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Trump retweets account that traffics in wild conspiracy theories, accused Hillary Clinton of murder

Stay classy.

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/DARRON CUMMINGS
CREDIT: AP PHOTO/DARRON CUMMINGS

A Twitter account President Trump retweeted Friday morning has posted a series of incendiary tweets, including one accusing Hillary Clinton of murdering former DNC staffer Seth Rich. Another tweet claimed the former president Barack Obama had a secret male lover.

Nonetheless, Trump retweeted this tweet from @Team_Trump45 to his more than 35 million followers:

Other tweets from the account are far more incendiary. Larry Sinclair is a disturbed individual who claims to be Barack Obama’s former lover. 

Conspiracy theorists have seized on the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich as a way of deflecting blame from Russian hackers. The account not only advanced that theory but accused Hillary Clinton of murdering Rich.

This is not the first time Trump has retweeted hate-mongering accounts. During the campaign, Trump routinely retweeted top influencers in the “white genocide” movement. In March 2016, he retweeted a picture unfavorably comparing the physical appearance of Ted Cruz’s wife to his wife Melania.

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In November 2015, Trump defended his decision to retweet a user who posted an inaccurate, racist graphic about black crime stats, telling then-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, “All it was is a retweet. It wasn’t from me, and it did — it came out of a radio show and other places.”

Trump has been a bit more discerning about who he retweets since the election, but his tweets on Friday suggest he may be reverting to old form on the first day of his 17-day summer golf vacation.

Though Trump accuses Democrats of being unable to move past the election, his retweet of @Team_Trump45 came the morning after he urged new investigations of Hillary Clinton during a rally in West Virginia. He’s reportedly considered hanging a similar picture of the electoral results in the White House, and recently urged a Washington Post reporter to try and have the paper run an image of the map on its front page.

As the Post broke down on Friday morning, the map Trump retweeted is misleading. It only depicts for geographical space, not the number of people who live in each county. Deep-blue Los Angeles County, for instance, doesn’t appear large on a map, but Clinton won the county by 48 points.

The Hill reports that @Team_Trump45 is followed “by several top Trump allies on Twitter, including Fox News host Sean Hannity, former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, and former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn.”