TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
When a President Can't Be Taken at His Word
http://time.com/4710615/donald-trump-truth-falsehoods
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Bill Maher with his opening guest, Matt Schlapp, on his show Friday. Watch it, and try to watch the whole show. "T" is for Treason.
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https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/2016/07/20/the-10-best-fact-checking-sites
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/10/factchecking-the-second-presidential-debate
http://www.factcheck.org/2015/04/no-veto-power-for-clinton-on-uranium-deal
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-russian-uranium-deal/?utm_term=.aaf6bae56f0c
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The three articles below are from the above sites, The Washington Post Fact Checker, and Factcheck.Org I encourage anyone who really wants to know the TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, to sign up for the The Washington Post's Fact Checking email. Also, make it a habit to visit Factcheck.org and the other sites mentioned. As you will see if you go to the first website mentioned, "mediabiasfactcheck.com" there is a list of the 10 best checking sites. I'm sure there are others that didn't make this cut. Factcheck.org, Snopes, & Washington Post Fact Checker were among the top 10.
It is amazing how much work was done to fact check the allegations BY BOTH SIDES during the Second Presidential Debate. So much is coming at us every day, we need to go back and just take a drink from this well to get our bearings.
No one, not me, not Marke, not the guy at the corner store, no one person should frame reality for you, BUT, Reality and Truth Can Be Known with a click of a mouse! You can see both sides and after that you can find the balanced voices in the middle. BEFORE ONE MORE PERSON VOTES (Midterms are coming up fast) THEY SHOULD KNOW ALL THE TRUTH AND NOT BE SWAYED BY THE PASSIONATE LIES OF EITHER SIDE.
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The Washington Post Fact Checker
Fact Checker
The facts about Hillary Clinton and the Kathy Shelton rape case
By
Glenn Kessler October 11, 2016
Who are the four women whom Trump says were mistreated by the Clintons?
Donald Trump held a news conference ahead of the second presidential debate on Oct. 9 with four women who have made allegations in the past against Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler explains those allegations. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
“I am also here to support Trump. At 12 years old, Hillary put me through something that you would never put a 12- year-old through. And she says she is for women and children.”
— Kathy Shelton, at a news conference hosted by Donald Trump, Oct. 9, 2016
“Hillary then began to attack my character, forcing me to undergo multiple polygraph tests where I was asked explicit sexual questions I didn’t even understand. Next I was sent for a psychiatric examination. It felt like I was the one on trial.”
— Shelton, first-person account on gofundme page
Before the second debate, Donald Trump held a brief news conference with
three women who claim they were abused by Bill Clinton – and one woman, Kathy Shelton, who says Hillary Clinton ruined her life when she was appointed by the court to defend the man who raped Shelton in 1975.
Memorable quotes from Clinton and Trump’s second presidential debate
Here are some memorable quotes from the presidential debate in St. Louis, Mo.
While the cases of three women connected to Bill Clinton have been well-litigated in the media, the Kathy Shelton case has attracted much less attention. Until a Newsday reporter
informed her in 2007 that Clinton was the lawyer in the case, Shelton had no idea that Hillary Clinton had been involved.
Moreover, a central part of her story — the psychiatric exam — does not appear to have taken place, according to court records.
The Facts
In 1975, Clinton — then Hillary Rodham — was a 27-year-old law instructor running a legal aid clinic at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. After a 41-year-old factory worker was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, he asked the judge to replace his
court-appointed male attorney with a female one. The judge went through the list of a half-dozen women practicing law in the county and picked Clinton. She has said she was not thrilled with the assignment but felt she had little choice but to take the court appointment — which the
prosecutor in the case confirmed to CNN.
Court records describe a sad tale. Shelton, at the time 12 years old, went out for a late-night drive with Tom Taylor, then 41, a 20-year-old cousin, and a 15-year-old boy with whom she was apparently infatuated. They bought a pint of Old Grand-Dad whisky, which was mixed with Coca-Cola for Shelton. After hanging out at a bowling alley for a few hours, they allegedly drove to a ravine where the two older men left Shelton and the 15-year-old together. The two then had sex, the boy told police. After they were finished, Taylor approached the truck and apparently attacked Shelton. The boy reported that Shelton screamed and he saw Taylor hitching up his pants.
As part of her handling of the case, Clinton filed an affidavit July 28, 1975, requesting that the girl go through a psychiatric examination. “I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing,” Clinton said. “I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body. Also that she exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way.”
Clinton offered no source for the claims.
When Glenn Thrush, then a reporter for Newsday, showed the affidavit to Shelton in 2007, he wrote that she was visibly stunned. “It kind of shocks me – it’s not true,” she said. “I never said anybody attacked my body before, never in my life.”
But Shelton told Thrush at the time that she bore no ill will toward Clinton. “I have to understand that she was representing Taylor,” she said. “I’m sure Hillary was just doing her job.”
But in 2014, Shelton
told the Daily Beast that she had been misquoted. “Hillary Clinton took me through hell,” she said.
Shelton’s ire had risen with the 2014 discovery of
previously unpublished audio recordings of Clinton discussing the case in the mid-1980s with Arkansas reporter Roy Reed for an article that was never published.
In the recorded interview, Clinton is heard laughing or giggling four times when discussing the case with unusual candor; the reporter is also heard laughing, and sometimes Clinton is responding to him.
For instance, Clinton laughed after she said: “Of course he [the defendant] claimed he didn’t [rape]. All this stuff. He took a lie-detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”
[
Update: Reed in
an interview published Oct. 12 denied that Clinton was laughing at Shelton. “As far as her laughing, God knows she was not laughing over the notion that this rapist was going to go free," said Reed. “I challenge any fair-minded reader of that transcript to make a case that Hillary Rodham was a coldblooded lawyer who was laughing over the plight of
the 12-year-old rape victim,"]
The Daily Beast article said:
The victim was put through several forensic procedures, including a lie detector test. At first, she failed the lie detector test; she said that was because she didn’t understand one of the specific sex-related questions. Once that question was explained to her, she passed, she said. The victim positively identified her two attackers through one-way glass and they were arrested.
