Pro-Trump Pundits Claim Without Evidence Explosives Mailed To Democrats Are ‘False Flag’ Operations

Conservative pundits who support President Donald Trump aren’t convinced the series of packages with explosives mailed to Democrats around the country are a legitimate threat.

Several anchors and commentators from Fox News and other conservative outlets suggested Wednesday these deliveries are simply “false flag” operations and that Democrats themselves may have orchestrated these actions. Former President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and billionaire George Soros were among the targets of the threats.

In a statement on the packages, Trump called for unity:

“In these times we have to unify, we have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America,” Trump said Wednesday at the White House.

Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker told Fox News the mailed explosive devices may have been delivered by a person “trying to get the Democratic vote out and incur sympathy.”

Right-wing conspiracy theorists also started flooding the internet with similarly baseless claims about Democrats having potentially staged these attempted attacks.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh suggested a Democrat was likely behind the explosives because “Republicans just don’t do this sort of thing.”

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Limbaugh added: “Even though every event, like mass shootings, remember, every mass shooting there is, the Democrats in the media try to make everybody think right off the bat that some tea partier did it, or some talk radio fan did it, or some Fox News viewer did it. Turns out, it’s never, ever the case.”

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, a prominent Trump sympathizer, called the bombs “fake” in a now-deleted tweet.

Other hard-line conservatives like Ann Coulter and townhall.com columnist Kurt Schlicter also went after liberals on Twitter by claiming they have a history of violence. Others also noted the “convenient” timing of the suspicious packages, given that the midterm elections are less than two weeks away.

Many Twitter users quickly fired back at Coulter and others by pointing out that they had conveniently not mentioned historical examples of violent attacks committed by white supremacists and other right-wing extremists. The examples they named included the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 and late terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in a bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995.