President Barack Obama has dismissed President Donald Trump’s notion that in 2011, during the Obama administration, a Navy Seal team killed a body double and not Osama Bin Laden.
In October, Trump retweeted a claim from a Twitter account that has since been suspended that alleged Bin Laden might still be alive, and “Biden and Obama may have had Seal Team 6 killed.”
Speaking with Obama on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Thursday night, Kimmel asked: “You’ve got this guy who, by the way, I’m sure, you know, floated the idea that they didn’t actually kill Bin Laden. You killed like Weird Al or something like that. Did you kill Weird Al Yancovic?”
“I mean, it would be preposterous except for the fact that it’s the President of the United States re-tweeting it,” Obama replied. “And when you had one of the members of the Seal team responding, understanding the risks he and his fellow Seal members took – anything could have happened… that’s just not what you want out of a Commander in Chief.”
Navy Seals were also referenced when Kimmel asked Obama if there were places someone could hide in the White House, “Like if, say, they were going to be removed, are there little cubby holes or anything we should know about?”
“Well, I think we can always send the Navy Seals in there to dig them out,” Obama replied.
Obama was on the show to promote his memoir, “A Promised Land,” a weighty 701-page tome. “Did you make it that long to make sure Trump never reads it?,” Kimmel asked. “You know, I don’t think it would have had to be 700 to make sure he doesn’t read it,” Obama replied to much applause. “But as I said, in the preface, I didn’t start off wanting to write a book that long, but as you start getting into it, you realize – first of all, I want people to understand how I was making decisions, what we were dealing with, the financial crisis or with Iran or these other issues.”
Obama was fulsome in his praise of his predecessor George W. Bush, describing him as a “good man” and a “patriot.” “He ordered everybody on his team to work seamlessly with us on the transition. Could not have been more gracious, could not have been more helpful. And that actually helped us be able to get a headstart on trying to stem what could have been a great depression instead of a great recession.”
The memoir sold 890,000 copies in the U.S. and Canada in the first 24 hours of release, setting a record for publisher Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House.