In
an interview with the Daily Mail that appeared Aug. 9, Shelton agreed for the first time to be identified by name. This article strongly suggested that what it described as “a grueling court-ordered psychiatric examination” took place:
Although Clinton’s legal maneuver would likely be prohibited today under Arkansas rape shield act, the law was not passed until two years after the case.
Shelton said one of her worst memories of the case was being questioned repeatedly by appointed experts.
“It got so bad that I told my mom I wasn’t going back, and whatever happened, happened,” said Shelton. “It’s sad that a 12-year-old had to go through what I had to go through, because for days I cried and cried and cried over it.”
The gofundme site,
which was established Aug. 13 and seeks to raise $10,000,quotes Shelton as explicitly saying that the test took place: “Hillary then began to attack my character, forcing me to undergo multiple polygraph tests where I was asked explicit sexual questions I didn’t even understand. Next I was sent for a psychiatric examination. It felt like I was the one on trial.”
But the court docket, unearthed by
Pittsburgh attorney Norma Chase and for the first time made public, shows that one day after Clinton filed a request for psychiatric exam, it was denied by the judge. The court docket for July 28 says Clinton filed her motion for an exam. On July 29, it states: “Hearing on Motion for Psychiatric Examination — Motion denied. Defendant objects.” (There is also no evidence that Clinton was responsible for arranging Shelton’s polygraph test.)
Here’s the docket sheet:
Taylor Docket Entries by
GlennKesslerWP on Scribd
As a court-appointed defense lawyer, Clinton was required to look out for her client’s interests. The prosecutor was supposed to look out for Shelton’s interests. The judge in the case was to hear the facts and decide what could be permitted. In this case, he rejected Clinton’s request.
For a variety of reasons, a plea agreement to a reduced charge was reached. Investigators mishandled evidence of Taylor’s bloody underwear, cutting out the stain that contained semen for testing and then losing it. Newsday also quoted a retired detective on the case as saying that Shelton’s “ ‘infatuation’ with the teenage boy, which she refused to admit,” led to “serious inconsistencies in her statements about the incident.” The detective also said Shelton’s mother “was so eager to end the ordeal she coached her daughter’s statements and interrupted interviews with police.”
Shelton did not respond to requests for comment left on her phone and the gofundme site. We also sought comment from Candice E. Jackson, an attorney who represents her.
Update: After this column appeared, Shelton’s gofundme site was substantially revised, with all references to an alleged psychiatric exam and the polygraph test removed. A screen grab of the original page is below:
Sean Hannity show on Oct. 13 is different than Shelton’s original account on the gofundme site: “On May 10, 1975, in Springdale, Arkansas, two men lured me into their truck with the promise of a soda. I knew them and trusted them.” Now to conform with her interview on Hannity, it says: “On May 10, 1975, in Springdale Arkansas two men, one around age 40 and the other in his teens, yanked me off my bicycle as I was riding to church.” She also told Hannity that she spent five days in a coma, but
court records show that four days after the rape, which took place at 4 a.m., an investigator signed a report on his conversation with Shelton.
The Bottom Line
Memories are malleable over time. The record shows that Shelton’s memories of the case have changed, specifically concerning being forced to take a psychiatric exam that, it turns out, was not approved by the court. Shelton did not know about Clinton’s affidavit asking for the exam in the 41-year-old case until it was shown to her by a reporter nine years ago. There is little indication that the outcome of the case would have been much different, no matter the defense attorney, given the mishandling of the evidence and Shelton’s difficulties as a witness. Yet now the exam has become a key part of her story in order to raise funds.
Shelton is a rape victim and until recently has not been in the public eye. However, she chose to appear at Trump’s news conference, and Trump has begun to highlight her story in campaign speeches. We’re not going to assign a Pinocchio rating, but readers should be aware of the facts of her case — and how her account has changed over time
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The Washington Post
Fact Checker
The facts behind Trump’s repeated claim about Hillary Clinton’s role in the Russian uranium deal
By
Michelle Ye Hee Lee October 26, 2016
The GOP presidential nominee is pressing his case ahead of Election Day.
“Hillary Clinton gave them 20 percent of our uranium — gave Russia for a big payment.”
— Donald Trump, campaign rally, Oct. 25, 2016
“Remember that Hillary Clinton gave Russia 20 percent of American uranium and, you know, she was paid a fortune. You know, they got a tremendous amount of money.”
— Donald Trump, campaign rally, Oct. 24, 2016
“She even handed over American uranium rights to the Russians.”
— voice-over in Trump campaign ad, “Corruption”
Hillary Clinton’s involvement with a Russian uranium deal has come under scrutiny since author and Breitbart News senior editor-at-large Peter Schweizer dedicated a chapter to the topic in his 2015 book, “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.”
The Trump campaign has been attacking Clinton over the uranium deal lately, perhaps as a way to distract attention from criticism of Trump’s interest in fostering a closer relationship with Russia. “Clinton Cash” was made into a graphic novel and a documentary, and on Oct. 20, makers of the graphic novel released an
animated ad about the uranium deal. FactCheck.org and PolitiFact have covered the facts, and we wrote about the deal briefly in a
speech roundup. But with the renewed attention this month, we decided to take a deeper look at Clinton’s role in this deal.
The Facts
The deal
The Trump campaign pointed to an
April 2015 New York Times article about this deal, based on a preview of “Clinton Cash.” The Times said it “scrutinized his [Schweizer’s] information and built upon it with its own reporting.”
The story starts with Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining financier and donor to the Clinton Foundation; Giustra’s company, UrAsia; and Uranium One, a uranium mining company headquartered in Toronto.
In 2007, Giustra sold UrAsia to Uranium One, which was based in South Africa and chaired by his friend, Ian Telfer. Giustra said he
sold his personal stake in the deal in fall 2007, shortly after the merger with Uranium One, in the midst of Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and before Clinton realized Barack Obama would win the nomination and she would become his secretary of state.
In 2009, Russia’s nuclear energy agency, Rosatom, began buying shares in Uranium One as a part of a larger move to acquire mines around the world. Rosatom first bought a 17 percent share of Uranium One, which has holdings in the United States. In 2010, the Russians sought to increase their share to 51 percent. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the deal. In 2013, Russia assumed 100 percent ownership.
