On Wednesday, The Daily Mail published an article claiming that Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States warned the Department of Homeland Security about Tamerlan Tsarnaev a year before the Boston bombings. The story, which was already fairly fishy, completely fell apart when the Saudi embassy said they had sent no such letter. But the fictional Saudi letter had already entered the conspiracy theory news cycle, where Glenn Beck, among others, picked it up and ran with it.
The theory, it turns out, also reached the halls of Congress. In an interview with Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg on Wednesday afternoon, Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania speculated that the Obama administration might be hiding a “Saudi connection” or other information about the the Boston bombings that might endanger “your town or my town.”
Well, we’re not surprised, number one, and we’re skeptical, I think, the American people, certainly I am, about the statements that there’s no one else involved. We keep on hearing about a Saudi connection. And listen, this administration hasn’t been forthcoming information on other cases that are important to the American people, namely Benghazi, Fast and Furious, etc., so pardon us for being skeptical and questioning the validity of the claims that, you know, nobody else is involved or nobody’s dangerous or this happened after the fact and so on and so forth.
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Listen, when they haven’t been really forthcoming about these other Saudi connections and what have you, then we are skeptical and we are mistrusting and we just don’t believe them. And so we wonder what other shoes haven’t dropped yet, and is there an unsafe situation in your town or my town?
