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Why is “Usama bin Laden” suddenly trending on Twitter TWTR, -0.28% ?
Well, that would be because Fox News ran this headline: “Usama bin Laden wanted to kill Obama so ‘totally unprepared’ Biden would be president, declassified docs show.”
Breaking news that clearly is not. Those documents, as Fox News pointed out, came to light way back in 2012 courtesy of the Washington Post, which reported it like this:
“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency… Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.”
At the time, administration officials said the Obama plot was never a serious threat.
The rhetorical question that spread across the internet: Why now?
Fox News told MarketWatch that the story was published due to “the new context of former Vice President Joe Biden being the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.”
Many on Twitter still took issue with the timing:
There were, of course, plenty of those who ate it up:
