Shoe Thrown at Hillary Clinton During Vegas Speech

[Saifullah Sani]

Hillary Clinton narrowly missed being pelted by a shoe tossed at her during a speech in Las Vegas to a recycling industry group.

A tape of the incident aired by KTNV shows an object quickly whizzing by Mrs. Clinton’s head. “Was that a bat?” she asked, before joking: “Is that somebody throwing something at me? Is that part of Cirque de Soleil?,” adding: “My goodness I didn’t know solid waste management was so controversial.”

The video also shows a woman being quickly whisked away by security. The speech was to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries meeting being held at the Mandalay Bay resort.

Ilene Rosen, the wife of a conventioneer from Denver who was seated in the second row, said the woman had walked down the aisle to within six rows of the front of the seating area, threw several items, turned around, put her hands in the air and walked toward the back of the room. Security officers quickly caught up with her.

Brian Spellacy, U.S. Secret Service supervisory special agent in Las Vegas, said the woman who allegedly threw the shoe was being questioned and would face criminal charges. Mr. Spellacy declined to identify the woman, and he said it wasn’t immediately clear what the charges would be.

Mr. Spellacy and Mark Carpenter, spokesman for the recycling institute, said the woman wasn’t a credentialed convention member and wasn’t supposed to have been in the ballroom.

A black and orange shoe was recovered from the stage, Mr. Spellacy said.

An attendee later handed a reporter a piece of paper that was apparently also thrown by the woman. It appeared to be a copy of a Department of Defense document labeled confidential and dated August 1967; it referred to an operation “Cynthia” in Bolivia. There was a Bolivian army operation of that name in 1967 to capture revolutionary Che Guevara.

Shoe Thrown at Hillary Clinton During Vegas Speech - Washington Wire - WSJ