A Berlin court ordered Germany’s far-right party to retract a false accusation that the country’s environment ministry gave money to Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign.
Georg Pazderski, leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) party, was ordered to scrub its website of the accusation and issue a correction stating that the German ministry “paid no money whatsoever to support the election campaign of Hillary Clinton,” Deutsche Welle news reported Monday.
Pazderski and his party claimed that millions that Germany’s Federal Environment Ministry donated to the Clinton Foundation’s climate initiatives in Africa were really funneled into Clinton’s campaign.
{mosads}The Clinton Foundation was funding projects in Africa as part of the International Climate Initiative, the newspaper reported.
Germany’s Federal Environment Ministry first began donating to the initiative in 2013 — years before Clinton kicked off her race for the White House.
The court ruled that the false accusations recklessly jeopardized “public confidence” in the federal ministry by making the claim that a German agency had intervened in the U.S. election.
The populist AFD first made the accusation in a November 2016 press release that Pazderski wrote, Deutsche Welle noted.
The environmental ministry won a court battle against AFD weeks after the claim went up, but now the group will have to issue a retraction.