The deal gave Russia control of about 20 percent of U.S. uranium extraction capacity, according to a
2010 CNN article about the deal. In other words, Russia has rights to the uranium extracted at those sites, which represents 20 percent of the U.S. uranium production capacity.
Clinton’s role
The State Department was one of nine agencies comprising CFIUS, which vets potential national security impacts of transactions where a foreign government gains control of a U.S. company. It was established by Congress in 2007 after the controversy over the planned purchase of seaports by a company in United Arab Emirates. The other agencies were the departments of Treasury, Defense, Justice, Commerce, Energy and Homeland Security, and two White House agencies (Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and Office of Science and Technology Policy).
The CFIUS can approve a deal, but
only the president can suspend or stop a transaction. If the committee can’t come to a consensus, a member can recommend a suspension or prohibition of the deal, and the president makes the call.
Due to confidentiality laws, there are few details made public about the deal or about Clinton’s role in it,
factcheck.org found. The Clinton campaign
saidClinton herself was not involved in the State Department’s review and did not direct the department to take any position on the sale of Uranium One. Matters of the CFIUS did not rise to the level of the secretary, the campaign said.
Jose Fernandez, then-assistant secretary of state for economic, energy and business affairs, sat on the committee. Fernandez told the Times: “Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter.” Fernandez did not respond to our requests for comment.
“Hillary’s opposition [to the Uranium One deal] would have been enough under CFIUS rules to have the decision on the transaction kicked up to the president. That never happened,” Schweizer wrote in “Clinton Cash.”
At the time the sale was underway, the Obama administration was
attempting to “reset” its relations with Russia, with Clinton leading the effort as secretary of state. But there is no evidence approval of the sale was connected to the reset policy. The national security concern that the United States faced when CFIUS considered the deal concerned American dependence on foreign uranium sources, the Times reported.
Yet the Uranium One deal was not on the radar of Michael McFaul, even though he was aware of many CFIUS cases in his role as the National Security Council’s senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs from 2009 to 2012 (and as a prime architect of the administration’s reset policy). McFaul, now senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said Fernandez could not “dictate the outcome of any decision single-handedly,” as he was one of nine members.
“Knowing how the CFIUS process works and how the bureaucracy at the State Department works, I cannot imagine that such an issue would be reviewed by the secretary of state. There is a hierarchy in place precisely to protect the secretary’s time for only the most important of issues and meetings,” McFaul said.
“I was not personally involved because that wasn’t something the secretary of state did,” Clinton told
a New Hampshire TV station in June 2015.
Some Republican lawmakers in 2010 did raise concerns about the deal — but they
sent their letter to then-Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. (
Treasury chairs the CFIUS.) Final approval
was given by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which noted that the mines would remain under the control of U.S. subsidiaries. “Neither Uranium One nor ARMZ [the Russian firm] holds an NRC export license, so no uranium produced at either facility may be exported,” the NRC said. (Some uranium yellowcake is extracted, processed in Canada and returned to the United States.)
We asked the Trump campaign for evidence that Clinton or the State Department had more of a role in the deal than any of the eight other member agencies of CFIUS, and did not receive a response.
Quid pro quo claims
Did the Clintons get paid for the Russian deal? The Trump campaign pointed to donations to the Clinton Foundation, as reported by the Times. Giustra became friends with Bill Clinton in 2005, over their charity work. The Washington Post took an
in-depth look at their ties and described their friendship as one “that has helped propel the Clinton Foundation into a global giant and established Giustra’s reputation as an international philanthropist while helping him build connections in countries where his business was expanding.”
Giustra eventually became one of the largest individual donors to the Clinton Foundation. His relationship with the Clintons came under scrutiny over donors to the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada), which raises money for the similarly named Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, one of the Clinton Foundation’s initiatives. (For more on this, read more about it
here,
here and
here.)
Individuals related to Uranium One and UrAsia, including Giustra and Telfer, donated to the Clinton Foundation, totaling about $145 million. The Times reported that Telfer also donated to the Clinton Foundation using his family charity based in Canada. These were donations made to the Clinton Foundation, not directly to the Clintons.
As
PolitiFact found, the majority of these donations were made before and during Clinton’s 2008 presidential run. So Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton “gave [uranium to] Russia for a big payment” is not accurate. If she had actually become president, she would have had more power over the deal than as the head of one agency among nine represented on CFIUS.
The Trump campaign also noted that Bill Clinton received speaking fees while the Uranium One deal was underway. After the Russians announced that they would acquire stakes in Uranium One, and while the Kremlin was promoting the purchase, Bill Clinton received $500,000 in 2010 for a speech in Moscow from a Russian investment bank that had ties to the Kremlin. Putin personally thanked Clinton,
the Wall Street Journal reported, adding that a review of Bill Clinton’s speeches “found no evidence that speaking fees were paid to the former president in exchange for any action by Mrs. Clinton.”
The Times also did not report a direct link between Bill Clinton and the deal. The bank’s analysts talked up Uranium One’s stock while the deal was under CFIUS consideration, and assigned it a “buy” rating. The bank “would not comment on the genesis of Mr. Clinton’s speech to an audience that included leading Russian officials, or on whether it was connected to the Rosatom deal,” the Times reported.
The Pinocchio Test
Trump and his campaign claim that Clinton “gave” or “handed over” 20 percent of American uranium rights to the Russians. Through the Uranium One deal, the Russian state-owned nuclear energy company does now have control over 20 percent of U.S. uranium extraction capacity. But it cannot export the uranium.
In 2010, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States approved the sale of the majority of the shares to the Russians. The State Department was one of nine agencies on the committee that approved the deal. The deal was also separately approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
There is no evidence Clinton herself got involved in the deal personally, and it is highly questionable that this deal even rose to the level of the secretary of state. Theoretically, as Schweizer says, Clinton could have intervened. But even then, it ultimately would have been Obama’s decision whether to suspend or block the deal.
We wavered between Three and Four Pinocchios. Trump so often uses broad-brushed language that pushes him into Four Pinocchio territory, and this is yet another one of those cases. He specifically names Hillary Clinton as the active agent in the Uranium One deal, saying she “gave them” or “handed over” uranium to the Russians, but that is not the case. Then, he further claimed the sale went forward in exchange “for a big payment.” There’s no evidence for that claim either.
