washington
CNN
—
President Donald Trump peppered a Fox News interview Wednesday with many of the same false claims he made during his first three days back in the White House.
President Trump, who met with Fox News host and ardent supporter Sean Hannity in the Oval Office, discussed topics related to the 2020 and 2024 elections, immigration and the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. In addition to certain inaccurate claims, he made a new and highly questionable declaration that there had been police brutality. Officers said some of the incidents were malicious, but it was a “very minor incident”.
Below is a fact check of 11 of his statements.
Jan. 6 Committee and Record: President Trump repeated false claims that the House selected committee that investigated the Capitol attack “deleted and destroyed all the information that we collected,” and in a later interview said the committee repeated that “all information has been destroyed.” This is a work that took more than two years. ”
President Trump’s claim that “all” information collected by the committee has been deleted is far from the truth. Republicans and Democrats have long argued over the status of certain committee records, with Republicans saying they should be archived and Democratic committee chairman Bennie Thompson saying they don’t need to be archived. did. , they were of no use to the Commission’s investigation – the Commission preserved a large amount of evidence.
As reported by FactCheck.org, the commission released not only its more than 800-page final report, but also transcripts of interviews with more than 140 witnesses. And Thompson said committee staff worked with the National Archives and Records Administration. and other government agencies are “preparing more than 1 million records of special committees for publication and archiving.”
Jan. 6 with Nancy Pelosi: President Trump says former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “admitted on tape” that she provided 10,000 troops to President Trump before Jan. 6, 2021. He repeated the false claims and said he was referring to footage taken by Pelosi’s daughter.
The video shows otherwise, and Pelosi never acknowledged that she rejected President Trump’s proposal for 10,000 troops. In fact, she has consistently stated that she has never received such an offer. And since the president, not the speaker of the House, directs Congress, she would not have had the authority to refuse the offer even if it had been made. District of Columbia National Guard.
A video recorded by Pelosi’s film director daughter Alexandra Pelosi on January 6 and later obtained by House Republicans shows a 42-second snippet posted on social media in June that shows Pelosi inside the Capitol. He was shown complaining about inadequate security. At one point, he said, “I am responsible for not preparing them further.” But this general statement is clearly not a specific acknowledgment that she rejected President Trump’s proposal for 10,000 troops.
In fact, other parts of the video appear to undermine President Trump’s claim that she was the one who declined to deploy the National Guard. She said, “Why wasn’t there a National Guard to begin with?”
After President Trump began referring to the video in June, Pelosi’s press secretary, Aaron Bennett, said in an email to CNN: “Numerous independent fact-checkers have confirmed multiple times that Speaker Pelosi did not plan to assassinate herself on January 6th. or any other day of the week, it does not change the fact that the Speaker of the House is not in charge of security at the Capitol.”
2024 Youth Vote: President Trump this week reiterated his repeated false claims about his supposed performance with young voters in the 2024 election, this time saying, “I won with young people by 36 points.” ” he declared.
He did not say how he defines the “youth vote,” and his transition team did not respond to CNN’s request for clarification earlier this week, but by any reasonable definition. His claims have no basis.
Because voting in U.S. elections is done by secret ballot, there is no official source of information about who different subgroups of voters supported in presidential elections. But the polls do exist, and despite the fact that Trump did better among young voters in multiple high-quality polls than he did in the 2020 election, In the youth vote, it was found that the election did not win by 36 points. Vice President Kamala Harris won 54% to 43% among voters ages 18 to 24, 53% to 45% among voters ages 25 to 29, and 51% to 51% among voters ages 30 to 39, according to CNN exit poll data. He defeated President Trump with 45%.
Like all public opinion polls, exit polls are an estimate of how a particular group voted and are therefore subject to error. But the Associated Press’ VoteCast estimates, collected using a different method, also found Harris with an edge among young voters. Even if Ms. Harris’ actual lead is smaller than the CNN and Associated Press polls show, there is no indication that Mr. Trump won over Ms. Harris among young voters, as Mr. Trump has claimed.
CNN’s Jennifer Asiesta contributed to this item.
