Tag: Trump lies

Businessman involved in Trump Tower Moscow discussions to appear before Intelligence Committee staff

Washington Post logoThe House Intelligence Committee is expected to hear Tuesday from a businessman who worked with the Trump Organization on a couple of projects, including briefly discussing building a Trump tower in Moscow.

Giorgi Rtskhiladze, a native of Georgia who is a U.S. citizen, expects to be quizzed Tuesday by the committee’s staff about his brief role in the Trump Moscow development discussions and about a more provocative topic: a text message he sent to Michael Cohen shortly before the 2016 election that was cited in the recent report by Robert S. Mueller III.

The text sent by Rtskhiladze in October 2016 said he had “stopped the flow of tapes from Russia,” presumably a reference to reports of videotapes that might be embarrassing to then-candidate Donald Trump.

View the complete June 24 article by Tom Hamburger on The Washington Post website here.

Trump did his first interview with Spanish-language TV — and he told a bunch of lies: report

AlterNet logoOn Thursday, the Spanish-language network Telemundo (Univision’s main competitor in the United States) aired its first interview with President Donald Trump. Telemundo’s José Díaz-Balart conducted the interview in English — Trump doesn’t speak Spanish — and Telemundo posted it on YouTube with Spanish-language subtitles. And when CNN’s Daniel Dale fact-checked the interview, he found some blatant lies and distortions.

Trump told Díaz-Balart that he inherited from President Barack Obama a policy of routinely separating families at the U.S./Mexico border. The president claimed, “When I became president, President Obama had a separation policy. I didn’t have it. He had it. I brought the families together.”

But Dale, in an article for CNN’s website, points out that under Obama, family separations at the U.S./Mexico border “were rare” — and it was Trump who “made them standard.”

View the complete June 21 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Fact-checking President Trump’s reelection campaign kickoff

Here we are again, four years later, fact-checking a campaign kickoff speech by Donald Trump.

The fact-checkable claims were different this time around, but history repeated itself nonetheless. Trump’s campaign kickoff speech in Orlando was littered with the same false or misleading claims he has so often repeated as president.

Phony numbers on trade. Unfounded claims about immigrants. False statements about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. Fishy economic statistics and wild exaggerations about his presidential accomplishments.

View the complete June 19 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.

Donald Trump’s Astonishing Lies About Vietnam

When politicians talk in private, they regularly use a cruel shorthand. For example, a candidate who is uninformed, unreflective and uncurious is often branded a “lightweight,” as in, “He is so lightweight he could tap-dance on a souffle.” Conversely, a “heavyweight” would be a politician of some substance, some political clout and personal gravity.

Al Gore — the Democratic presidential nominee who won 543,895 more votes than George W. Bush in 2000 but ended up losing the election in a 5-4 Supreme Court split decision — was regularly dismissed for being so unexciting that his favorite color was beige. The line at the time was, “Al Gore is so dull that his Secret Service code name is Al Gore.”

That was cute but inaccurate. I once asked then-Sen. Gore of Tennessee why he — almost alone among his Harvard 1969 classmates — volunteered to join the U.S. Army to go to Vietnam. Gore’s answer was revealing: “I come from a small town (Carthage) of 3,000 people. I concluded that if I didn’t go, somebody else would have to go. And I knew just about everybody else who was going to have to go in my place…For me, that sort of reinforces the sense of community and nation that is at the root of why you have a duty to serve your country.”

View the complete June 16 article by Mark Shields on the National Memo website here.

Trump claims farmers wept behind him when he signed an executive order. Video shows otherwise.

The scene President Trump illustrated while addressing a southwest Iowa crowd this week was like something out of a storybook.

He harked back to Feb. 28, 2017, when he sat in the Oval Office surrounded by, as Trump put it Tuesday, “homebuilders and farmers mostly, and ranchers.” The president was preparing to sign an executive order instructing a review of the Obama-era Waters of the United States rule, which he and other critics opposed for levying excessive federal regulation over farmers’ land.

When he put pen to paper, Trump recalled, the nearly two dozen men and women standing behind him wept with joy. The emotional outpouring was apparently a first for a contingent in the room, as many of them had never cried before.