Trump could have avoided so many Pinocchios had he been more careful with the language. For example: “Hillary Clinton’s State Department was one of nine agencies that approved the deal.” Words matter.
Four Pinocchios
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FactChecking the Second Presidential Debate
We found a mountain of false and misleading statements in the second meeting of the presidential nominees.
Summary
ST. LOUIS — In a sometimes nasty second presidential debate, there were again several calls by the candidates for fact-checkers to referee competing statements, which we are happy to oblige. But even when Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton weren’t calling out each other on the facts, we found many of their uncontested claims to be misleading or false.
- Clinton exaggerated when she said the U.S. was now “energy independent.” The country imported 11 percent of total energy consumed in 2015.
- Trump falsely said he never tweeted “check out a sex tape” in the wee hours of the morning a few days after the first presidential debate. He did.
- Trump told Clinton “after getting the subpoena” to turn over documents related to the Benghazi investigation “you delete 33,000 emails.” A contractor managing Clinton’s server deleted the emails. There is no evidence Clinton knew when they were deleted.
- Trump also said Clinton’s emails were “acid washed,” calling it a “very expensive process.” Neither statement is true. The emails were deleted using a free software program that does not involve the use of chemicals.
- Clinton said there is “no evidence that anyone hacked the server I was using.” That is true, but the FBI said it was “possible” that her email system was hacked because she sent and received emails in “the territory of sophisticated adversaries.”
- Clinton said intelligence officials said this week that Russians were behind political hacking attacks in the U.S. Trump said, “She doesn’t know if Russia is doing the hacking.” Clinton is closer to the truth.
- Clinton claimed she was holding up Abraham Lincoln as an example of leadership when she defended “back room” deals. Turns out, she did.
- Trump distorted the facts about a rape case that Clinton was involved in as a legal aid lawyer in 1975, wrongly accusing Clinton of “laughing at” the victim.
- Both candidates distorted the other’s tax plan. Trump said Clinton was “raising everybody’s taxes massively,” when two analyses concluded almost all of the tax increases she proposes would fall on the top 10 percent. And Clinton claimed Trump’s plan “would end up raising taxes on middle class families.” Some families would see increased taxes, but on average middle-income taxpayers would get a tax cut.
- Trump wrongly claimed that Clinton’s 2008 campaign manager said on TV that the campaign had started the false rumor that Obama was not born in the U.S.
- Trump wrongly claimed that Clinton wanted to implement a government-run, “single-payer,” health care system, like Canada’s, and he cherry-picked high proposed premium increases in the Affordable Care Act exchanges.
- Clinton went too far in saying an ACA provision to allow young adults to stay on their parents plans until age 26 was “something that didn’t happen before.” At least 31 states had similar provisions before the law was enacted.
- Trump said that “Ambassador [Chris] Stevens sent 600 requests for help” before he was killed in an attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012. But not all 600 were requests for security upgrades, nor were they all from Stevens.
- The candidates disagreed over Clinton’s role in a U.S. response to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Both had a point. Clinton was in office when President Obama said Assad’s use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line for us,” but she was gone when Obama failed to back up his threat.
- Clinton claimed that since the Great Recession the gains have all gone to the top, but a 2016 economic report said that in 2014 and 2015 “the incomes of bottom 99% families have finally started recovering in earnest.”
- Trump again claimed without evidence that “many people saw the bombs all over the apartment” of the San Bernardino shooters.
And there were more claims that we’ve heard before on trade, foreign affairs and nuclear weapons.
Note to Readers: Deputy Managing Editor Robert Farley was at the debate at Washington University. This story was written by Farley with the help of the entire staff, based in the Philadelphia region and Washington, D.C. An annotated transcript of the debate with our fact-checks can be found
here.
Analysis
The
second of three presidential debates was held on Oct. 9 at Washington University in St. Louis. The much-anticipated town hall-style matchup came as both candidates were facing renewed scrutiny: Republican nominee Donald Trump for lewd comments about women made in 2005 but just released on Oct. 7; and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for the public release of hacked emails from her campaign. As in the first debate, we found plenty of distortions of fact.
Energy Independence
Clinton exaggerated when
she said the U.S. was now “energy independent.”
Clinton: You know that we are now for the first time ever energy independent. We are not dependent upon the Middle East, but the Middle East still controls a lot of the prices. …We’ve got to remain energy independent. It gives us much more power and freedom than to be worried about what goes on in the Middle East. We have enough worries over there without having to worry about that.
Actually, the U.S. imported 11 percent of the total energy it consumed in 2015, according to the
most recent figures from the Energy Information Administration, and that percentage increased to 12 percent in the first six months of this year.
While it’s correct to say that last year’s dependence on imported energy (from all sources, not just petroleum) was the lowest in a long time, it doesn’t represent total “independence,” and it’s not even the first time “ever” that the percentage has been so low. It was
below 11 percent every single year from 1949 (the start of EIA’s figures) through 1971.
Judging by her repeated mention of the “Middle East,” we suspect Clinton was thinking specifically of oil imports and not total energy. But looking only at petroleum, she’s even further off base to claim “independence.”
In 2015, the U.S.
imported 24 percent of the petroleum and refined products that it consumed. To be sure, that was the
lowest annual level of dependency on imports since 1970. However, dependency on imports has begun creeping upward once again. For the first eight months of 2016, imports have accounted for an average of 27.5 percent of consumption.
Furthermore, the U.S. is still importing
a fair amount of oil from Persian Gulf states, despite what Clinton said about being “not dependent upon the Middle East.”
The total imports of petroleum and petroleum products from Persian Gulf states averaged 1.5 million barrels per day last year. That’s 45 percent less than the U.S. imported from them in 2001, when the total hit an annual high. But it’s still a long way from zero.
Trump’s Sex Tape Tweet
Trump
said he never tweeted “check out a sex tape” in the wee hours of the morning a few days after the first presidential debate. That’s false — he did.
Debate moderator Anderson Cooper
asked Trump whether he had the “discipline” to be president, given the fact that he sent out “a series of tweets between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., including one that told people to check out a sex tape” in the days after the first presidential debate.
