President Donald Trump retweeted a totally ludicrous conspiracy theory on Twitter this week suggesting that the Obama administration never oversaw the execution of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden at all. In fact, the theory claims, the Navy SEALs team that went after bin Laden actually killed a body double, and the utterly ludicrous theory adds that then-Vice President Joe Biden supposedly ordered a Navy SEAL helicopter to be shot down in order to help hide the supposed truth of the situation. Robert O’Neill — who was on the Navy SEAL team that took out bin Laden — has now offered a memorable public response to the lunacy.
On Twitter, O’Neill commented:
‘Very brave men said goodby to their kids to go kill Osama bin Laden. We were given the order by President Obama. It was not a body double. Thank you Mr. President. Happy birthday @USNavy’
Very brave men said goodby to their kids to go kill Osama bin Laden. We were given the order by President Obama. It was not a body double. Thank you Mr. President. Happy birthday @USNavy
— Robert J. O'Neill (@mchooyah) October 13, 2020
The original utterly bonkers conspiracy theory that the president retweeted came from an account that has since been suspended. At the time of the president’s retweet, the account was operating under the username of “Oscar the Midnight Rider 1111,” but based on a link in the profile to a companion account on the right-wing social media site Parler, the account appears to belong to someone named Kari Donovan, who describes herself as “an ex-Community Organizer and Homeschool Mom.” In the bio of Donovan’s since suspended Twitter account, she included a hashtag — “#TrustthePlan” — related to the infamous far-right conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which has no relationship to reality yet has drawn in fans across the internet anyway.
Sheer lunacy https://t.co/50LUxy8eP7
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 13, 2020
The president has given oxygen to conspiracy theories before this incident. All the way back during the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Trump suggested that challenger Ted Cruz’s father may have had something to do with the murder of John F. Kennedy. More recently, he has expressed tepid support for QAnon as a whole, although he didn’t seem overly familiar with the tenets of their unhinged belief system. He simply said that the loony conspiracy theory’s adherents “love our country.”
Check out Twitter’s response to O’Neill below:
