For about 15 minutes, he laid out one indictment of Mrs. Clinton after another, asking the audience after each one, “Guilty or not guilty?” It was part red meat, part courtroom procedural, and with each query, “GUILTY!” rang through the hall, interrupted only by an occasional, “Lock her up!”
Like many indictments, the facts presented to the Republican jury were sometimes selective: not necessarily false, but often ignoring exculpatory evidence. Below is a closer look at Mr. Christie’s case.
On Libya
Mr. Christie started in North Africa, accusing Mrs. Clinton of being the “chief engineer of the disastrous overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya.” Pretending to be a prosecutor speaking to a jury, he urged the raucous crowd to render a verdict. The crowd roared, “Guilty!”
Fact check: Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state during the period in question, and she did make a humanitarian case for intervening to prevent Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from taking over Benghazi in 2011, when it appeared that his forces might kill more than 10,000 Libyan citizens. President Obama has expressed regret that plans for the aftermath of the strikes were not well thought-out, and that the world was wrong to expect the rebels to build a stable government there.
On Terrorism
In Nigeria, Mr. Christie said, Mrs. Clinton “amazingly fought for two years to keep an Al Qaeda affiliate off the terrorist watch list.” He said her actions had led directly to the kidnapping of hundreds of young girls by the group, Boko Haram, and demanded a verdict for “an apologist for an Al Qaeda affiliate.”
Fact check: The Clinton State Department did decline to add Boko Haram to its list of terrorist groups, in part because Islamic scholars and regional experts had urged it to try other means of confronting the group’s tactics. It did, however, put several Boko Haram leaders on other terrorist lists, and added the group in 2013.
