Ridiculous and frankly shameful': CNN's Jake Tapper squelches Donald Trump's 'outrageous' attack on Clintons

For the second time in less than a month, Jake Tapper has used a CNN segment to clear up an unsubstantiated "falsehood" lobbed by Donald Trump.

Tapper on Tuesday discussed what he called "ridiculous and frankly shameful" comments Trump made to The Washington Post related to the death of White House aide Vince Foster.

Foster, an aide to President Bill Clinton, was determined to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound back in 1993, according to law-enforcement officials and a separate federal investigation. He was found to have suffered from depression.

But conspiracy theories surrounding Foster's death — suggesting the Clintons were somehow involved — have been the subject of internet rumors for years. Trump engaged on the subject during an interview with The Post last week.

"I don't bring [Foster] up because I don't know enough to really discuss it," Trump told The Post. "I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don't do that because I don't think it's fair."

Tapper brought up the fact that five separate investigations all came to the same conclusion — that Foster was not murdered.

"The notion that this was a murder is a fiction born of delusion and untethered to reality and contradicted by evidence reviewed in at least six investigations, one of them by Ken Starr, hardly a Bill Clinton defender," Tapper said during the segment.

"To say otherwise is ridiculous, and, frankly, shameful," Tapper continued, adding that his scrutiny of Trump's comments wasn't "pro-Clinton" or "anti-Trump" but "pro-truth."

The CNN host said Trump had "lent credence to a bizarre and unfounded conspiracy theory" and said the presumptive Republican nominee was right to say it wasn't fair to bring up the unfounded theory.

"You're right: It's not fair that you did that, certainly not to Mr. Foster's widow or their three children," he said.

Tapper held a similar segment earlier this month to correct the record on Trump's suggestion that Ted Cruz's father was somehow linked to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Trump based that claim off of a photo that appeared in a supermarket tabloid that attempted to link Cruz's father to Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Both Cruz and his father vehemently denied the uncorroborated and unfounded claim.

Trump has stepped up his attacks on Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton in recent days, hitting her over some of the controversies from her husband's White House.

Businessinsider