President Trump’s senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway, on Friday said she meant to refer to “Bowling Green terrorists” after she made a claim in a Thursday night interview about a terrorist attack that never happened.
While defending Trump’s immigration order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Conway referred to an Obama administration ban on Iraqi refugees following the “Bowling Green massacre,” though no such incident ever occurred.
“President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre. Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered,” Conway said.
In a tweet early Friday, Conway said she meant to refer to the terrorists from Bowling Green, Ky.
{mosads}Conway’s tweet links to a 2013 ABC News article that referred to the discovery of two “al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky,” which prompted the FBI to investigate improvised explosive devices (IEDs) collected from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan for fingerprints from suspected terrorists.
The two men were indicted for allegedly attempting to send weapons to Iraq “for the purpose of killing U.S. soldiers.” The story refers to the overhaul of the U.S.’s refugee screening system in 2011 after the two men were found to be mistakenly admitted to the U.S.