Right-Wing Ghouls Seize on Reporter Christopher Sign’s Death as Proof the ‘Clinton Body Count’ Lives On

On June 12, police in Alabama discovered Birmingham TV information anchor Christopher Sign lifeless in his residence at 45 years previous from an obvious suicide.

Under regular circumstances, Sign’s demise would have remained a neighborhood tragedy. But it’s taken on nationwide significance in the right-wing rumor mill after conservative media personalities and a member of Congress noticed a chance to take advantage of Sign’s demise by suggesting he had been murdered at the orders of the Clinton household.

Now Sign has been added to the fictitious “Clinton physique depend” alongside Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer whose still-unsolved 2016 homicide in Washington, D.C. that police imagine to be the results of a botched theft. Fox News personalities like Sean Hannity seized on Rich’s demise to recommend he was one way or the other concerned in the launch of Democratic emails obtained by WikiLeaks — a declare that was shortly discredited, and resulted in a confidential Fox News settlement with Rich’s household.

But whereas the conspiracy theories about Rich percolated for months on obscure boards and hoax information websites earlier than making it to mainstream right-wing media, Sign’s demise was instantly seized on by main conservative figures, together with congresswoman and nationwide speak radio hosts.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who praised the QAnon conspiracy principle throughout her marketing campaign, was one among the first main Republican figures to recommend Sign was murdered by the Clintons.

“Why is it that so many who cross the Clinton Crime Syndicate find yourself lifeless?” Boebert tweeted on June 13, attaching video of a Sign look on Fox News in 2020.

As a neighborhood TV information reporter in Arizona, Sign broke the information in 2016 that Bill Clinton met secretly with then-attorney normal Loretta Lynch on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport. While Lynch claimed she had principally simply talked to Clinton about touring and his grandchildren, the assembly drew consideration as a result of it got here throughout a Justice Department investigation into Hillary Clinton’s electronic mail server.

In a 2020 Fox & Friends look to advertise his ebook about the assembly, Sign claimed that he had acquired demise threats as a results of his reporting.

Police in Hoover, Alabama, the place Sign’s physique was discovered, didn’t reply to requests for remark.

Speculation about Sign’s demise has taken off on conservative speak radio, the place Conservative speak radio host Dan Bongino additionally urged the Clintons might have one way or the other been concerned in Sign’s demise.

“Could this story have a wonderfully regular, albeit tragic, clarification?” Bongino requested in a June 14 broadcast of his present. “It might. Anyone claiming in any other case ought to produce proof. But I’m suggesting it’s getting fairly odd, isn’t it? People in the Clinton’s circle — it’s unusual.”

In a phase on Sign’s demise, speak radio host Charlie Kirk learn out an inventory of different supposed victims of the “Clinton physique depend” and urged

“If you may have any details about the Clintons, I like to recommend you get a bodyguard,” Kirk stated.

Pro-Trump cable information channel One America News went maybe furthest of all after Sign died, suggesting that Sign’s demise was one way or the other tied to rich intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 jailhouse demise. As an OAN narrator mentioned Sign’s demise in a voiceover, the community confirmed footage of Bill Clinton with Epstein, claiming that Sign was the newest particular person with ties to the Clintons to die “underneath mysterious circumstances.”

“Sign’s demise follows a line of people that had been seen as harmful to the Clintons and died, together with Jeffrey Epstein,” the narrator of the OAN phase stated.

The concept that Bill and Hillary Clinton are grasp assassins, directing groups of hit males which have left dozens of individuals tangentially related to them lifeless, has continued since the 1990’s. In tales associated on chain emails and hoax web sites, anybody with damaging data on the Clintons dangers being “Arkancided” — executed on the Clintons’ order.

Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of fact-checking web site “Truth or Fiction” and the former managing editor of Snopes, stated tales puncturing the Clinton physique depend smears had been constantly the hottest articles on the debunking websites the place she has labored — a mark of how widespread the conspiracy theories had unfold.

“I feel the Clintons usually are perfect for the conspiracy theorists of the world due to their energy and affect,” Binkowski informed The Daily Beast. “They get folded into the Illuminati conspiracy principle and provides the haters political course. Hillary Clinton, particularly, is an ideal particular person for the world’s misogynists to focus on.”