The Clinton body count
A circulating list attributes dozens of deaths to the Clintons. It is built by counting anyone who ever met them, over forty years, and treating each death as suspicious. Applied to any long career, the method produces the same result.
Why this verdict
Debunked as a statistical artefact: the list is assembled by collecting deaths from an enormous pool of associates over four decades with no base rate, no cause-of-death analysis, and no comparison group.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That Bill and Hillary Clinton have arranged the deaths of dozens to hundreds of people — aides, bodyguards, witnesses, investigators — who possessed damaging information about them.
02Where it came from
The list originated with Arkansas activist Linda Thompson in 1993 and was expanded by a Indianapolis lawyer's compilation circulated by fax and early modem networks. It received mainstream oxygen from the Vince Foster case: the deputy White House counsel died by suicide in July 1993, and the initial handling of documents from his office was genuinely botched, producing real questions. Five separate investigations — including two by independent counsels, one led by Robert Fiske and one by Kenneth Starr, who had every political incentive to find otherwise — concluded he died by suicide. The list has been recycled continuously since, most recently absorbing Jeffrey Epstein.
03What the record shows
✕ DEBUNKED — Investigated and refuted. Here is what actually happened.
The method is the error. A national political family accumulates tens of thousands of associates across four decades: staff, donors, security details, officials, journalists, business contacts. American actuarial tables predict a substantial number of deaths in any such cohort, with roughly a fifth of all US deaths in some age bands attributable to accident, suicide or homicide. No version of the list has ever supplied a denominator, an expected rate, or a matched comparison group — and when researchers have applied the same method to other long-serving politicians, they have produced comparable lists.
The individual cases dissolve on inspection. Many listed deaths have documented natural causes; several people on widely circulated versions were not dead; some had no demonstrable connection to the Clintons; and several were investigated by local police and medical examiners who found nothing anomalous. The Foster case, the list's anchor, produced a Park Police report, a Fiske report, a Senate Banking Committee inquiry, a House inquiry, and a Starr report — all concurring.
The structure is unfalsifiable in the usual way: the absence of evidence for each death is treated as proof of the killers' competence, so nothing can count against the claim.
04What it cost
The list is a durable political weapon that requires no maintenance — every new death of a public figure with any connection is simply appended. It also does something more corrosive: it trains an audience to treat coincidence as evidence, which is the general-purpose skill underlying most of the entries in this archive. Foster's family has spent thirty years responding to it.
05Connections
- The Biden–Ukraine claimDEBUNKED
- The deep stateDEBUNKED
- The death of Jeffrey EpsteinUNRESOLVED
- Faked celebrity deathsDEBUNKED
- The Kennedy assassination — the open questionsUNRESOLVED
- The Obama religion claimDEBUNKED
- PizzagateDEBUNKED
- QAnonDEBUNKED
- The Seigenthaler Wikipedia hoaxDEBUNKED
- Uranium OneDEBUNKED
- WatergateCONFIRMED