“Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy, ‘Oh, he’s using gas!’ ”
Donald Trump, July 2016 

Trump Lie Roundup

Within 24 hours, President Trump repeated several false or misleading claims about wiretapping, Hillary Clinton and his own chief strategist.

#1 Responding to last week’s chemical attack in Syria and his subsequent strike on a Syrian air base, Mr. Trump characterized President Bashar al-Assad as “evil” in an interview with Fox Business Network that aired early Wednesday morning. He also again faulted President Barack Obama for not intervening in the Syrian conflict more aggressively.

The comments contradicted Mr. Trump’s earlier, more dismissive attitude on chemical weapons.

“Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy, ‘Oh, he’s using gas!’ ” he said at a July 2016 campaign rally. In 2013 and 2014, Mr. Trump repeatedly said that Mr. Obama should not attack Syria, and, after he was elected in November, he even questioned the incentive for intervening.

#2 Mr. Trump told The New York Post that he didn’t know Stephen K. Bannon before the 2016 campaign.

“I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late. I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist, and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”


FALSE. Mr. Trump has known Mr. Bannon, his chief strategist, since 2011, when Mr. Trump was considering a presidential run.

David Bossie, a conservative activist who worked with Mr. Bannon on a series of films, made the introduction. “They definitely hit it off,” Mr. Bossie told Scott Shane of The New York Times in November.

Mr. Bannon joked in August 2015 that he was Mr. Trump’s hidden “campaign manager,” and he hosted Mr. Trump on his radio show in November 2015.

“I have known Steve and Kellyanne both for many years,” Mr. Trump said in an August 2016 statement announcing Mr. Bannon as his campaign’s chief executive and Kellyanne Conway as his campaign manager. “They are extremely capable, highly qualified people who love to win and know how to win.”

#3 Mr. Trump blamed Democratic obstruction for vacancies in executive branch posts.

“Hundreds and hundreds of people. And then they’ll say, why isn’t Trump doing this faster? You can’t do it faster, because they’re obstructing. They’re obstructionists. So I have people — hundreds of people that we’re trying to get through. I mean, you have — you see the backlog. We can’t get them through.”


FALSE. Mr. Trump’s personnel shortage is largely his own doing, even by his own account.

As of Wednesday, Mr. Trump had yet to nominate anyone for 478 out of more than 533 crucial appointments, according to the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition. Of 24 nominations Mr. Trump has sent to the Senate, 22 have been confirmed; 29 other appointments have been announced but not formally submitted.​

#4Mr. Trump suggested that the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, had deemed Hillary Clinton ‘guilty.’

“Don’t forget, when Jim Comey came out, he saved Hillary Clinton. People don’t realize that. He saved her life, because — I call it Comey won. And I joke about it a little bit. When he was reading those charges, she was guilty on every charge. And then he said she was essentially O.K. But he — she wasn’t O.K., because she was guilty on every charge.”


THIS IS MISLEADING. At no point in the F.B.I. investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state did Mr. Comey recommend charging her with a crime for her handling of classified information.


#5 Mr. Trump took credit for NATO’s counterterrorism efforts.

“The secretary general and I had a productive discussion about what more NATO can do in the fight against terrorism. I complained about that a long time ago, and they made a change, and now they do fight terrorism.”

FALSE. NATO’s counterterrorism efforts stretch back three decades, long before Mr. Trump called the alliance “obsolete” in his 2016 campaign.

NATO has been responding to terrorist attacks since 1980, and prioritized the issue after Sept. 11. The alliance’s website highlights several milestones on its counterterrorism efforts: the creation of a Partnership Action Plan Against Terrorism in November 2002, the launch of its first major counterterrorism operation in mid-October 2011, and the adoption of comprehensive counterterrorism policy guidelines in 2012.

#6 Mr. Trump said revelations about Susan Rice validated his wiretapping accusation.

“When you look at Susan Rice and what’s going on, and so many people are coming up to me and apologizing now. They’re saying, you know, you were right when you said that.”


NO EVIDENCE. Mr. Trump is referring to conservative commentators who claim that Ms. Rice, a former national security adviser, sought to learn the identities of Trump associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials and improperly leaked them to the news media.

#7 Mr. Trump claimed he used the word ‘wiretapping’ as a broad definition of surveillance.

“We’re talking about surveillance. It was wiretapped in quotes.”


THIS IS MISLEADING. Mr. Trump did put the word in quotes in two of his Twitter posts, but he explicitly accused Mr. Obama of wiretapping his phones.

“I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just before Election!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter in an early-morning post on March 4.

Ten minutes later, he wrote, “How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

Last edited by Goose (4/13/2017 6:59 am)