One of President Donald Trump’s top White House advisers referred to a terror attack that never happened in an MSNBC interview that aired on Thursday night.
Kellyanne Conway suggested that the so-called “Bowling Green Massacre” in Bowling Green, Kentucky, was one of the catalysts for Trump’s executive order banning nationals from seven Muslim-majority states like Iraq.
There was no such attack in the US.
During her interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Conway described the false incident as two Iraqi refugees having come to the US, becoming radicalized, and masterminding the nonexistent attack. Conway offered no evidence to back up her claims and flatly suggested that “most people don’t know … because it didn’t get covered.”
Neither Conway, nor a White House spokesperson immediately responded to a request for comment.
The only incident surrounding Iraqi refugees and Bowling Green, Kentucky, in recent history was a 2011 case in which two Iraqi nationals were indicted on federal charges on accusations that they tried to provide material support to terrorists and to al Qaeda in Iraq.
The FBI’s 2011 press release said that the two men, Waad Ramadan Alwan, 30, and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, 23, were former residents of Iraq who lived in Bowling Green at the time of their arrests. Alwan was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison in and Hammadi received a life term in 2013, the FBI said.
Despite Conway’s allegations, there was no massacre in Bowling Green, and, according to the FBI’s statement on the matter, there was no plan for a terror attack in that city.
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The Trump administration has used the threat of a terror attack in the US to justify travel bans that target people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — keeping them from entering the US for 90 days.
The executive order has been criticized from nearly every corner of American life — from Silicon Valley, to the auto industry, to major banks, the nation’s top universities, leading GOP senators, and beyond.
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