Former President Bill Clinton attempted to blame the death of Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student, on Trump, but his comments backfired when he gifted Republicans a tailor-made soundbite.
During a stop in Fort Valley, Georgia, while campaigning on behalf of Harris, Clinton tried to tie Riley’s death to Republicans killing a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year at the behest of Trump.
“She’s the only candidate who has actually endorsed a bill that would hold down immigration in any given year to a certain point and then make sure we gave people a decent place to live,” Clinton said. “We didn’t divide people from their children, and we did total vetting before people got in. Now Trump killed the bill. The bill was written being written by senior Republicans in the Senate, and he killed the bill.”
“You got a case in Georgia not very long ago didn’t you, they made an ad about it,” Clinton said, referencing the murder of Riley. “A young woman who had been killed by an immigrant. Yeah, well, if they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened. … America is not having enough babies to keep our population up, so we need immigrants that have been vetted to do work, there wouldn’t be a problem, and he couldn’t keep people all torn up and upset.”
His comments, however, were quickly clipped and shared online by the Trump campaign and Trump surrogates, and Clinton was made to sound like he was throwing the Biden administration, and by extension, Harris, under the bus.
