Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York City during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, glossed over the deadliest terrorist attack in United States history in a speech about terrorism.
During a rally for Republican nominee Donald Trump in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday, Giuliani attempted to place blame for the rise of jihadist terrorism in the U.S. on President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic rival.
“Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States,” Giuliani said. “They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.”
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Casual observers of history will note that the 9/11 attacks happened more than seven years before Obama became president, in the first year of former President George W. Bush‘s tenure in the White House, which followed eight years of a Bill Clinton presidency.
Obama was an attorney, law professor, and Illinois state senator at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which were carried out by terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden. Clinton was a U.S. senator for New York during the 9/11 attacks.
Asked whether Giuliani’s omission of the 9/11 attacks from his speech on Monday was intentional or simply a misstatement, Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks told the Daily Dot in an email, “The Mayor was referencing since 9/11.”
The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a flight that went down over Pennsylvania took the lives of nearly 3,000 people and injured some 6,000 more.
Giuliani’s remarks preceded a speech by Trump in which the GOP presidential candidate lamented the rise of ISIS—which he attributed to the policies of Obama and Clinton, who served as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
The U.S. has suffered seven deadly jihadist terrorist attacks during Obama’s nearly eight years in office, including the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, the San Bernardino, California, shooting in 2015, and the Orlando, Florida, nightclub shooting in June.