President Donald Trump shared a video on social media Saturday that connected a series of deaths to former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, reviving a long-circulating conspiracy theory.
Trump posted the clip to Truth Social with the caption “The Video Hillary Clinton Does Not Want You to See.” The video compilation referenced multiple deaths spanning decades, including individuals with varying degrees of connection to the Clinton family.
The Deaths Referenced
The video included John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a 1999 plane crash and was seen as a potential political rival to Hillary Clinton for a New York Senate seat. It also featured Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, who was fatally shot in Washington, D.C., in July 2016 while walking home from a bar.
White House Counsel Vince Foster’s 1993 death was included, with his body found in Fort Marcy Park near the George Washington Parkway in Virginia in what authorities ruled a suicide. Former White House intern Mary Mahoney was shot and killed during a robbery at a Washington, D.C., Starbucks in July 1997.
The compilation also referenced James McDougal, a Whitewater scandal witness who died of cardiac arrest in a federal prison in Texas in 1998, and Walter Scheib, a Clinton White House chef found dead from an apparent accidental drowning in New Mexico in 2015.
The Conspiracy Theory
The “Clinton body count” theory has circulated for years, with supporters claiming suspicious patterns in deaths linked to the Clinton family. No evidence has been presented in court connecting the Clintons to any of these deaths.
Snopes investigated the theory in 1998, reporting that “various respected news outlets have been confronted with versions of the ‘Clinton Body Count’ list, run their own investigations of a few of the claims, and found nothing to substantiate what they looked into.” Fact-checkers have consistently dismissed the theory as unfounded.
Political Significance
Trump’s decision to amplify the video carries weight given his status as sitting president and his long-standing rivalry with Hillary Clinton. The post represents a notable escalation in promoting the widely-debunked conspiracy theory on a mainstream platform.
The hashtag #ClintonBodyCount previously trended online following Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 death in custody, prompting Democratic officials and Clinton allies to condemn the conspiracy’s spread.