Topic: WorldNetDaily
Chelsea Schilling tries her best dramatic voice in a Nov. 1 WorldNetDaily article:
For nearly 20 years, Hillary Clinton has had an extremely close working relationship with a young beauty who was raised in Saudi Arabia.
Hillary’s ties to Huma Abedin go so deep, it’s been said that the vice chairwoman of Hillary’s campaign is one of few people who knows where the proverbial Clinton “bodies are buried.”
In fact, Abedin, whom Hillary once called her “second daughter,” had direct access to classified national security information stored on Hillary’s unsecured email server. Abedin had served as Hillary’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department. And it’s been widely predicted that Abedin would serve as chief of staff if Hillary wins her race for the White House.
But who is this woman, and why is she privy to some of America’s deepest national security secrets?
The hacktivist group Anonymous released a stunning video laying out the scandalous details of Abedin’s background on Oct. 24. In just one week, the video has gone viral with 1.6 million views. The same video was previously posted on YouTube on Sept. 11 under another username.
The video details many of the stunning revelations WND has reported for years – including eye-opening details of Abedin’s ties to terrorists and funders of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
As with a lot of things written by Schilling, there's not a lot of truth here. Snopes explains by debunking her claimed source of the video:
Neither the video nor its content was new, however, nor were they created by the hacktivist group Anonymous. The video was originally posted on 11 September 2016 to a YouTube channel called "Leaked Uploads." It, in turn, closely follows the text of an article posted approximately 10 days before that in a subreddit populated by Donald Trump supporters. Both the text and video appear to have been created by the same individual, a user who goes by the handle "Invadepro."
Indeed, claiming the video was made by Anonymous simply doesn't pass the smell test at first whiff; the the loosely affiliated group is known for hacking websites, not making slick videos filled with faux research.
Snopes goes on to debunk the video's main claims that Schilling repeats uncritically as "the hair-raising details of Abedin’s past," invoking such purportedly stellar sources as Jerome Corsi and Walid Shoebat. At no point does Schilling indicate she made any attempt whatsoever to fact-check the contents of the video before writing her WND article about it.
Snopes also points out:
[B]efore she could serve as Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff at the State Department, Abedin underwent a security clearance requiring, among other things, vetting of her personal and professional history to establish her loyalty to the United States and "freedom from conflicting allegiances and potential for coercion." While we would not argue that the clearance process is infallible, nor that information could not subsequently come to light that might change the assessment, we think it likely that the investigators charged with the task have better research tools available to them than does the average Internet user.
There are lots of reasons nobody believes WND, and promoting a smear video filled with falsehoods and distortions without fact-checking it or even confirming its claimed source is just one of them.
