Mass shootingPastor leading prayers at a Trump rally says Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax

Carl Gallups an evangelical pastor who led prayers at a Donald Trump campaign rally, has been a Sandy Hook “truther,” claiming that the school massacre never happened and that the parents of the child victims were “Hollywood actors” hired by the Obama administration to help promote gun safety laws.

Trump said it was a “great honor” to receive Gallup’s support, a southern Baptist pastor who spoke to a crowd of more than 10,000 at a rally for the Republican frontrunner earlier this year.

The Telegraph reports that his radio show Freedom Friday earlier this year, Rev. Gallups suggested that the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary school, in which Adam Lanza killed twenty children and six staff members, were a hoax.

Speaking to his guest, a man using the pseudonym Barry Soetoro, Gallups focuses on David and Francine Wheeler, who lost their six-year-old son Ben in the killings.

Rev. Gallups – “excitedly and enthusiastically,” in the Telegraph’s words — repeats the accusations made by Soetoro that the couple were “paid Hollywood” actors participating in a government conspiracy aimed at promoting gun control in America.

“[David Wheeler] played the part of a grieving father with a woman standing beside him, crying, slinging snot,” said Rev. Gallups on the show that aired in February.

“This guy, he and his so-called wife, are standing up there and they’re grieving, and ‘my child, my child, this and that, we gotta get take the guns.’ … This dude is a Hollywood actor, his so-called wife is a Hollywood actor.”

After this news story broke, Rev. Gallup denied the allegation that he believed that Sandy Hook was a hoax, but in line with other “truthers” – who also still argue that President Obama is a Muslim who was born outside the United States – said that recent mass shootings in the United States raise “deserving questions” about their authenticity. In a statement which appeared on his Web site, Rev. Gallup said: “I have openly admitted that some of the evidence brought forward in these controversial cases is, to say the least, very interesting and deserving of a closer look. At this point, I can state emphatically that I do not believe these tragedies to be mere hoaxes.”

The New York Daily News reports, though, that the interview with the Sandy Hook denier was but one of several similar interviews Rev. Gallups conducted with conspiracy theorists on the issue. Throughout these interviews, he makes comments which clearly indicate that he shares these conspiracy theories.

He Web site’s home page also carried an article which made the case for mass-shootings-as-hoaxes conspiracy theory.

Hope Hicks, a spokesman for Trump, told the Telegraph: “The campaign was not aware of this individual’s personal views, which we do not share or support.”