Fact-checking Trump’s garbage truck of lies: His speech accusing Clinton of corruption is riddled with fiction and conspiracies
Fact-checking Trump’s garbage truck of lies: His speech accusing Clinton of corruption is riddled with fiction and conspiracies
Salon
EnlargeDonald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Mike Segar)
Donald Trump’s long-awaited speech Wednesday supposedly detailing the dirt he has on Hillary Clinton turned out to be exactly what critics expected: A diatribe of right-wing paranoia seemingly cribbed off all-caps email forwards sent to you by your grandfather. Much of it assumed an audience that already has spent years poring over anti-Clinton urban legends and that gets almost all its news from the Drudge Report.
It is also a fact-checking nightmare, a garbage truck of lies, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. It’s as if Trump is trying to overwhelm the fact-checkers with so many lies they simply give up. Indeed, it’s impossible to really deal with all of it, but I went over the speech and checked some of the most prominent claims in it against the public record.
Claim: “Hillary Clinton who, as most people know, is a world-class liar….”
Fact: “As for her statements on issues, Politifact, a Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking organization, gives Clinton the
best truth-telling record of any of the 2016 presidential candidates,” Jill Abramson, writing for the Guardian,
explained earlier this year. “She beats Sanders and Kasich and crushes Cruz and Trump, who has the biggest “
pants on fire” rating and has told whoppers about basic economics that are embarrassing for anyone aiming to be president.”
Fact: The biggest liar in this election cycle is Donald Trump, by a long shot. Politifact rates
76% of statements made by Donald Trump to be false,
compared to 27% by Hillary Clinton. 19% of Trump’s untruths are rated “pants on fire” lies, compared to only 1% of Clinton’s statements. Of the 3 Clinton “pants on fire” statements, two were from the 2008 election cycle. Twenty-seven of 31 of the “pants on fire” statements from Trump come from this election cycle.
Claim: “But here is the bottom line: I started off in Brooklyn, New York, not so long ago, with a small loan and built a business worth over 10 billion dollars.”
Fact: “But that ignores the fact that he joined his father’s thriving real estates business after college and that he relied on his father’s connections as he made his way in the real estate world,”
the Washington Post explained when Trump made this same claim in a debate. “Nor does it count the estimated $40 million he received as an inheritance in 1974.”
Fact: There’s almost no way Trump is worth $10 billion.
No one can figure out the true number, since Trump jealously guards that information,
but various investigations have cast doubt that Trump is even worth a billion dollars, much less $10 billion. Ironically, if he had simply taken what he got with his father’s help in the 70s and invested it in a standard index fund,
he would be worth an estimated $6 billion now. Instead, he tried to manage his own money and now appears to have much less than he would have had by basically doing nothing.
Claim: “Her server was easily hacked by foreign governments – perhaps even by her financial backers in Communist China – putting all of America in danger.”
Fact: “A former aide to
Hillary Clinton has turned over to the
FBI. computer security logs from Mrs. Clinton’s private server, records that showed no evidence of foreign hacking, according to people close to a federal investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails,”
the New York Times reported.
The insinuation that Clinton has “financial backers” sneaking into her email is more conspiracy theory mongering from Trump, similar to his insinuations that
President Obama is secretly working for ISIS.
Claim: “Just look at her pathetic email and server statements, or her phony landing in Bosnia where she said she was under attack but the attack turned out to be young girls handing her flowers.”
Fact: It’s telling that this is literally the best Trump has got, and it’s basically nothing.
Clinton has definitely been dodgy on the email situation — Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post notes she uses “careful language” that argues “her case on narrow, technical grounds”, but admits that did not break the law. Rules-lawyering and political weaseling, sure, but tiddlywinks compared to the true “world class” lies Trump tells, many in this speech.
Fact: In 2008, Clinton took a true story — that she flew into Bosnia during
reports of sniper fire — and exaggerated many of the details to make the threat seem graver than it was.
She swiftly apologized for the error, after her exaggeration was discovered.
Generally speaking, it’s hard to care much about a bit of political embroidery 8 years ago when the candidate in question is facing an opponent as fundamentally dishonest as Trump.
Claim: “She has pledged to grant mass amnesty and in her first 100 days, end virtually all immigration enforcement, and thus create totally open borders in the United States.”
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Fact: Clinton proposes reforming our immigration system to make it easier for families to stay together, but there is no plan for “mass amnesty” or “open borders”.
Claim: “Under her plan, we would admit hundreds of thousands of refugees from the most dangerous countries on Earth – with no way to screen who they are or what they believe.”
Fact: Clinton does support helping more refugees, though she put the number at 65,000 rather than “hundreds of thousands”, but she wants to do so with “the mechanisms for vetting the people that we would take in”. The vetting process under Obama is already incredibly onerous,
taking an average of 18-24 months.
Claim: “Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20% of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while 9 investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.”
Fact: “Hillary Clinton’s State Department was one of nine U.S. agencies to approve of the transfer of the 20% of the U.S. Uranium reserves to Russia,”
NBC reports. Clinton simply couldn’t be taking bribes to do this, unless Trump is accusing all 8 other agencies of taking bribes, as well.
Claim: “Among the victims is our late Ambassador, Chris Stevens. He was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed — that’s right, when the phone rang at 3 o’clock in the morning, she was sleeping. Ambassador Stevens and his staff in Libya made hundreds of requests for security. Hillary Clinton’s State Department refused them all.”
Fact: The right-wing conspiracy theory known as “Benghazi” has been debunked over and over and over again. But the facts:
Clinton was not asleep when alerted to the attack on the embassy in Benghazi, but was in her office. That’s because the alert was sent at 3:45 PM — that’s the afternoon, not the morning. (It’s also beyond weird how
outraged conservatives are at the idea that someone might be sleeping at 3AM.) Rather than blowing them off, Clinton worked incredibly hard at trying to coordinate a response amidst all the chaos.
Clinton did not deny anyone anything. “Quite the contrary: the safe evacuation of all U.S. government personnel from Benghazi twelve hours after the initial attack and subsequently to Ramstein Air Force Base was the result of exceptional U.S. government coordination and military response,”
an independent accountability board created by the government found.