'Anti-Semitic' Hillary Clinton meme tweeted by Trump came from white supremacist message board

The property mogul’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, blamed the controversy on 'political correctness run amok'

The offensive meme appeared on the notorious message board /pol/ at least a week before it was tweeted by the Trump campaign

A Donald Trump tweet that drew widespread accusations of anti-Semitism had previously appeared on a notorious white supremacist web forum.

On Saturday, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee tweeted a meme of his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, overlaid on piles of 100-dollar bills alongside a red, six-pointed star containing the phrase “Most corrupt candidate ever!”

Political commentators soon pointed out that the star was shaped like the Star of David, with critics claiming the meme could be construed as anti-Semitic. The Trump campaign – or Mr Trump himself – deleted the offending tweet and replaced it with a new image, in which the star had been turned into a simple red circle.

Speaking to CNN on Sunday, the property mogul’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, blamed the controversy on “political correctness run amok”, but it has now emerged that the meme was previously posted on /pol/, an Internet message board frequented by white supremacists and neo-Nazis from the so-called “alt-right”.

The image appeared on /pol/ at least as early as 22 June, more than a week before the Trump campaign’s controversial tweet. The offensive thread on which it featured no longer exists, but a cached version of the page can still be found using the internet “time capsule”, Archive.is.

A week before that, it was also tweeted by @FishBoneHead1, an account known for featuring racist and sexist memes.

According to Mic, which first reported its origins, “The file name of the photo, HillHistory.jpg [is] potentially a nod to the Neo-Nazi code for ‘HH,’ or ‘Heil Hitler,’ which the alt-right is fond of hiding in plain sight.”

The American far-right has been emboldened by Mr Trump’s presidential campaign, which has energised white supremacists and helped to unleash a swarm of online anti-semitism.

One far-right group, the Traditionalist Worker Party, announced earlier this week that it would send members to the Republican convention to protect Trump supporters from left-wing protesters. In an interview with The Independent, the group’s leader, Matthew Heimbach, said Mr Trump was “not a white nationalist, but we appreciate that he agrees with us on globalism, on free trade, on sovereignty, on immigration… Trump is introducing those ideas to the mainstream, and people are responding very strongly.”