Trump’s 2020 vote total: Trump said in the 2020 election, which he lost, that “it was reported that I got about 75 million votes,” then falsely said this was not an accurate number. made a claim. It wasn’t a number, it was their number. ”This is nonsense. Votes were accurately counted and reported, and Trump’s vote total (approximately 74.2 million votes) is the actual vote total.
The legitimacy of the 2020 election: President Trump defended his supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, saying, “They knew the election was stolen and they protested the vote.” “I was,” he claimed. Aside from President Trump’s description of the violent riots as mere protests, his account of the election is false, a familiar lie that has been debunked over the years. Trump’s loss to Joe Biden was completely justified.
Democrats and elections: President Trump described the Biden administration as election fraudsters, saying, “The only thing they’re really good at is cheating,” adding, “People who cheat that much are not stupid.” This is nonsense. US elections are free and secure. Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Trump in the free and fair 2020 election held during President Trump’s term, and Mr. Trump defeated then-deputy Kamala Harris in the free and fair 2024 election held during Mr. Biden’s term as President. won the president.
Immigrant numbers under Biden administration: President Trump said he believes the number of immigrants entering the country under President Joe Biden is “21 million.” This number is incorrect. Under the Biden administration, the country had recorded fewer than 11 million migrant “encounters” nationwide through December, including millions who were rapidly deported. Even if you add in the so-called fugitives who evaded detection, which House Republicans estimate to be about 2.2 million, there’s no way the total would be “21 million.”
Immigration, Prisons, and Psychiatric Hospitals: President Trump has frequently repeated unsubstantiated claims that foreign countries have somehow “emptied prisons” to bring prisoners to the United States. He singled out Venezuela, repeating later in the interview that “prisons from all over the world were brought to our country.”
Mr. Trump’s claims lack evidence and his own presidential campaign has been unable to substantiate them, but experts on prison conditions in Venezuela and around the world say they have seen no such evidence. said.
“There is no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying prisons or mental health facilities and sending them abroad, to the United States or any other country,” said Roberto Briseño-Leon, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory. said. Violence, an independent organization that tracks domestic violence, said in an email to CNN in June after President Trump made similar claims.
President Trump has occasionally sought to back up his claims with other claims: that the world’s prison population is declining. But that’s also wrong. According to the World Prison Population List compiled by British experts, the recorded global prison population increased from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people from October 2021 to April 2024.
“I do daily news searches to find out what’s happening in prisons around the world, and I see absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending everyone to the United States.” says Helen Fair, co-author of Prison Population List. Researchers at the Birkbeck Institute for Crime and Justice Policy at the University of London said this in June, when President Trump made similar claims.
“Congolese,” Prisons and Immigration: President Trump reiterated his unsubstantiated claim that “Congolese” were “spilling prisons to the United States.” Experts from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring Congo told CNN that there is no evidence for these claims, that Trump’s own presidential campaign has been unable to substantiate them, and that both governments have said that the allegations are not true. Unfounded.
Adam Schiff and Trump’s Ukraine controversy: Trump on events that occurred during the impeachment row related to a 2019 phone call in which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Biden , retelling the false story he’s been telling for years.
Trump claimed that then-Congressman and now-Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, “made this story up,” but that “after he made it up, they turned to the conversation that the State Department created. The tape, I don’t know, but sometimes when I make a phone call it creates a tape.”
In fact, no tape of the call between Trump and Zelensky was ever released or revealed. More than five years later, there is no known record of the conversation in the United States. Before Schiff released the 2019 comments Trump criticized here, Trump’s White House released a rough transcript of the call — and Schiff It was this very sketchy record that he used as the basis for exaggerated and sometimes misleading representations of his claims. I said this on the phone.
In other words, Trump’s story that Schiff made up what Trump allegedly said to Zelensky and was then embarrassed by the revelation of what Trump actually said is baseless. The revelation of what Trump actually said came first.
Trump Tax Cuts: Trump repeated the familiar false claim from his first presidency that he had delivered the “largest tax cuts in history.” His 2017 tax cut law was neither the largest as a percentage of gross domestic product nor the largest in inflation-adjusted dollars in U.S. history, according to expert analysis.