View the complete June 13 article by Michael Brice-Saddler on The Washington Post website here.

Trump says McGahn ‘may have been confused’ when he said Trump directed him to pursue Mueller’s firing

President Trump said in an interview broadcast Friday that former White House counsel Donald McGahn “may have been confused” when he told investigators that Trump had directed him to pursue the firing of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III amid his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

During the interview with ABC News, Trump issued a fresh denial of an episode detailed in Mueller’s report that House Democrats have seized upon as they examine whether Trump sought to obstruct Mueller’s probe and should be impeached.

“I don’t care what he says. It doesn’t matter,” Trump said of McGahn in the interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I was never going to fire Mueller. I never suggested firing Mueller.”

View the complete June 14 article by John Wagner on The Washington Post website here.

Fact-checking President Trump’s swing-state spin

“Pennsylvania has never done this well. We’ve got steel back, we brought coal back, we brought so many things back, and the state now is doing better than it’s ever done. … Miners are going back to work that never thought they’d see that job again.”

— President Trump, in an interview following a campaign rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., May 20, 2019

“Toyota’s coming in with $14 billion, many, many companies are coming in. And they’re coming in, frankly, to Michigan, they’re coming back, they want to be back to Ohio, to Pennsylvania, to North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and what’s the name of this special place? It’s called Wisconsin. So they’ll be investing very shortly.”

— Trump, at a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wis., April 27, 2019

Notice a theme here? In Trump’s telling, several swing states that could decide the 2020 presidential election are seeing a resurgence of blue-collar jobs in the coal-mining, steel and automotive industries.

We’ve fact-checked many of these lines in our database of Trump’s false or misleading claims. But the blue-collar renaissance now appears to be a campaign mainstay, especially when the president touches down in swing states, so we’re taking a closer look at the numbers.

“Miners are going back to work that never thought they’d see that job again. … They’re digging coal again, so I’m really honored by that, and Pennsylvania is one of the big beneficiaries.” (Wilkes-Barre, Pa., May 20)

View the complete June 13 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.

Report: Trump Orders Aides To Lie About His Bad Poll Numbers

Confronted with abysmal poll numbers in key 2020 states, Trump demanded his aides follow his example: Deny and lie.

According to a New York Times report, after internal polling conducted in May showed him trailing some Democratic contenders in states like Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Trump ordered his aides to deny any such data existed.

But when the polling inevitably leaked, Trump “instructed aides to say publicly that other data showed him doing well,” reports the Times.

View the complete June 11 article by Dan Desai Martin on the National Memo website here.

President Trump has made 10,796 false or misleading claims over 869 days

President Trump’s pitter-patter of exaggerated numbers, unwarranted boasting and outright falsehoods has continued at a remarkable pace. As of June 7, his 869th day in office, the president has made 10,796 false or misleading claims, according to the Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement the president has uttered.

The president crossed the 10,000 threshold on April 26, and he has been averaging about 16 fishy claims a day since then. From the start of his presidency, he has averaged about 12 such claims a day.

About one-fifth of these claims are about immigration, his signature issue — a percentage that has grown since the government shut down over funding for his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, his most repeated claim — 172 times — is that his border wall is being built. Congress balked at funding the concrete barrier he envisioned, so he has tried to pitch bollard fencing and repairs of existing barriers as “a wall.”

View the complete June 10 article by Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s parade of false claims overseas

President Trump sat down for an interview with Piers Morgan of “Good Morning Britain” at the conclusion of his trip to London. Here’s a roundup of some of the president’s false and misleading claims during the discussion, one of which he repeated a few hours later in Ireland.

“The United States right now has among the cleanest climates there are, based on all statistics, and it’s even getting better.”

— Interview with Morgan

“We have the cleanest air in the world, in the United States, and it’s gotten better since I’m President. We have the cleanest water; it’s crystal clean.”

— Remarks with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar

Trump withdrew the United States from participation in the Paris accord to combat climate change, and he falsely asserted that the United States had the world’s “cleanest air” and “cleanest climate” and even the “cleanest water.”

View the complete June 6 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.