Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence questioned if an Iranian scientist was executed because of information in Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s emails.
As BuzzFeed reported, Pence told Sean Hannity Monday that “we’ve got to get to the bottom” of why Shahram Amiri was executed by the Iranian government.
“We’ve got to find out whether Mr. Amiri, who was executed this last weekend … it became public because of the revelations in Hillary Clinton’s email,” Pence said on Hannity’s radio show. “I know that’s been alleged, there’s been news reports to that effect, Sen. [Tom] Cotton has raised some of those issues.”
Listen to Pence on Hannity’s show:
As The Washington Post pointed out, Amiri ― who had been accused of passing on state secrets to American officials ― was not outed by emails sent over Clinton’s private email server:
U.S. officials at the time told me and many other journalists that Amiri had defected to the United States of his own free will and had helped the U.S. for many years while he was in Iran by providing essential intelligence information about Iran’s nuclear program. The Washington Post reported at the time the U.S. government had paid Amiri $5 million.
Clinton talked publicly about the case at the time. “He’s free to go. He was free to come. These decisions are his alone to make,” she said on July 13, 2010.
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But there’s no reasonable connection between the discussion of Amiri’s case on email by Clinton’s staff to Amiri’s eventual execution. There’s no evidence her server was hacked. The Iranians knew all about Amiri well before the emails were released publicly. His kidnapping story never held water and his fate was sealed long before his sentence was carried out.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump floated the same theory on Monday, tweeting “many people are saying” there was a connection between the execution and the emails.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
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