Fox Host Confuses The US And Jordan To Falsely Claim Clinton Gave A “Different Message” In Private On Admitting Syrian Refugees

Written by Media Matters Staff

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Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt cited an October 28, 2013, speech Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton gave at the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago’s Vanguard Luncheon to claim that Clinton admitted that “we can’t vet these Syrian refugees” entering the U.S., claiming that she offered a “different message” now with her plan to increase the number of refugees admitted into the U.S. Excerpts of the 2013 speech, released in WikiLeaks’ hack of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email, show that Clinton was, in fact, talking about Syrian refugees entering Jordan, saying, “Jordan, because it’s on [Syria's] border and they have hundreds of thousands of refugees and they can’t possibly vet all those refugees.” Fox News has a pattern of misinforming about the United States' refugee vetting process and using Syria's refugee crisis to stoke Islamophobic fears. From the October 11 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends: 

AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): We're reading through all the WikiLeaks email, the latest ones that were released yesterday. Who is Hillary Clinton? She's out on the campaign trail saying, we need to let all these Syrian refugees in. Sixty-five thousands of them and when you read her emails from just three years ago, her conversations with [Clinton campaign chairman John ] Podesta and her conversations at these big banks, these transcripts have been released. She said just three years ago, that we can't vet these Syrian refugees, but if you hear her now, she has a different message. But she says, how are we going to know if these Syrian refugees that are leaving Syria, that are going into Jordan, how are the Jordanians going to really know if they are terrorists or not?

LAURA INGRAHAM: We don't know who these people are. 

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): Yeah.

INGRAHAM: Donald Trump, as far as I could tell, was the only person, over the last month, in the Republican Party that was really making this an issue other than maybe Jeff Sessions. So, again, if you want to have hundreds of thousands of Islamic refugees in the United States, if you want to do that, ones that we can't vet -- not proper immigration, but the ones we can't vet -- then definitely vote for Hillary Clinton. But I think Europe is dealing with this situation now, and they realize they made a massive mistake in what they have done but there's no turning back. There's no turning back.