USA Today reached out to several Middle East experts about this. One such expert, Andrew Tabler, said:
“The US never supported AQ in Iraq — not sure where that came from.”

Another expert, Perry Cammack, called Breitbart‘s story “amazingly poor reporting,” and said:
“If anything the Obama administration has been criticized for doing too little to support the Syrian opposition, and it’s frankly for exactly this reason.”

As far as Hillary’s involvement, that’s Trump and Breitbart grasping at some very small, slippery straws. While the memo does list the office of the Secretary of State, Cammack says it would likely have been “read by worker bees,” and incorporated into a larger briefing for Hillary to review later.In other words, that notation is meaningless, and Trump’s accusation is baseless.

USA Today concluded their report by saying that Trump’s claims are the kind of conspiracy theories they’d debunk in an article, and debunk, they did.

They shot down this conspiracy theory rather soundly with basic research of which neither Trump, nor Breitbart, is capable (and they’ll eventually be banned for this).

Last edited by DollyLongstaff (6/19/2016 6:27 am)

The Guardian: “The Breitbart Report Is A Faulty Reading Of” The Memo. The Guardian noted that “The Breitbart report is a faulty reading of an internal intelligence document from 2012,” because the conservative news outlet was “conflating the opposition and the insurgency.” From the June 15 Guardian post
[T]he Breitbart report does not support the claim that Trump earlier said he didn’t make but now appears to have taken ownership of.The Breitbart report is a faulty reading of an internal intelligence document from 2012 about the security situation in Syria. The document notes that “the West” is supporting the Syrian opposition. It also notes that al-Qaeda is part of the insurgency. Incorrectly conflating the opposition and the insurgency, the Breitbart report concludes that the Obama administration supports al-Qaeda in Syria. [The Guardian, 6/15/16]

ThinkProgress: Breitbart’s “Interpretation Of The Memo Was Widely Debunked At The Time.” ThinkProgress detailed how Breitbart’s “interpretation of the memo was widely debunked at the time,” citing Middle East scholar Juan Cole who ridiculed “the idea that the memo proves that the U.S. was supporting ISIS as ‘an unfounded conspiracy theory.’” From the June 15 report:
The publication of Breitbart’s article is unusual since its interpretation of the memo was widely debunked at the time.Middle East scholar Juan Cole derided the idea that the memo proves that the U.S. was supporting ISIS as “an unfounded conspiracy theory.” Rather, it was a “correct assessment of where things were going in Syria.” The memo states that “those powers (e.g. Turkey and the Gulf monarchies) supporting the opposition wanted to see the declaration of a Salafi (hard line Sunni) breakaway statelet, in order to put pressure on the al-Assad regime.”It does not say the United States supports an Islamic State and “warns that any such development could lead to the break-up of Iraq, an eventuality that the authors clearly felt was undesirable.” [ThinkProgress, 6/15/16]