White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway a cited a demonstrably nonexistent “massacre” as justification for President Donald Trump’s temporary immigration ban in an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine days before making headlines by mentioning the falsehood on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”
Conway said in a phone interview with Cosmo on January 29, and a video interview with TMZ that the Obama administration had called for a temporary ban on Iraqi refugees after a “massacre” she said was carried out by terrorists in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The magazine described the comments in an article published Monday.
“Why did he do that?” Conway told the magazine, referring to Obama. “He did that for exactly the same reasons. He did that because two Iraqi nationals came to this country, joined ISIS, traveled back to the Middle East to get trained and refine their terrorism skills and come back here and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre of taking innocent soldiers’ lives away.” Conway told TMZ a very similar story.
The Obama administration did review and slow down its program admitting Iraqi refugees after an incident in Bowling Green, but it did not introduce an outright ban the way Trump’s executive order temporarily has.
Two Iraqi refugees in Bowling Green were arrested in 2011 and indicted on federal terrorism charges accusing them, in part, of providing material support to Al Qaeda in Iraq – but no attack ever took place in the US. The refugees were ensnared in an FBI sting operation and later convicted.
When Cosmo reached out to the FBI about Conway's account, it said, an FBI spokesman told the magazine "a couple of your facts seem incorrect."
Cosmo didn't publish Conway's remarks initially, but on Friday, Conway told the same story on "Hardball." She quickly corrected herself, issuing tweets saying she only misspoke and meant to say "Bowling Green terrorists" instead of "Bowling Green massacre."
In an interview with Fox News' Howard Kurtz on Sunday, Conway again defended the legitimacy of her story.
"I should have said plot or I should have just called them terrorists … I clarified immediately," Conway said. "I should have said terrorists and not massacre. I'm sure it will live on for a week."
"I misspoke one word." she added. "The corrections in the newspapers that are attacking me are three paragraphs long every day."
