Conservative commentators are cautioning Donald Trump not to give fuel to conspiracy theories and sordid controversies that have long swirled around Bill and Hillary Clinton after the presumptive Republican nominee called a former White House aide’s suicide “fishy” and released an Instagram ad featuring audio recordings of the former president’s accusers.

“I’m not sure it’s a good thing to do that,” Fox News host Bill O’Reilly told Trump on Monday night, hours after the Instagram ad was posted. “Kind of tawdry stuff.”

The brash billionaire said he only did so to counter Hillary Clinton’s attacks on him.

“She has been very nasty,” Trump said. “I don’t like doing [ads like] that. But I have no choice. When she hits me on things, I just have no choice.”

The Instagram video featured the voices of Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey, two women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault in separate incidents — Broaddrick’s in 1978, when she was working on Clinton’s gubernatorial campaign in Arkansas. The 30-second spot was posted to Trump’s social media accounts along with the message, “Is Hillary really protecting women?”

Is Hillary really protecting women? A video posted by Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on May 23, 2016 at 8:27am PDT





Bill Clinton has long denied the allegations and was never charged.

“I understand what you are trying to do here is inhibit Mrs. Clinton from attacking you personally by saying, ‘If you play that game, then can I come back 10 times harder,'” O’Reilly said. “But it is — you know that it makes the country look bad abroad and things like that. That’s what worries me.”

In an interview with the Washington Post published on Monday, Trump was asked about Vincent Foster, the former White House aide whose 1993 death was ruled a suicide by both police and federal investigators. The likely GOP nominee called the circumstances surrounding Foster’s death “very fishy.”

“He had intimate knowledge of what was going on [with the Clintons],” Trump said. “He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.”

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Trump continued: “I don’t bring [Foster’s death] up, because I don’t know enough to really discuss it. I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair.”

“It’s the one thing with her, whether it’s Whitewater or whether it’s Vince or whether it’s Benghazi. It’s always a mess with Hillary,” Trump said.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon called Trump’s recent attacks an effort “to distract from an issues-based campaign, which is what we intend to run.”

“Every day he spends in this type of stuff is a misspent opportunity by him in terms of doing the outreach he needs to do to improve his numbers,” Fallon said.

.@realDonaldTrump dredges up past Clinton conspiracy theories, @JoeNBC weighs in on this general election strategy https://t.co/QFaxoKloU5 — Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) May 24, 2016





MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Trump’s tactic of elevating conspiracies simply won’t work in the general election.

“I think it’s about as effective as accusing your Republican opponent’s father of being friends with Lee Harvey Oswald and implying he may have had something to with the assassination of JFK,” Scarborough said, referring to Trump’s attack on his former rival in the GOP primaries, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. “I wonder what Republicans who are now going to treat Donald Trump as their prospective nominee — what are they thinking?”

Scarborough added: “Instead of building a coherent foreign policy … instead of building any coherent policy, he’s going out and dredging up murder conspiracies from the 1990s that only kooks were trying to sell.”