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  • 2016-09-14 (xsd:date)
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  • Hillary Clinton Was Responsible for the Waco Massacre? (en)
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  • As Hillary Clinton has risen to become one of the two people most likely to be the next president of the United States, so too have various legends and rumors implicating her in the deaths of everyone from Vince Foster to John F. Kennedy Jr. The latest rumor to crop up in 2016 is an accusation (which appears on conspiracy theory web sites under titles such as WOMAN POWER: HILLARY CLINTON GAVE ORDER TO MURDER WACO BABIES and It Takes a Clinton to Murder a Village: Hillary Clinton Ordered Waco Massacre That Lead To The Death Of Woman And Children) holding that Hillary Clinton issued the order that resulted in the deaths of 76 religious cult members at the Branch Davidian compound in 1993. When the FBI and other law enforcement agencies began their fateful 51-day standoff with a religious cult in Waco, Texas, known as the Branch Davidians on 28 February 1993, Bill Clinton had just taken office as President a month earlier. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was the lead agency on the issue, directing law enforcement operations during the standoff that started on a Sunday when agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) attempted to serve an arrest warrant on the group's leader, Vernon Howell (better known by an assumed name, David Koresh): The standoff finally ended on 19 April 1993, when the FBI attempted the expected non-lethal solution of introducing nonlethal tear gas into the compound and the Davidians responded by setting fire to the compound, culminating in a shootout with ATF agents: So how could Hillary Clinton have been responsible for this bloody event? The only answers come from fringe conspiracy sites, who improbably claim that she — despite having no authority over the Department of Justice or any other law enforcement agency in her position as First Lady — was even more improbably running the Waco operation and issued an order for the final assault on the compound to Attorney General Reno through Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster ... something apparently known only to Linda Tripp, a former U.S. civil servant White House employee: The typical narrative of this conspiracy scenario bizarrely maintains that Hillary Clinton held enough sway to issue the order for an assault on the Waco compound because White House counsel Vince Foster was her longtime boyfriend and sexual partner, while Associate Attorney General Webster (Webb) Hubbell was the real biological father of Clinton's daughter Chelsea. This scenario even more bizarrely claims that Clinton's putative motivation for issuing the order was that she was disgruntled over the Branch Davidian issue's hogging all the headlines while she was working to craft a healthcare reform package: The Department of Justice (DoJ) oversees the FBI, and the attorney general heads the DoJ. At the time of the Waco incident the attorney general was Janet Reno, who — after consulting with the President and FBI officials — gave the final approval for the assault on the compound (although the FBI maintained a great deal of leverage as the lead agency on the ground). A detailed Justice Department report described numerous FBI and Justice Department officials involved in the decision-making process that led up to the end of the siege — but made not a single mention of Hillary Clinton or Vince Foster: While the operation involved hundreds of law enforcement officers from numerous local, state and federal agencies, and its aftermath resulted in multiple investigations by both the government and news media, we found no credible evidence that one of the people involved in the multitude of decisions that were made concerning the standoff was Hillary Clinton. (en)
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