Former President Bill Clinton had a bad couple of days on the stump as he tried to whip up support for Vice President Kamala Harris in Georgia.
The 42nd president, 78, held the microphone with noticeably trembling hands during an appearance in Columbus Monday, one day after he was first confused for President Biden by a McDonald’s worker during a fast food pit stop — and then cast blame on the Harris-Biden administration for not properly vetting the migrant accused of killing nursing student Laken Riley.
“You got a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn’t you — they made an ad about it — a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant,” Clinton said Sunday during a fish fry in Fort Valley, referring to the February murder of Riley, 22.
“Yeah, well, if they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened,” the former president added.
Riley’s accused murderer is Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan migrant who has ties to the dangerous Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang and entered the US illegally in September 2022 — during Harris’ tenure as President Biden’s so-called “border czar” — along with his girlfriend and her 5-year-old son.
Ibarra was arrested in El Paso, Texas, but was released on parole after fewer than 24 hours in custody due to lack of detention capacity and told to report to authorities in October of this year, ICE insiders told The Post in March.
In August 2023, Ibarra was arrested by the NYPD and charged with riding a gas-powered moped with Franco’s son on the back without any head protection or restraint for the child.
Ibarra was ultimately released and fled to Georgia to be with his brother Diego, who also is linked to TdA.
The Harris campaign had tapped Clinton to help shore up support for the Democrat in the final three weeks before the election. The Peach State has not backed a Democrat in two consecutive presidential elections since native son Jimmy Carter won the state in 1976 and 1980.
At the same fish fry, Clinton tried to make the case for mass immigration, saying: “America is not having enough babies to keep the population up. So we need immigrants that have been vetted to do work.”
The former president repeated that assertion Monday, admitting that Americans don’t want “chaos” at the border, but adding that Americans are not “at replacement level, which means we gotta have somebody come here if we want to keep growing the economy.”
“Unless one of you with these Artificial Intelligence genius can figure out how we can all grow with no work,” he added jokingly.
Clinton also came out in support of a bipartisan spending bill that Democrats have tried to push as evidence they wanted to fix the border.
“There it was on a silver platter, a new direction to manage an immigration crisis in a tough time where there’s all this upheaval all over the world,” Clinton said Monday, dubiously claiming that Biden and Harris were working for “three years” to get the border under control.
The former president then argued Trump was the one who wanted to stop the border bill from going through, reiterating Democratic talking points about the bill that was stalled by Senate Republicans.
“Trump killed the bill,” Clinton said at the fish fry Sunday, claiming the measure would have helped the government vet more immigrants.
The border bill would have allowed the president to shut down crossings between ports of entry if they went over 4,000 per day for seven consecutive days. Republicans argued that would still allow nearly 2 million migrants in per year and that the president already has the authority to implement similar measures without congressional approval.
Harris has also championed the border bill and would likely work to put it in front of Congress again if she assumes the presidency.
Clinton last won elected office in 1996, meaning the youngest voters who supported him are now in their mid-40s.
The former president, renowned for his love of the Golden Arches, underwent quadruple bypass surgery in 2004, and suggested during this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago that he may not get the chance to speak to his party’s delegates again.
“I want to say this from the bottom of my heart, I have no idea how many more of these I’ll be able to come to,” he said in long-winded remarks.
“I started in ’76 and I’ve been [to] every one since — no, ’72. Lord, I’m getting old.”
