Tag: Trump lies

Trump illegally used his foundation for campaign and must pay $8.4 million in restitution and fines: NY attorney general

President Donald Trump illegally used his charity to benefit his presidential campaign, New York’s attorney general said in a court filing Thursday.

Attorney General Letitia James said that Trump turned the Trump Foundation into a wing of his campaign in a 37-page court filing. James asked a judge to order the organization to pay $2.8 million in restitution for using charitable donations for political and business purposes, the Associated Press reported.

James also asked a judge to order President Trump to pay a $5.6 million penalty in the case, and to bar the president and his three eldest children from running any charities in the state for the next 10 years, Bloomberg reported.

View the complete March 17 article by Igor Derysh of Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Trump pledges support for health programs but his budget takes ‘legs out from underneath the system’

As President Trump stood before a joint session of Congress for his State of the Union address in February, he urged Republicans and Democrats alike to support the audacious goal of stopping the spread of HIV within a decade. “Together, we will defeat AIDS in America and beyond,” he declared.

The White House’s 2020 budget request, issued this week, does propose an additional $291 million as a down payment for a new HIV initiative. Yet the $4.7 trillion budget also calls for sharp spending reductions to Medicaid, the public insurance program for the poor on which more than 2 in 5 Americans with the virus depend.

Such a contradiction — giving while also taking away — runs through the budget arithmetic for many of the Trump administration’s health-care priorities. In addition to combating HIV, the president has taken aim at childhood cancer and the opioid crisis, but his budget would undermine all those efforts by shrinking the health infrastructure that people struggling with those issues rely on while throttling back national cancer research spending — even as it offers discrete pots of money for those causes, policymakers say.

View the complete March 14 article by Amy Goldstein, Laurie McGinley and Lena H. Sun on The Washington Post website here.

Larry Kudlow’s claim that ‘we have virtually paid for’ Trump’s tax cut

Judy Woodruff, PBS: “You are hanging a lot of this on these tax cuts, but we now have a number of experts who are watching those tax receipt numbers that come in regularly, and they are saying that they do not add up to what is anything like the kind of growth that the administration had projected off these tax cuts.”

National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow: “Well, actually, overall revenues are up about 10 percent. So that’s a pretty good number. And let me say, one of the people that are skeptical of us, the Congressional Budget Office, nonetheless, their estimates before taxes and most recently after the taxes, they have argued, they have said, there’s roughly $7 trillion of higher nominal GDP, and from that comes about 1.2 trillion in extra revenues, so that the tax cuts are about 80 percent paid for overall.”

— Exchange on PBS’s “NewsHour,” March 11, 2019

“Even the CBO, with which we generally disagree — I’m not breaking news here on my part — but they just published their new numbers. You know, from the point of pre-tax-cut to now, we have had about $7 trillion unexpected increase, $7 trillion over 10 years in terms of GDP. And that kind of calculates to roughly 1.2, 1.3 trillion in additional revenue. That’s the CBO numbers. These are all 10-year estimates. I apologize for that, but that’s the convention. So, what am I saying here? The tax cut was about 1.5 trillion scored. We have virtually paid for it — I guess 80 percent paid for it — and that’s by the CBO’s own numbers.”

— Kudlow, in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” March 8, 2019

President Trump’s chief economic adviser says new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office show that 80 percent of the administration’s tax cuts will be paid for in a decade. Even when accounting for lost revenue, the tax cuts will “virtually” pay for themselves because of increased economic activity, Kudlow suggests.

He’s not the first Republican to claim tax cuts pay for themselves. But he is the first to twist what the CBO’s nonpartisan number-crunchers said in a Feb. 28 analysis.

CBO Director Keith Hall factored in several big developments in this analysis. One was the estimated effect of the tax cuts Trump signed in December 2017. Another was “changes to federal spending resulting from legislation enacted early in 2018.” The biggest change came from “revised historical data and changes in the economic outlook … before accounting for the effects of the tax act.”

The Pinocchio Test

View the complete March 14 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.

Fact Checker Analysis Have Iraq and Syria been ‘liberated’ from ISIS, as President Trump says?

Trump has claimed his administration has defeated ISIS and beaten back the caliphate. But those aren’t the same. The caliphate may be gone but ISIS remains. (Video: Meg Kelly, Joy Yi, Atthar Mirza/Photo: Atthar Mirza and Andrew Quilty/The Washington Post)
Over the past several months, President Trump has made a variety of claims about the Islamic State. He has said “we have won,” that ISIS has been “beaten,” “defeated” and that there is “very little ISIS” left. He’s also said “the caliphate [is] almost knocked out” and the United States has “liberated virtually 100 percent of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.”

Army Gen. Joseph Votel, the head of U.S. Central Command, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats have all used more-measured language to describe the situation.

We asked the White House and the National Security Council for comment on the discrepancies in language between the president and his intelligence chiefs. An NSC spokesman pointed us to national security adviser John Bolton’s remarks on ABC News’ “This Week” on March 10.

