Donald Trump Falsely Boasts That He Called for Osama bin Laden to Be Killed a Year Before the 9/11 Attacks

President Donald Trump announced this past weekend that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed during a raid by U.S. Forces.

Despite having claimed on Twitter that former President Barack Obama deserved no congratulations for overseeing the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, Trump was quick to take credit for this operation, even though evidence shows he was golfing during the raid that killed Baghdadi.

While addressing the public about the raid, Trump veered into taking credit for warning about Osama bin Laden a year before the terrorist orchestrated the September 11 Attacks.

Watch below.

Complaining he never gets credit for anything, Trump said:

“In that book about a year before the World Trade Center was blown up, I said, ‘There’s somebody named Osama bin Laden. You’d better kill him or take him out.'"

While Trump does mention Osama bin Laden in his 2000 book The America We Deserve, the mention of bin Laden is actually somewhat dismissive, and at no point does the passage call for Osama's execution.

The excerpt is below:

The gaffe was just the latest in a long line of gaffes relating to the 9/11 attacks, with Trump often using the tragedy to gain a political foothold.

Remember that while painting a fearsome portrait of American Muslims during the 2016 campaign, Trump claimed he saw hundreds of Muslims cheering victoriously in New Jersey on the day of the attacks. This is patently false.

Trump also claimed he went to Ground Zero immediately after the attack with over 100 volunteers to begin clearing the rubble. No one there has been able to confirm this.

People thought Trump's latest grab for recognition was rather pathetic.

And the assertion revived his past statements regarding the September 11 attacks.

Trump is weighing whether or not to release partial video of the operation that led to al-Baghdadi's death.