Facts Matter

Facts Matter

Lies from 5 Tweets on Sunday (7/29/18)

1. "Things are really getting ridiculous. The Failing and Crooked (but not as Crooked as Hillary Clinton) @nytimes has done a long & boring story indicating that the World's most expensive Witch Hunt has found nothing on Russia & me so now they are looking at the rest of the World!" (9:04am)

Truth:

He referring here to an article in the Times published Saturday detailing a 2016 meeting between his son and a liaison for two Arab princes in which the emissary made clear that his clients wanted to assist his dad's campaign. He is also making a tangential reference to a detailed piece published in the Times earlier this week that detailed the origins of the FBI investigation into Russia interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion between his campaign and the Russians.

He is hanging his conclusion on this one sentence: "A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting his advisers to the hacking or linking himself to the Russian government's disruptive efforts."

What these sentences make clear is this…

A) No public evidence yet exists and

B) The investigation is ongoing.

The rest is smoke and vapor

2. "....At what point does this soon to be $20,000,000 Witch Hunt, composed of 13 Angry and Heavily Conflicted Democrats and two people who have worked for Obama for 8 years, STOP! They have found no Collusion with Russia, No Obstruction, but they aren't looking at the corruption..."

Truth:

There's zero factual basis for him to put a $20 million price tag on the Mueller probe. The closest we have come to a fact-based cost for the Mueller probe is back in December, when the investigation's total cost was $6.7 million. He claims that there are 13 Democrats on Mueller's team is also false. According to WAPO, 5 of the 16 known members of Mueller's team donated to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. The New York Times says that nine of the 17 known lawyers on Mueller's team have donated to Democratic campaigns in the past. Then there's this from the Post's Philip Bump: "Of the 18 attorneys we identified on Mueller's team, half of them gave no money to anyone, according to our analysis. Another five gave $1,000 or less. The one who gave the most also gave to two Republicans."

It's not entirely clear who he is referring to with the line "two people who have worked for Obama for 8 years" but, presumably, one of them is Mueller himself. The problem with that is that Mueller was appointed FBI director by President George W. Bush, a Republican. President Obama simply kept Mueller on for the length of his 10-year term. He also says that Mueller's team has found no collusion, but that too is not accurate. The investigation is ongoing and all of Mueller's findings have yet to go public.

Mueller has gleaned the following in the first 443 days…

• 187 criminal charges in active indictments or to which individuals have pleaded guilty
• Another 23 counts against his former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates were vacated when he agreed to cooperate with Mueller
• Thirty-two people and three businesses have been named in plea agreements or indictments
• Six guilty pleas from five defendants, including Gates, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, businessman Richard Pinedo and lawyer Alex van der Zwaan
• Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort faces 25 criminal counts
• Van der Zwaan served about four weeks in prison and has been deported to the Netherlands, his home country
• 52 counts of conspiracy of some kind
• 113 criminal counts of aggravated identity theft or identity fraud
• Four guilty pleas for making false statements
• 25 Russian nationals have been charged with crimes along with three Russian business entities. Those individuals were charged in two indictments, one focused on Russia’s alleged effort to foster divisiveness on social media (indicted in February) and one focused on alleged hacking (indicted Friday)
• 13 individuals believed to be linked to Russian intelligence agencies have been charged, including Manafort’s longtime associate Konstantin Kilimnik, a resident of Ukraine
• Four individuals working directly for or acting as advisers to his 2016 campaign have been indicted; three have pleaded guilty

So what about that "Witch Hunt" Sir?

3. "...In the Hillary Clinton Campaign where she deleted 33,000 Emails, got $145 million while Secretary of State, paid McCabes wife $700,000 (and got off the FBI hook along with Terry M) and so much more. Republicans and real Americans should start getting tough on this Scam."

Truth:

Yes, Clinton did delete 33,000 emails after she and her attorneys determined they were entirely private and personal communications with no ties to her work as Secretary of State.

However, the $145 million figure he is referring to is the total donations to the Clinton Foundation by nine individuals who also at one time or another had investments in a Russian company that Clinton's State Department allowed to buy a majority stake in Uranium One, a Canada-based company with US mining interests. The issues with his claims are considerable and include the fact that the donations to the Clinton Foundation were made prior to the idea of Clinton serving as secretary of State and that State was one of nine agencies who approved the deal. His insistence that someone in the Clinton campaign paid then FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's wife $700,000 as a payoff to drop any investigations into them is a jumble of falsehoods. McCabe's wife ran for the state Senate in Virginia in 2015. A super PAC affiliated with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally, donated $500,000 to her campaign. She lost. There is zero evidence that Hillary Clinton was involved in the donation in any way, shape or form, or that McAuliffe made the donation to dissuade Andrew McCabe from looking into alleged wrongdoing by the Clintons.