View the complete March 13 article by Meg Kelly on The Washington Post website here.

President Trump stretches others’ comments to claim ‘no collusion’

“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort. . . . But if you notice, both his lawyer — a highly respected man — and a very highly respected judge, the judge said there was no collusion with Russia. It’s had nothing to do with collusion. There was no collusion. It’s a collusion hoax. It’s a collusion witch-hoax. I don’t collude with Russia. So, I just want to tell you that his lawyer went out of his way, actually, to make a statement last night: no collusion with Russia. There was absolutely none. The judge, I mean, for whatever reason — I was very honored by it — also made the statement that this had nothing to do with collusion with Russia.”

— President Trump, in remarks to reporters at the White House, March 8, 2019

Michael Cohen “said no collusion. And I said, it’s funny, he lied about so many things, and yet he could have said — he might as well lie about that one, too. But he said no collusion. And everybody said no collusion. Richard Burr, Senator Burr, said no collusion. Senate Intelligence. The House has come up, as you know, the committee, Devin Nunes and all, they said no collusion.”

— Trump, in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Feb. 28, 2019

Don’t take it from me, Trump says. Look at all these other people saying there was no collusion with Russia. Continue reading “President Trump stretches others’ comments to claim ‘no collusion’”

Trump tells RNC donors: “The Democrats hate Jewish people”

To prevent leaks from Trump’s Friday night Mar-a-Lago speech to RNC donors, security guards made attendees put their cellphones in magnetized pouches that they carried around like purses until they left the club.

So leakers had to rely on their memories. Trump entered to Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American,” then launched into one of his trademark stream-of-consciousness speeches, according to three people who were there. They said the crowd roared with laughter throughout.

Some of his remarks raised eyebrows.

1. Referring to the recent anti-Semitism controversies with Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, Trump told the donors: “The Democrats hate Jewish people.”

View the complete March 10 article by Jonathan Swan on the Axios website here.

Trump: I did not break campaign finance laws

President Trump on Thursday doubled down on his assertion he did not break the law when he involved himself in a scheme to pay two women who alleged in the lead-up to the 2016 election that they had extramarital affairs with him.

“It was not a campaign contribution, and there were no violations of the campaign finance laws by me. Fake News!”  Trump tweeted.

The comments come after The New York Times reported Trump signed checks to reimburse his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, while he was serving as president.

Trump keeps claiming the trade deficit is going down. It’s not.

“You saw trade deficits went down last month and everyone’s trying to figure out why. Well, we’re taking a lot of tariff money. And it has reduced the trade deficit.”

— President Trump, remarks in Hanoi, Feb. 28

The president really, really, really wants trade deficits to decline. But reality keeps biting.

During his news conference in Hanoi after the collapse of summit talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump made the observation above. It reminded us of the time in mid-2018 when he repeatedly claimed the quarterly trade deficit had declined $52 billion and complained that “nobody reports it.”

Well, that’s because it was not true. He stopped making that claim after our fact check appeared.

But now he highlights a one-month decline in the trade deficit — and says it’s because “we’re taking in a lot of tariff money.”

View the complete March 1 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.

Did Ivanka Trump create ‘millions’ of jobs?

During a meeting with U.S. governors, President Trump claimed his daughter created millions of jobs. (Joy Yi/The Washington Post)

“My daughter Ivanka, who is going to be speaking later, is — she has been so much involved. So incredibly involved. My daughter has created millions of jobs. I don’t know if anyone knows that, but she’s created millions of jobs.”

— President Trump, remarks to U.S. governors, Feb. 25, 2019

These remarks from the president raised eyebrows — and inquiries from readers. The U.S. economy has added almost 4.9 million jobs since Trump became president, but regular readers know we would frown on the idea that any president himself “created” these jobs.

Now, he says his daughter Ivanka Trump created jobs. What is he talking about?

View the complete February 27 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.

President Trump’s imaginary numbers on military aid to South Korea

At a cabinet meeting on Feb. 12, President Trump said the U.S. spends ‘$5 billion worth of protection’ for South Korea. (The Washington Post)

“South Korea — we defend them and lose a tremendous amount of money. Billions of dollars a year defending them. And working with Secretary Pompeo and John Bolton, they agreed to pay, yesterday, $500 million more toward their defense. Five hundred million, with a couple of phone calls. I said, ‘Why didn’t you do this before?’ They said, ‘Nobody asked.’ … But South Korea is costing us $5 billion a year. And they pay — they were paying about $500 million for $5 billion worth of protection. And we have to do better than that. So they’ve agreed to pay $500 million more.”

— President Trump, in a Cabinet meeting, Feb. 12, 2019

“You saw South Korea, they were paying us $500 million a year. I say, ‘You got to do more. You got to give more.’ Anyway, now they’re up to almost $900 million. That was, like, two phone calls.” Continue reading “President Trump’s imaginary numbers on military aid to South Korea”