The Hillary Clinton Lies Every Voter Should Know About

When you consider all the Hillary Clinton lies over the course of her public life, her current status as the de facto Democratic presidential nominee for 2016 suggests honesty doesn't matter at all in American politics.

Even after a two-month surge by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the former New York senator and secretary of state still leads in the Real Clear Politics poll average with a dominating 54.5% to Sanders' 22%.

2016 Election Candidate Hillary ClintonBut the latest series of Hillary Clinton lies, centered on her private email server while she served as secretary of state, has reminded voters of her penchant for deception. Despite her high levels of support, voters don't see her as honest.

A July Quinnipiac poll in three swing states showed how much of a toll decades of Hillary lies have taken on her trustworthiness. In Virginia, 55% of voters said they did not consider Hillary Clinton trustworthy; in Iowa, it was 59%; and in Colorado, it was 62%.

Clinton has lied at least four times over the course of the email scandal alone:

  • In a March press conference, she said she needed a private email account because she thought it would be "simpler" to have a single email account and a single smartphone. Except that just two weeks earlier, she admitted to using both an iPhone and a BlackBerry in an interview with Re/code's Kara Swisher at the Silicon Valley Conference for Women.
  • At the same press conference, Clinton said she had asked the U.S. State Department to "make all my work-related emails public for everyone to see." Except that she deleted 31,830 of the emails from her server, turning over only the remaining 30,490. Her excuse? Those emails were "personal," supposedly about daughter Chelsea's wedding and her mother's funeral arrangements. We just have to trust her judgment.
  • On several occasions, Clinton claimed that she neither sent nor received classified information on her private email account, which would have violated State Department rules as well as a federal law. But so far, State Department officials going through Clinton's emails have found 60 that contain classified information and two that had "top secret" information.
  • In July, Clinton said in a CNN interview that she had never received a subpoena regarding the State Department emails. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) disagreed. He subpoenaed her emails in March, a fact Clinton's lawyer acknowledged.

Still think this is a person deserving of the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination? The email fibs are just the latest examples of decades of Hillary Clinton lies.

As far back as January 1996 - while she was caught up in a series of lies and scandals during her time as first lady to President Bill Clinton - Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist William Safire branded her a "congenital liar."

Here are some of Clinton's biggest whoppers since she first arrived in Washington...

The Biggest Hillary Clinton Lies of the Past 25 Years

Some of Hillary Clinton's lies are very serious, as in the case of the email scandal, but others are inexplicably silly. But that tells us she'll lie about just about anything.

Hillary Clinton Lies No. 1 - NAFTA: For or Against?

During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Clinton said repeatedly that she had been "a critic of NAFTA from the beginning." (NAFTA is the North American Free Trade Agreement.) But she didn't criticize NAFTA at the beginning - she praised it. And she praised it for years after it went into effect. When candidate Obama pointed out the hypocrisy, Clinton's campaign angrily demanded an apology.

Hillary Clinton Lies No. 2 - Phantom Sniper Fire

In 2008, Clinton told a scary story about facing sniper fire after landing in Bosnia in 1996 while she was first lady. "There was supposed to be some greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles," she said. Video footage of the event shows Clinton smiling and chatting while receiving flowers at a greeting ceremony. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was demoted for this sort of "misremembering."

Hillary Clinton Lies No. 3 - Poverty Stricken

In a 2014 ABC News interview with Diane Sawyer, Clinton said this about her and Bill's financial state in December 2000: "We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt." While technically the Clintons were in the red due to Bill's massive legal bills, the couple was far from destitute. They owned one expensive home, a $1.7 million five-bedroom in Chappaqua, N.Y. and, despite their lack of money, were able to buy another $2.85 million seven-bedroom house near Embassy Row in Washington. The impoverished Clintons were able to put down $855,000 to buy the Washington residence. The next year, Bill was raking in speaking fees at $125,000 a pop while Hillary earned $2.84 million in royalties from book publisher Simon & Schuster. By 2004, the couple had a net worth of between $10 million and $50 million.

Hillary Clinton Lies No. 4 - Benghazi

Then-Secretary of State Clinton for weeks blamed rage over a YouTube video for the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans. But she had forwarded emails describing Benghazi as a coordinated terrorist attack in the days after the incident took place.

Hillary Clinton Lies No. 5 - Beginner's Luck in the Futures Market

In 1978, Clinton had great success trading cattle futures. She was able to turn $6,300 into nearly $100,000 in just 10 months! Her secret? When the futures story broke in 1994, Clinton couldn't recall making a profit on the trades. Eventually Clinton admitted an expert futures trader had placed the key trades.

Hillary Clinton Lies No. 6 - A Truly Tall Tale

During her time as first lady in the 1990s, Clinton told people she had been named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who reached the peak of Mount Everest in 1953. The tidbit even made it into Bill Clinton's 2003 autobiography. Trouble is, Hillary Clinton was born in 1947 - five years before Sir Edmund scaled Everest.

Hillary Clinton Lies No. 7 - The Irish Peacemaker

In a CNN interview in 2008 (again during her presidential campaign), Clinton said that she had "helped bring peace to Northern Ireland" in the 1990s while first lady. But despite the implication that she played a major role, she wasn't even present during the peace talks. At best, Clinton helped get more women involved in the peace talks. But when she made the claim, she was trying hard to establish her foreign policy credibility.

Hillary Clinton Lies No. 8 - Missing Documents Reappear

During the tenure of her husband's presidency, Hillary Clinton was involved in several scandals, including one called Whitewater. It had to do with sweetheart land deals made through the Rose Law firm in Arkansas, where both Bill and Hillary worked in the 1980s. Hillary played dumb when asked about a group of missing records sought by the Senate Whitewater investigation committee in 1996. Two years later, the documents turned up in the private residence area of the White House - with Hillary's fingerprints on them.

The Bottom Line: Honesty is in short supply in American politics, but the ease with which Hillary Clinton lies puts her in a class by herself. The question for voters is whether they want to give someone so comfortable with deception the power of the U.S. presidency.

Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Ties: Hillary Clinton rails against the 1% on the campaign trail, but she has no trouble taking campaign donations from wealthy Wall Street contributors. Despite what she says, here's why the 1% is not the least bit worried about Clinton winning the presidency...

Follow me on Twitter @DavidGZeiler.

Related Articles:

About the Author

David Zeiler, Associate Editor for Money Morning at Money Map Press, has been a journalist for more than 35 years, including 18 spent at The Baltimore Sun. He has worked as a writer, editor, and page designer at different times in his career. He's interviewed a number of well-known personalities - ranging from punk rock icon Joey Ramone to Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Over the course of his journalistic career, Dave has covered many diverse subjects. Since arriving at Money Morning in 2011, he has focused primarily on technology. He's an expert on both Apple and cryptocurrencies. He started writing about Apple for The Sun in the mid-1990s, and had an Apple blog on The Sun's web site from 2007-2009. Dave's been writing about Bitcoin since 2011 - long before most people had even heard of it. He even mined it for a short time.

Dave has a BA in English and Mass Communications from Loyola University Maryland.

Read full bio