4. "Now that the Witch Hunt has given up on Russia and is looking at the rest of the World, they should easily be able to take it into the Mid-Term Elections where they can put some hurt on the Republican Party. Don't worry about Democrats, FISA Abuse, missing Emails or Fraudulent Dossier!"

Truth:

The Mueller probe has not "given up" on Russia. It's worth noting that five people in his campaign orbit have already pleaded guilty to crimes unearthed by Mueller, and several including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates are cooperating with the Mueller probe.

His implanted-informant theory is a lot like his unfounded wiretapping allegation. It is less clear wha the is referring to with the phrase "Dems FISA abuse" although he has repeatedly suggested that Obama ordered a wiretap on him at his residence during the campaign (not true) and that the FBI placed an informant in his campaign as spy (knowledgeable sources deny that claim). As for the missing emails, it is not clear what crime that he is alleging, although there is little doubt Clinton would have been better served to have a neutral third party go through her emails to determine which were personal and could be deleted and which were not. His claim that the so-called "Steele dossier" is "fraudulent" is also not accurate. The more salacious elements of the dossier, gathered by former British spy Christopher Steele, are unconfirmed by the FBI. But the intelligence community has made clear that portions of the dossier are borne out by their own investigation.

5. "What ever happened to the Server, at the center of so much Corruption, that the Democratic National Committee REFUSED to hand over to the hard charging (except in the case of Democrats) FBI? They broke into homes & offices early in the morning, but were afraid to take the Server?"

Mostly Accurate:

The FBI confirmed that the DNC repeatedly rejected their requests to turn over the email server that had been penetrated by someone allegedly affiliated with the Russians. His reference to the raids conducted by the FBI on the homes and offices of people like former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his personal attorney Michael Cohen misses the mark, however. Federal law enforcement did not break into these homes. They conducted raids based on search warrants and entirely legal process based on, among other things, probable cause.

Lies from Some of His Past Rallies

1) “Highways would take 21 years to get approved. We have it down to two years, and it’s going to be one year very shortly”

The Truth:

He has doubled a previously exaggerated claim about the permitting process for roads and infrastructure taking a decade. Average wait times for a permit ranged from three to six years from the fiscal years 1999 to 2016, according to the Federal Highway Administration. In the 2017 fiscal year, the average wait time was three years and 10 months, almost double his claim of a two-year period.

“Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Bruce Springsteen “were drawing crowds smaller than my crowds”

The Truth:

This is not the first time he has compared crowd size to Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s, though it appears to be the first time he has brought the Boss into the mix and he also claimed that 20,000 to 49,000 people attended his biggest rallies during the 2016 presidential campaign and even if we take him at his word, those figures pale in comparison to audiences that have assembled to hear Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Mr. Springsteen perform. For example, Mr. Springsteen sold out a two-night show in May 2016 in Dublin, drawing an average of 80,000 people to each show. This June, Beyoncé and Jay-Z performed for a crowd of over 57,000 in Berlin

2) “United States Steel is opening up six plants through expansion and new”

The Truth:

After making claims that the United States Steel Corporation “is opening up seven plants” he announced that he would impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in March. But since then, the United States Steel Corp. has not announced the opening of a single new plant, let alone six. The company has announced that it would restart two blast furnaces at a plant in Granite City, Ill., one in March and the second in June. He may have been referring to each individual component of the steel-making process at Granite City as its own plant, an analyst explained to the fact checker, but those parts are not new either.

3) “Russia is very unhappy that he won”

The Truth:

During a joint press conference following his meeting, Putin was asked whether he wanted the President to win in 2016. To this Putin responded “Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal," he said. The White House was forced to correct the official transcript from the event 10 days after it happened in order to reflect the question.

4) “Mischaracterized NATO members as “delinquent” on payments to the alliance”

The Truth:

He does not understand how NATO works because no “payment” plan was ever set up with European countries. Also, being in NATO allows us to have U.S. bases in Europe at cut-rate prices and being in Europe deters Communist’s like Putin from attacking any European NATO country which benefits America.

5) “NATO funding was going down” before he raised the issue

The Truth:

He came into the NATO meeting saying the European members needed to spend more. At a news conference after the meeting, he said their defense spending had been falling. He claims that "It was going down, the amount of money being spent by countries was going down and down very substantially, and now it's going up very substantially". President Obama raised the issue in a constructive and collegial way that succeeded in securing a pledge from NATO members to start increasing their defense spending. Also each year, (NATO) nations have been increasing their contributions. We must note that since 2014 European members collectively increased defense spending by 8% or $20 billion in real terms and Canada’s spending also rose by $7 billion.

More to come…