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Are Nick Merrill and the NYT trying to gaslight us? Are we supposed to believe the whole “Russian asset” thing Hillary cooked up was just a case of everyone mishearing and misunderstanding what she said?

And if Hillary really meant that the GOP was “planning to set up” Gabbard as a third-party candidate in 2020, how is this any less of a really dumb conspiracy theory?

Here is Hillary spokesman Nick Merrill’s new claim, and audio from David Plouffe’s podcast last week:

Via MarketWatch.

In a curious turn of events, a number of major news organizations ran corrections Wednesday night over week-old reports that sparked a testy war of words between Hillary Clinton and Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.

Last week, a number of media organizations, including the New York Times, CNN and Politico, ran reports saying Clinton told the podcast “Campaign HQ with David Plouffe” that Russians were “grooming” a female Democratic candidate — widely assumed to be Gabbard — for a third-party run to play a potential spoiler in the 2020 election.

But apparently Clinton meant Republicans — not Russians — were doing the grooming.

The New York Times ran this correction Wednesday night: “An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an element of Hillary Clinton’s recent comments about Representative Tulsi Gabbard. While Mrs. Clinton said that a Democratic presidential candidate was ‘the favorite of the Russians,’ and an aide later confirmed the reference was to Ms. Gabbard, Mrs. Clinton’s remark about the ‘grooming’ of a third-party candidate in the 2020 race was in response to a question about the Republicans’ strategy, not about Russian intervention.”….

Here’s the full quote from the podcast:

Plouffe: “So [Trump’s] gonna try and drive the people not to vote for him but just to say, ‘you know, you can’t vote for them either.’ And that seems to be, I think, to the extent that I can devine a strategy, their key strategy right now.”
Clinton: “Well, I think there’s gonna be two parts and I think it’s gonna be the same as 2016: ‘Don’t vote for the other guy. You don’t like me? Don’t vote for the other guy because the other guy is gonna do X, Y and Z or the other guy did such terrible things and I’m gonna show you in these, you know, flashing videos that appear and then disappear and they’re on the dark web, and nobody can find them, but you’re gonna see them and you’re gonna see that person do these horrible things.’….