Trump responded, “No, there wasn’t ‘check out a sex tape.’ It was just take a look at the person [former Miss Universe Alicia Machado] that [Clinton] built up to be this wonderful Girl Scout, who was no Girl Scout.”
But Trump did say exactly that.
On Sept. 30 at 5:30 a.m., Trump
tweeted, “Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?”
As for the supposed sex tape, Trump may be referring to a
grainy, night-vision scene in a Spanish reality TV show in which Machado could be having sex under covers.
Clinton Emails
There were several claims about Clinton’s emails that were either wrong, misleading or lacked context.
Trump
twisted the facts when he directly addressed Clinton about her use of a private email system while secretary of state. “You get a subpoena and after getting the subpoena you delete 33,000 emails. And then you acid wash them — or bleach them, as you would say — a very expensive process,” Trump said.
Trump is referring to
31,830 emails that Clinton’s lawyers had deemed personal and, as a result, did not have to be turned over to the government.
As we have written, the department’s policy allows its employees to determine which emails are work-related and must be preserved. “Messages that are not records may be deleted when no longer needed,” according to the State Department’s
Foreign Affairs Manual (5 FAM 443.5). So Clinton was entitled to delete those nearly 32,000 emails.
It is true that the emails were deleted after Clinton received a subpoena from a Republican-controlled House committee investigation into the 2012 deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. But there is no evidence that Clinton knew that the emails were deleted after the subpoena was issued.
A quick recap of what happened,
according to FBI notes of its investigation: In December 2014, a Clinton attorney told Platte River Networks – which at the time was managing Clinton’s private server – that Clinton had preserved her work-related emails and “decided she no longer needed access to any of her e-mails older than 60 days.” Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, instructed the PRN employee — who was not identified — “to modify the e-mail retention policy” on Clinton’s server “to reflect this change,” FBI notes show.
On March 9, 2015, Clinton’s attorney informed PRN of the committee’s subpoena. The PRN employee who deleted the emails told the FBI that “he had an ‘oh shit’ moment” sometime between March 25 and March 31, 2015, and deleted the Clinton emails from the PRN server. Clinton told the FBI that she was not aware that they were deleted in late March 2015. (
See pages 17-19 for the FBI’s notes on the deleted emails.) The FBI did not say when Clinton learned when the emails had been deleted.
Trump went too far when he said “after getting the subpoena you delete 33,000 emails” since there is no evidence at this time that shows she had knowledge of when the emails were deleted.
Also, Trump said the emails were “
acid washed,” calling it a “very expensive process.” Neither statement is true.
As we wrote, the FBI said that PRN used BleachBit, which is a free software program that does not involve the use of chemicals.
As for Clinton, she glossed over the facts when
she said that there is “no evidence that anyone hacked the server I was using.” That is true, but
FBI Director James Comey said it was “possible” that her email system was hacked because she sent and received emails while in “the territory of sophisticated adversaries.”
Comey, July 5: With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.
Hacking Attacks
Clinton
claimed intelligence officials said this week that Russians were behind political hacking attacks, including of the Democratic National Committee. But Trump said, “She doesn’t know if Russia is doing the hacking.” Clinton is tilting closer toward the truth on this one.
Clinton: Our intelligence community just came out and said in the last few days, that the Kremlin, meaning Putin and the Russian government, are directing the attacks, the hacking on American accounts to influence our election.
Trump: … I notice any time anything wrong happens they like to say, the Russians, the Russians—she doesn’t know it’s the Russians doing the hacking, maybe there is no hacking, but they always blame Russia.
On Oct. 7, the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security issued a
joint statement saying they were “confident” that recent hacks into the email systems of the Democratic Party were directed by the Russian government.
Joint Statement, Oct. 7: The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
Russia
has denied any involvement. But
NBC News reported that U.S. intelligence officials were able to determine Russia’s involvement based on the “signature” of the attacks, which “hackers may not have realized they left behind.”
Invoking Lincoln
Clinton
invoked Abraham Lincoln in defending a comment she made in a paid speech to apartment building landlords about politicians needing “a public position and a private position.”
Q: [Y]ou say you need both a public and private position on certain issues. So … is it okay for politicians to be two-faced?
Clinton: [T]hat was something I said about Abraham Lincoln, and after having seen the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie called “Lincoln” [working to] get the congress to approve the 13th amendment [which prohibits slavery]. It was principled and it was strategic. … That was a great I thought a great display of presidential leadership.
The question referred to
a private email message — posted by Wikileaks — outlining some possibly troublesome passages from Clinton’s paid speeches, the transcripts of which she has not made public. It included this passage, supposedly from a transcript of a speech Clinton made to the National Multi-Family Council (a trade group for the apartment industry) on April 24, 2013 (emphasis added):
Clinton (as quoted by Wikileaks): You just have to sort of figure out how to — getting back to that word, “balance” — how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today.
That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, “Lincoln,” and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it.
I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.
So we find Clinton was correct to this extent: If the Wikileaks quote is accurate — and Clinton did not dispute it — she was indeed holding the Great Emancipator up as an example to justify taking one position in public and another in “back room discussions.” But she also was conceding that she sometimes feels it politically necessary to be “two faced,” to use the phrase posed by the questioner.
Clinton ‘Laughing’ at Rape Victim?
While talking about Bill Clinton being “abusive to women,” Trump
distorted the facts about a rape case that Hillary Clinton was involved in as a legal aid lawyer in 1975.
Trump accused Hillary Clinton of “laughing at” a 12-year-old girl who was raped and claimed that Clinton “got [the accused rapist] off.” But Clinton did not laugh at the girl, and her client pleaded to a lesser offense.
Also, the rape case has nothing to do with Bill Clinton, although viewers may have been misled into thinking that it did because of how Trump discussed the case.
Trump: Bill Clinton was abusive to women. Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously. Four of them are here tonight. One of the women, who is a wonderful woman, at 12 years-old, was raped at 12. Her client she represented got him off and she’s seen laughing on two separate occasions laughing at the girl who was raped.
Kathy Shelton, that young woman, is here with us tonight.
As we have
written before, Clinton defended an accused rapist in 1975 when she worked at the University of Arkansas School Legal Aid Clinic. In her book “Living History,” Clinton recalled that Mahlon Gibson, a Washington County prosecutor, told her that the accused rapist “wanted a woman lawyer” to defend him, and that Gibson had recommended Clinton to Judge Maupin Cummings.
