New York's 9/11 mayor conveniently forgets about 9/11

The Trump campaign stumbled through another historic gaffe on Monday courtesy of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who conveniently seemed to forget about the Sept. 11 attacks in an effort to undermine President Barack Obama.

Speaking ahead of a joint appearance by Donald Trump and his running mate Mike Pence in Ohio, Giuliani brought up Pence's lack of foreign relations experience. During the speech, Giuliani paused and said, "Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn't have any successful radical Islamic terrorists attacks in the United States."

The problem: Giuliani conveniently overlooked two big attacks in his own city.

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First, there was the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing. At the time, Giuliani was an attorney at Anderson Kill Olick & Oshinsky but soon after took a leave of absence to run for mayor (he won).

Far more substantial, of course, were the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, during which Giuliani was still serving as mayor of New York. In fact, Giuliani was quick to invoke the attacks during his previous presidential run in 2007-08 for which he faced backlash.

Twitter was, as usual, unforgiving.

Perhaps Giuliani has come to agree with @KatrinaPierson that 9/11 was an inside job.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 15, 2016

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The Trump campaign will likely release a statement at some point today in an effort to explain Giuliani's gaffe, though it's hardly the first such gaffe coming from the Trump campaign relating to action in the Middle East.

Campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, speaking to CNN two weeks ago in the midst of the controversy over Trump's statements about the Khan family, blamed Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama for Capt. Humayun Khan's death even though Khan died in 2004, years before Obama was in the White House.

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And just over the weekend, when asked about Trump calling President Obama the "founder of ISIS," Pierson said, "We weren't even in Afghanistan by this time; Barack Obama went into Afghanistan."

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Pierson later apologized, saying she meant to say Syria instead of Afghanistan but mixing up two very different countries that the U.S. has been involved with isn't the best sign of competence.

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