Washington, Apr 12: Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has asked her husband, Bill Clinton, to keep his mouth shut and stop making excuses, which compounded her false claim that she landed "under sniper fire" on a goodwill trip to Bosnia as First Lady.

"Hillary called me and said, 'You don't remember this, You weren't there. Let me handle it, and I said, 'Yes, ma'am,' " Bill Clinton told reporters outside a campaign office in Terre Haute, Indiana.

During his interactions, the former President revived the all-but-dead tall tale of Hillary's travel to Tuzla - a whopper his wife repeatedly told on the campaign trail before a video forced her to admit the mistake.

"He doesn't know when to shut up," a Clinton Administration veteran said.

Bill managed to add a few more fibs to the fabled Bosnia landing when he resurrected it, the Daily News reported.

"There was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated and immediately apologized for it - what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995," Clinton told a crowd in Boonville, Indiana.

His fervent defence of his wife had glaring new errors: Hillary Clinton made the initial comment in the morning, repeated it several times before finally admitting it was untrue. And the trip occurred in 1996, not 1995.

The Clinton campaign did not try to spin away the flub. "Senator Clinton appreciates her husband standing up for her, but this was her mistake and she takes responsibility for it," her team said in a statement.

Loyalists and veterans of the Clinton White House were perplexed, comparing it to racial remarks Bill Clinton made during the South Carolina primary that hurt Hillary’s campaign.

"Much of what he does baffles me. Sometimes I can't tell if he is trying to sabotage the campaign or is just off the range. I thought they had him on a short leash, but I guess not," said author and former Clinton White House aide Keith Boykin. (ANI)