In a taped interview in 1980, Clinton recalled the rape case, and she can be heard laughing three times, beginning with a joke she makes about the accuracy of polygraphs. She said, “He took a lie detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”
At another point, Clinton said the prosecutor balked at turning over evidence, forcing her to go to the judge to obtain it. “So I got an order to see the evidence and the prosecutor didn’t want me to see the evidence. I had to go to Maupin Cummings and convince Maupin that yes indeed I had a right to see the evidence [Clinton laughs] before it was presented.”
Clinton did get the evidence, which turned out to be a pair of the accused’s underwear with a hole in it — which Clinton laughed about as she retold the story of taking the underwear to a forensic expert in New York. Clinton said that the expert told her that there wasn’t enough material on the underwear to test. In recalling the incident, Clinton said she told the judge that the forensic expert is “ready to come up from New York to prevent this miscarriage of justice.” It was at this point that Clinton laughed.
We leave it for others to judge if her laughter was appropriate, but Clinton wasn’t laughing at the victim.
Clinton also didn’t “get him off.” The defendant pleaded guilty to a lesser offense and served one year in county jail and four years of probation.
Competing Tax Claims
In dueling tax claims, the candidates
distorted the effects of each other’s tax plans.
Trump said of Clinton’s plan, “She is raising everybody’s taxes massively.” Everybody?
No. Analyses by the nonpartisan
Tax Policy Center and the pro-business
Tax Foundation both concluded that almost all of the tax increases proposed by Clinton would fall on the top 10 percent of taxpayers. Hardest hit would be the less than 0.1 percent of taxpayers who earn more than $5 million per year. “Nearly all of the tax increases would fall on the top 1 percent; the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers would see little or no change in their taxes,” the Tax Policy Center concluded.
Clinton, meanwhile, claimed Trump’s plan, “would end up raising taxes on middle class families, millions of middle class families.” An
analysis by New York University School of Law professor
Lily L. Batchelder found that Trump’s plan “would actually significantly raise taxes for millions of low- and middle-income families with children, with especially large tax increases for working single parents.” In all, the report estimated Trump’s plan would increase taxes for about 7.8 million families with children who are minors, or roughly 25 million individuals. But the Tax Foundation told us that while it was able to replicate those results, its full
analysis of Trump’s plan found that, on average, middle income taxpayers would get a tax cut. “As our distributional tables show, the typical middle class family would get a net tax cut of several hundred dollars,” Alan Cole, an economist with the Tax Foundation, told us. “Simply put, the middle class as a whole would see a tax reduction, but some middle class families would see a tax increase.”
The two also sparred over the so-called carried interest loophole. Trump, who proposes to close it, incorrectly said Clinton wants to keep it.
“Hillary Clinton has friends that want all of these provisions, including the carried interest provision, which is very important to Wall Street people,” Trump said. “But they really want the carried interest provision, which I believe Hillary Clinton is leaving and it’s very interesting why she is leaving carried interest.”
According to her
tax plan, Clinton wants to close “the ‘carried interest’ loophole that allows hedge fund, private equity, and other Wall Street money managers to avoid paying ordinary income rates on their earnings.” Trump has also
proposed this.
Clinton noted that she has been in favor of getting rid of this loophole since she was a senator from New York. While it is true that Clinton came out against carried interest during her tenure in the Senate, she was the last of the Democratic presidential candidates in 2007
to do so.
‘Birther’ Repeats
Trump again
pushed the idea that Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign had started the false rumor that Obama was not born in the U.S. and was ineligible to be president. Trump wrongly claimed that Clinton’s campaign manager said “exactly that” on television recently.
Trump: Well, you owe the president an apology, because as you know very well, your campaign, Sidney Blumenthal — he’s another real winner that you have — and he’s the one that got this started, along with your campaign manager, and they were on television just two weeks ago, she was saying exactly that.
Trump is wrong about Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s 2008 campaign manager. Solis Doyle
has said that a “rogue volunteer coordinator” in Iowa was immediately fired when the campaign found out that the aide forwarded an email promoting the birther conspiracy.
And Solis Doyle said that she did apologize to Obama campaign manager David Plouffe for the incident. “This was not the kind of campaign we wanted to run,” she said she told Plouffe.
As for Blumenthal, he has denied a claim made by McClatchy’s former bureau chief James Asher that Blumenthal, a senior adviser to Clinton’s 2008 campaign, encouraged McClatchy to chase the story of Obama’s birth.
Shashank Bengali, who now works at the
Los Angeles Times, said Asher told him to “look into everything about Obama’s family in Kenya,”
according to Politico. Asher gave Politico an email that he received from Bengali that said, “I can’t recall if we specifically discussed the birther claim, but I’m sure that was part of what I researched.”
Other than that, there is no clear evidence to support Asher’s account.
Obamacare Claims
Trump used an old GOP scare tactic, wrongly claiming that Clinton wanted to implement a government-run, “single-payer,” health care system, like Canada’s. He also cherry-picked high proposed premium increases in the exchanges, and he said that the law should be replaced with “something absolutely much less expensive,” when repealing the law is expected to increase federal deficits.
We’ll start with the
single-payer claim.
Trump: She wants to go to a single-payer plan … somewhat similar to Canada. … But she wants to go to single payer, which means the government basically rules everything.
Clinton
supports making Medicare available to those over age 55, and creating a “public option,” or a federal insurance plan, that would compete with private plans on the ACA exchanges. She hasn’t called for a single-payer system.
Before the Affordable Care Act was passed, Republicans
repeatedly warned of a
government takeover of health care. But the ACA didn’t do that — instead, it built upon, and expanded, private insurance as well as Medicaid.
Earlier versions of the legislation contained a “public option,” or a federal insurance plan that would be offered, along with private insurance, on the ACA exchanges, where people who buy their own insurance can get coverage. Republicans claimed this public option would eventually lead to a Canadian- or British-style system of complete government-funded, universal health care. As
we wrote at the time, the impact of the public option would depend on how it was structured. But one of the final versions of the House bill would have led to about 6 million Americans joining the public plan, a
ccording to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The public option wasn’t included in the final bill that President Obama signed into law.
