Kellyanne Conway took to Twitter on Friday to walk back her comments on MSNBC’s Hardball about a nonexistent terrorist attack in Bowling Green, Kentucky. However, this wasn’t the first time she used the words “Bowling Green massacre” in an on-the-record conversation with a reporter.In an earlier interview with Cosmopolitan.com, she not only used this same phrase but also went a step further in describing the actions of the two Iraqi men involved in the case to which she was referring.
Conway spoke to MSNBC on Thursday, but earlier in the week, she did an interview with Cosmopolitan.com in which she also referenced the “Bowling Green massacre.”The White House aide was actually quite specific about the incident that never happened, pointing to details with no basis in reality: “[T]wo Iraqi nationals came to this country, joined ISIS, traveled back to the Middle East to get trained and refine their terrorism skills, and come back here, and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre of taking innocent soldiers’ lives away.”Again, in reality, there was no such massacre. The Iraqis in Bowling Green were caught trying to send weapons to terrorists in Iraq — they were busted in a federal sting operation — and they’re both behind bars now.But the idea that Conway twice accidentally referred to a “massacre” that didn’t happen is literally unbelievable. At this point, she’s developed a reputation for brazen falsehoods that the Republican pollster may never be able to escape.Update: Here’s another example of Conway repeating the same claim, this time referring to the “Bowling Green attack on our brave soldiers.” There was no such attack, and the repetition of the claim reinforces the idea that she didn’t “misspeak.”
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."