Trump suggests Clinton emails caused Iranian scientist’s execution

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested that Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s unsecured emails may have inadvertently caused the death of an Iranian nuclear scientist who was executed for spying for the US.

Trump tweeted Monday night: “Many people are saying that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the US because of Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails.”

He did not clarify which “people” he was referring to.

The FBI, after its investigation of Clinton’s unsecured private email server she used during her tenure as secretary of state, said there is no evidence that Clinton’s emails were hacked.

“‘Many people are saying, ‘I made this up,'” retorted Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill on Twitter.

Trump is not the first to suggest there could be a link between Clinton’s emails on her private server and the execution of Shahram Amiri by the Islamic Republic last week.

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK) said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that there “were on Hillary Clinton’s private server, there were conversations among her senior advisers about this gentleman.”

“That goes to show just how reckless and careless her decision was to put that kind of highly classified information on a private server,” he said.

Amiri, an Iranian nuclear scientist, defected to the US in 2009, supposedly to trade secrets for millions. When he returned to Iran in 2010, he was given a hero’s welcome and greeted with flowers by government leaders. Then he mysteriously disappeared.

Amiri’s case found its way into the media last year with the release of State Department emails sent and received by Clinton.

One email forwarded to Clinton by senior adviser Jake Sullivan on July 5, 2010 — just 10 days before Amiri returned to Tehran — appears to reference the scientist.

“We have a diplomatic, ‘psychological’ issue, not a legal one. Our friend has to be given a way out,” the email by Richard Morningstar, a former State Department special envoy for Eurasian energy, read. “Our person won’t be able to do anything anyway. If he has to leave, so be it.”

Another email, sent by Sullivan on July 12, 2010, appears to indirectly refer to the scientist just hours before he appeared at the Iranian-interests section at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington.

“The gentleman … has apparently gone to his country’s interests section because he is unhappy with how much time it has taken to facilitate his departure,” Sullivan wrote.

Clinton’s storage of her emails on a private server in her New York home sparked an FBI investigation and has become a dominant issue in the presidential race.

By: World Israel News Staff
AP contributed to this report.

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