But what had been proposed before still wasn’t anywhere near “single-payer,” a system in which everyone would have health coverage provided by the government.
During the Democratic primary campaign, it was Sen. Bernie Sanders, not Clinton, who
called for a single-payer system. Clinton
criticized that idea, saying early this year, “I don’t believe number one we should be starting over. We had enough of a fight to get to the Affordable Care Act.”
Trump also cherry-picked high proposed premium increases on the ACA exchanges, as
he has done before, saying “your health insurance … is going up by numbers that are astronomical, 68 percent, 59 percent, 71 percent.”
It’s true that
some insurers have requested high rate increases for 2017 premiums on the exchanges. Any increase above 10 percent
has to be submitted and approved by government regulators for the next open enrollment period, which begins Nov. 1. But other plans have proposed decreases.
The Kaiser Family Foundation
analyzed preliminary rates in cities in 16 states and Washington, D.C., and found the second-lowest cost silver plan would increase by a weighted average of 9 percent from this year if the rates hold. The change in premiums would vary widely — from a drop of 13 percent in Providence, Rhode Island, to a hike of 25 percent in Nashville. That’s higher than the increase for 2016, which was only 2 percent for those areas.
Also,
80 percent of those buying exchange plans get federal subsidies, which lower premium contributions to a percentage of their income.
As for employer-based insurance plans, where most insured Americans get their coverage, those premiums
have been rising at historical low rates for the past several years.
Finally, Trump said that the ACA is “unbelievably expensive for our country. … We have to repeal it and replace it with something absolutely much less expensive.” But the CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation’s
latest estimates on the impact of repealing the law find doing away with it would likely increase federal deficits over the 2016-2025 time period. While there is uncertainty in such estimates, CBO and JCT say, their “best estimate is that repealing the ACA would increase federal budget deficits by $137 billion over that 10-year period.”
Obamacare Boast
Clinton went too far in touting the benefits of the ACA, saying that a provision to allow young adults to stay on their parents plans until age 26 was “something that didn’t happen before.” In fact, at least 31 states already had similar provisions before the law was enacted.
Clinton: But everybody else, the 170 million of us who get health insurance through our employers got big benefits. Number one, insurance companies can’t deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition. Number two, no lifetime limits, which is a big deal if you have serious health problems.
Number three, women can’t be charged more than men for our health insurance, which is the way it used to be before the Affordable Care Act. Number four, if you’re under 26, and your parents have a policy, you can be on that policy until the age of 26, something that didn’t happen before.
All of the provisions she rattled off were indeed
part of the ACA. And it’s true that the law extended policies nationwide allowing young adults under age 26 to remain on their parents’ plans. That provision
took effect in September 2010. But 31 states had similar measures in effect before then,
according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“Before implementation of the ACA, at least 31 states required carriers to extend coverage to young adults,” the NCSL states. “The age at which insurers were no longer required to provide coverage to young adults under their guardians’ plans varied by state. Additionally, some states required certain conditions to be met by young adults in order to be eligible for coverage under their guardians’ plans. For example, a number of states required that young adults be unmarried in order to qualify.”
Some states went beyond age 26. In New York and Pennsylvania, unmarried young adults could remain on their parents’ policies until age 30, and New Jersey extended that to age 31.
Clinton also said that insurance companies “can’t deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition.” To be clear, before the ACA, employer-provided plans c
ould exclude coverage of the preexisting condition temporarily, for up to a year. If a new employee had continuous coverage previously, with a gap in coverage no longer than 63 days, that employee was granted a waiver for that exclusion period, equal to the time spent on the previous plan.
‘600 Requests for Help’?
Trump
said that “Ambassador [Chris] Stevens sent 600 requests for help” before he was killed in an attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012. But as the
Washington Post Fact Checker reported, not all 600 came from Stevens, nor were they all requests for security upgrades, as it may have appeared to those watching or listening to the debate.
The total refers to the “cumulative number of security requests/concerns from Benghazi – 2012,” according to a chart the House Select Committee on Benghazi showed during a congressional hearing in October 2015. And “requests” and “concerns” are not the same thing, the Fact Checker said.
From its report:
Washington Post Fact Checker, Jan. 26: “A request is made via email or cable for physical security, equipment, or something related to the compound itself (lighting, barriers, wire, etc),” a GOP congressional staff member explained. “Weeks or months later, the same unresolved issue is brought up again in a discussion. That’s a request and a concern. In general, concerns followed requests. However, some concerns are independent of a request. Such concerns could, for example, be expressed about the delay of issuing visas to DS agents kept out of Libya. Concerns could be expressed about security personnel needing to provide their own holsters or protective gear, etc.”
Requests, meanwhile, were about any specific security-related need in Benghazi. A request for hundreds of sandbags would count as one request.
However, officials could not say how many of the 600 were security requests and how many were concerns.
Also, the State Department Accountability Review Board, which did call U.S. security in Benghazi “inadequate” prior to the attack, noted in
its report that the agency made several security upgrades in 2012. So at least some of the security issues raised by officials were addressed, which may not have been clear from Trump’s statement.
The Red Line
Trump and Clinton had a
disagreement over President Obama’s failure to back up his threat to use military force if Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people.
Trump said Clinton “was there as secretary of state with the so-called line in the sand,” referring to Obama’s threat that Assad’s use of chemical weapons would cross “a red line for us.” Obama made that remark in August 2012 in response to a question about whether he “envision[ed] using U.S. military” in Syria.
Clinton interrupted Trump and claimed that she was not in office.
Trump: First of all, she was there as secretary of state with the so-called line in the sand, which …
Clinton: No, I wasn’t. I was gone. I hate to interrupt you, but at some point …
Trump: OK. But you were in contact — excuse me. You were …
Clinton: At some point, we need to do some fact-checking here.
Trump: You were in total contact with the White House, and perhaps, sadly, Obama probably still listened to you. I don’t think he would be listening to you very much anymore.
It’s not really clear if Trump was criticizing Obama for making the threat or not following through on it, because Clinton interrupted him. But the fact is, Clinton was in office when Obama
made his threat in August 2012, but not when the president
defended his failure to back it up in September 2013. Clinton was secretary of state from
January 2009 to February 2013.
