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Hillary Clinton’s campaign backed off Monday from a disputed campaign claim, saying Clinton “misspoke” when she said she landed “under sniper fire” during a 1996 trip to war-torn Yugoslavia.

There were reports of snipers in nearby hills, but no known shots were taken at the landing craft or tarmac in Tuzla, Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson told reporters on a conference call.

“The facts are clear from contemporaneous news accounts that she was entering a potentially dangerous situation, and she has written about this before, she has talked about this before and there you have it,” Wolfson said in a conference call.

“Now, it is possible in the most recent instance in which she discussed this that she misspoke with regard to, you know, the exit from the plane,” he continued.

“There were reports of snipers in the hills and they were forced to cut short an event on the tarmac. That is what she wrote in her book, that is what she has said many, many times. And on one occasion she misspoke, but it’s — the record is clear in terms what she has said before on this topic.”

Despite a growing number of disputed accounts, Clinton and her supporters have repeatedly claimed that her 1996 to Yugoslavia was evidence that she was considered a key foreign policy adviser in her husband’s administration, largely due to a high level of danger on the trip.

Clinton has said that the plane landed “corkscrew”-style, similar to the way planes land in Baghdad to avoid surface-to-air threats, and that her arrival was “under sniper fire.”

Last week, during a speech at George Washington University in Washington, she said she remembered “that trip to Bosnia. … There was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn’t go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went.

“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

Comedian Sinbad, who accompanied Clinton on the trip, recently said he recalled a much more relaxed trip, and a Washington Post fact-check piece on Saturday lambasted the claims.

And a CBS News report of the trip posted to YouTube shows a smiling Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, shaking troops’ hands and touring encampments in the open.

Click here to see the video.

FOX News Jim Angle contributed to this report.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Hillary Clinton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.