Our No. 2 hit of 2016; checking Hillary Clinton on Alex Jones, child deaths

Did Austin’s Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist behind InfoWars.com, really say that no kids died at Sandy Hook Elementary?

We looked into what Jones said–for what turned out to be out No. 2 most-clicked fact check from the year–after Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said as much in a September speech. Jones, Clinton declared, “even said, and this really just is so disgusting, he even said the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre were child actors and no one was actually killed there. I don’t know what happens in somebody’s mind or how dark their heart must be to say things like that.”

For his part, Jones shortly disputed Clinton’s statement, telling viewers of his online program that Clinton “lied, not only to the U.S. but the world… that I say that no children died at Sandy Hook and they were all actors. I’ve never said any of those things.”

A moment later, Jones went on: “They can’t find anywhere where I have said that I know the kids killed at Sandy Hook were actors or that it didn’t happen” and furthermore, he said, he’s been criticized by conspiracy theorists who maintain the Sandy Hook events were fake–“because I don’t buy into that.”

In January 2015, we found, Jones indeed said actors were used to stage the child killings. “Sandy Hook,” Jones told a caller to his program, “is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors.”

We rated Clinton’s statement TRUE.

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JUST AHEAD: Our No. 1 most-clicked fact check from 2016.