Obama has been
criticized for not following through on his threat, so perhaps Clinton quickly interrupted Trump to distance herself from Obama’s decision not to take action. However, she did publicly support that decision even though she was no longer in office.
On Sept. 9, 2013, Clinton
said a “political solution” is in the best interests of the U.S. “I will continue to support his efforts and I hope that the Congress will as well,”
she said.
Income Exaggeration
Clinton
repeated a campaign talking point that overstates income inequality.
Clinton: It’s been unfortunate, but it’s happened, that since the Great Recession the gains have all gone to the top and we need to reverse that.
“All” of the income gains since the Great Recession haven’t gone to the top.
Clinton usually says that 90 percent of the income gains have gone to the top 1 percent. And that was the case, at least according to the work of economist Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, based on preliminary 2013 data. But that talking point is now outdated.
Saez’s
most recent figures show that the top 1 percent of families captured 52 percent of the income growth from 2009 to 2015. That’s also the case for 1993-2015.
He wrote in his June 30, 2016, report: “In 2014 and especially in 2015, the incomes of bottom 99% families have finally started recovering in earnest from the losses of the Great Recession. By 2015, real incomes of bottom 99% have now recovered about two thirds of the losses experienced during the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009. Top 1% families still capture 52% of total real income growth per family from 2009-2015 (Table 1) but the recovery from the Great Recession now looks much less lopsided than in previous years.”
Reporting Terrorists
In stressing that Muslims need to notify the police of wrongdoing in their communities, Trump
claimed without evidence that “many people saw the bombs all over the apartment of the two people that killed 14 and wounded many, many people” in San Bernardino last year.
As we have written, a neighbor reportedly had noticed packages being delivered to the San Bernardino home of the shooters, and told a friend that the couple was doing a lot of work in their garage. The friend said the neighbor did not want to racially profile the couple, so she did not report it. Another worker in the neighborhood reported seeing well-dressed Middle Eastern men walking from the house to lunch several times, which the worker said he thought was unusual but also did not report.
But in neither case did anyone report that they had seen “bombs all over the floor” of the couple’s home, and failed to report it to authorities.
Trump made the same claim about the San Bernardino case after a mass shooting in June at a gay night club in Orlando. At that time, Trump said “Muslims are the ones that have to report him,” referring to the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen. However, Mohammed A. Malik
contacted the FBI in 2014 after he learned that Mateen had been watching videotapes of
Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Yemen-based imam. The FBI confirmed Malik’s story, the
Washington Post wrote.
Still More Repeats
And it was Groundhog Day for fact-checkers on several other topics:
Nuclear weapons: Clinton exaggerated when
she said she was responsible for getting “a treaty with Russia to lower nuclear weapons.” The New START agreement, which Clinton helped negotiate, caps the number of nuclear weapons that Russia and the U.S. can deploy on long-range (or strategic) launchers at 1,550. But,
as we wrote, it does not require either side to destroy any nuclear weapons or reduce their nuclear stockpile, and it doesn’t place limits on shorter-range nuclear weapons. Also, Russia was below the limit for deployed strategic nuclear warheads when the treaty took effect in 2011, and it has increased them since then. As of Sept. 1, Russia had 1,796 deployed strategic nuclear warheads — up from 1,537 deployed warheads in February 2011,
according to the Department of State.
Libya, Iraq and ISIS: Trump once again criticized Clinton for “bad judgments on Libya, on Syria, on Iraq. I mean, her and Obama, whether you like it or not, the way they got out of Iraq, the vacuum they’ve left, that’s why ISIS formed in the first place.” Trump conveniently leaves out that he posted a
YouTube video in February 2011 voicing support for U.S. intervention in Libya to remove Moammar Gadhafi from power, and that he told CNN in a
2007 interview that the U.S. should “declare victory [in Iraq] and leave … [T]his is a total catastrophe and you might as well get out now, because you just are wasting time.” And finally Trump pins too much blame for the rise in ISIS — whose origin dates back to the Bush administration — on the troop withdrawal (an issue we explored in length in our story, “
Trump’s False Obama-ISIS Link.”)
Libyan oil: It’s been half a year, and Trump is still making the false claim that “
ISIS has a good chunk” of Libyan oil fields. We
first flagged this statement in April, when an expert on Libya’s oil operations told us there’s no evidence that the Islamic State has control of any oil fields in that country.
Trade deficit: As he did during
the first presidential debate, Trump wrongly claimed that last year the U.S. had “an almost $800 billion trade deficit.” Trump is referring to the trade deficit for goods, which was $762.6 billion in 2015,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But the U.S. had a $262.2 billion trade surplus in services, including intellectual property such as software, for a net trade deficit in goods and services of $500.4 billion last year.
NAFTA: Trump
said that the North American Free Trade Agreement was “signed by her husband,” referring to President Bill Clinton.
As we have written, NAFTA was
negotiated and signed by President George H.W. Bush. Clinton
signed the implementing legislation. Trump also said the trade agreement had “stripped us” of manufacturing jobs. A
2015 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service called the net impact “relatively modest,” saying “NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters.”
Iraq War: Trump
repeated that he “was against the war in Iraq” and claimed that this “has not been debunked.” But we have found
no evidence that he was against the Iraq War before it began.
At the first debate, Trump cited as evidence “numerous conversations” that he privately had with Sean Hannity of Fox News. He also has cited a January 2003 TV interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto. In the TV interview, Trump told Cavuto that President Bush needed to make a decision on Iraq. “Either you attack or you don’t attack,” he says. But he offered no opinion on what Bush should do. There is simply no public record of Trump opposing the war before it started.
Clinton on coal: Trump claimed that “Clinton wants to put all the [coal] miners out of business.” At a
CNN town hall forum in March, Clinton said she wants to “move away from coal,” and that in the shift to renewable energy production “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” But
she added, “We don’t want to forget those people.” And she promised to bring renewable energy jobs to coal country to replace lost coal jobs. Clinton reiterated that position in the debate, saying she “supports moving toward more clean, renewable energy as quickly as we can. … But I also want to be sure we do not leave people behind. That is why I am the only candidate, from the very beginning of this campaign, who had a plan to help us revitalize coal country.”
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