidential election

No, Hillary Clinton never secretly met with officials from Broward County (or any other county either)

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published November 1, 2016 2:54PM (EDT)

 (AP)
(AP)

Republican operative and Donald Trump advisor Roger Stone was forced to retract a claim he made last week that Hillary Clinton had met with Florida officials to rig the presidential election.

"Yesterday Hillary Clinton shows up in Broward County, slips into a private meeting with the woman who runs the board of elections," Stone said during his interview last week with Alex Jones, a notorious conspiracy theorist. "We're going to have photos right here on InfoWars shortly, but there was a short two-person closed-door meeting between the woman who's the supervisor of elections in Broward County."

On Sunday, Stone said that he was "incorrect." He was merely off by a county. Via Media Matters:

Yesterday I said that I had intelligence that Hillary Clinton had met with the Broward County supervisor of elections and that that wasn’t on her schedule, there was no media presence, and I believed that there was video and photos existed. I was incorrect about that. In fact, I was off by a county. The Clinton entourage pulled up behind the West Palm Beach office.

He also complained that "nobody in the traveling press entourage — and no one in the Florida press — has reported this private meeting."

The photographs never materialized, and it turned out that the press never reported the meeting because it hadn't happened.

Stone attributed his false claim to a "language barrier."

Trump's dirty tricks guru has been involved in suspicious activities on behalf the Republican nominee for months. Recently, he has suggested placing right-wing "poll watchers" at the polls on Election Day to intimidate low-income and minority voters in swing states from casting their ballots. During the primaries, he actively promoted the rumor that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz, one of Trump's chief opponents in the 2016 Republican primaries, had been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.


By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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Related Topics ------------------------------------------

Donald Trump Elections 2016 Florida Vote Hillary Clinton Roger Stone Vote Rigging