One of our all-time great fact-checks was the March 21, 2008, 4-Pinocchio ruling on Hillary Clinton’s false claim during the 2012 presidential campaign that she arrived in Bosnia “under sniper fire” as first lady. Clinton had told this dramatic story to show she was sent to places that her husband could not go because they were “too dangerous.” Fact Checker founder Michael Dobbs was the first to debunk this, and other outlets quickly followed. It ultimately became a defining moment in the 2008 campaign for Clinton. Readers ask us to fact-check this all the time. Other top fact-check requests on Clinton are Benghazi (here are 20 fact-checks on it) and her e-mails (here are 10 fact-checks on it). Dobbs’s fact-check from eight years ago now appears in small print on an older version of the website, so we republished it this week with some new material. During a March 17, 2008, speech at George Washington University, Clinton said: "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base." But that was simply not credible. Bosnia was not “too dangerous” a place for the president to visit in early 1996. A review of nearly 100 news accounts of her visit showed that not a single news outlet reported any security threat to her. Photos and videos of her arrival ceremony showed she calmly walked out of the military transport plane that brought her to Tuzla. Her campaign eventually conceded that she misspoke in that instance, but insisted she was “going to a potential combat zone” (even though the war ended three months earlier). Clinton herself said that she misspoke, but that she was told to “land a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire.” Former ambassador Christopher R. Hill, who accompanied Clinton on the trip, recounted in his 2014 memoir that staff and reporters received an unusually intense briefing about the security situation just before landing in Bosnia. It doesn’t excuse Clinton’s statement, but it’s an example of how memories can be forged in unexpected ways. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we’ll check it out. Happy Memorial Day weekend! Your Fact Checker newsletter author is away, so here’s another oldie but goodie for you to enjoy this long weekend. | 
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