Did U.S. Navy SEALs arrest Hillary Clinton? No, that's not true: Clinton was not arrested under a secret order former President Donald Trump gave to the Navy. "The story is fabricated and not factual," Cmdr. Courtney Hillson, assistant chief of information, Media Operations/Plans for the U.S. Navy, told Lead Stories.
The claim appeared as an article published by Real Raw News on March 4, 2021, titled "Navy SEALS Arrest Hillary Clinton - Real Raw News" (archived here) which opened:
The chant "lock her up," has finally seen fruition. US Navy SEALS loyal to Donald Trump raided Hillary Clinton's Chappaqua, NY estate and arrested her on charges of treason, destruction of government property, and aiding and abetting the enemy, Real Raw News has learned. The arrest happened on Tuesday night, according to a source in [...]
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Navy SEALS Arrest Hillary Clinton - Real Raw News
The chant "lock her up," has finally seen fruition. US Navy SEALS loyal to Donald Trump raided Hillary Clinton's Chappaqua, NY estate and arrested her on charges of treason, destruction of government property, and aiding and abetting the enemy, Real Raw News has learned. The arrest happened on Tuesday night, according to a source in [...]
The article gives made-up details of the purported late-night raid on the Clinton's home:
Under cover of darkness, an eight-man detachment from Naval Special Warfare Group 3 infiltrated the Chappaqua mansion shortly after 2:00am. Mysteriously, Clinton's two-man Secret Service detail, which normally lives in a guest house on the property, was absent that morning. The SEALS cleared the main building, then silently breached the door to her bedroom, where they found her awake rehearsing a speech before a vanity mirror. They fired a single tranquilizer dart into her neck, our source said, before taping her mouth and sealing a black cloth bag over her head."
Here are some facts:
The "Tuesday" arrest of Clinton was never attached to a specific date. The article was published on Thursday, March 4, 2021, and Clinton tweeted in the days before that and the days after that from her public verified account.
On Monday, March 8, 2021, Clinton did a live interview that aired on the front page of the Washington Post website. This is a screenshot of her interview with Jonathan Capehart that aired live on Twitter and on the newspaper's site. She was not incarcerated and appeared to be in her home.
👉🏾👉🏾👉🏾 Join me and @HillaryClinton at the top of the hour for our WaPo @postlive interview at 2pm ET! #Internationalwomensday https://t.co/Yphf9JWHMS
-- Jonathan Capehart (@CapehartJ) March 8, 2021
The article claims Clinton's arrest came after "Trump had spoken to Rear Admiral Hugh W. Howard at US Special Operations Command and given him a 'mammoth trove' of evidence of Clinton's criminality dating back to her days at the State Department."
Howard is a real person and is the commander, Naval Special Warfare Command as his bio says on the Navy website. But under the Posse Comitatus Act, the military does not have the authority to arrest anyone inside the United States.
The Clinton-being-arrested claim is another QAnon conspiracy theory, one in a continuing series of prophecies that don't come true, all related to baseless claims that she is part of an international cabal of evil Democrats that kill children and eat them, and that she will be taken into custody by Trump's military and tried for her crimes. This is not supported by any public evidence and has been debunked by Lead Stories and national news outlets including the New York Times.
NewsGuard, a company that uses trained journalist to rank the reliability of websites, describes realrawnews.com as:
An anonymously run website that has published baseless and debunked conspiracies about COVID-19 and U.S. politics.
According to NewsGuard the site does not maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability. Read their full assessment here.
