A visibly-flustered former Trump adviser tried on Monday to explain how and why the GOP candidate tweeted out an anti-Semitic image that originated from an internet message board known for racist and anti-Semitic content.
Michael Caputo, a supporter of Donald Trump and former adviser to the reality show star-turned-political candidate, said the media and campaign for Trump's rival, Hillary Clinton, had ginned up controversy over the Saturday tweet to distract from the fact that Clinton was interviewed by the FBI in its investigation into her private email server usage.
Caputo was part of a Monday morning panel on CNN and was being pressed by host John Berman.
"This was not intended to offend anyone," Berman said. "It was, like I said before, a tweet that had a... geometric image on it that some associate with the horrible days of Nazi Germany. I get that, clearly they get that. This was an unforced error, there's no question about it, otherwise they wouldn't have changed it. But to apologize for it, I don't think so."
The "geometric image" Caputo referred to was the Star of David. The image Trump tweeted was mined from an internet message board used by white supremacists called /pol/ and showed Hillary Clinton with the Star of David, and $100 bills in the background.
"Let's face it, this whole tweet thing has been ginned up in order to try and subsume the story of the weekend, which is, the Democratic nominee was interrogated by the FBI in a criminal investigation," Caputo said.
The FBI interviewed Clinton for three and a half hours on Saturday, but it was a voluntary session, not an interrogation, according to the New York Times. The Bureau is investigating whether she or her staff broke the law by using a private server for email correspondence during her tenure as Secretary of State.
Berman asked Caputo if it was Trump who "ginned it up" by publicly using the controversial image taken from a message board that features anti-Semitic images atop its home page.
When Berman brought that up, Caputo shot back, "Do you know that? Do you know that?"
Caputo then added, "Do you think somebody from the Trump campaign went and visited this... the idea that somebody was sitting up late at night trolling on some kind of a fascist website is laughable to me."
Watch the interview, as posted by Mediaite, here:
