As the Department of Justice investigates his handling of highly classified documents, former President Donald Trump spoke for nearly two hours in a rally in Pennsylvania that was filled with false, exaggerated and misleading statements:

• Trump falsely claimed that DOJ used a “phony pretext” to search his Mar-a-Lago property. Trump and his staff repeatedly thwarted efforts by government officials to recover all documents for more than a year before DOJ resorted to seeking a search warrant.
• The FBI didn’t “stage” a photo to “pretend” that Trump left classified documents on the floor of his Mar-a-Lago office. The seized documents were found in a container, but were placed on the floor so agents could photograph them as evidence, officials say.
• Trump falsely claimed that an FBI investigation into whether his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia was “developed by Hillary Clinton,” his 2016 opponent. The probe was launched when a Trump campaign adviser told a foreign official that the Russians had damaging information on Clinton.
• Trump made numerous false statements about Clinton’s use of a private server while secretary of state. There’s no evidence that Clinton’s emails were “plundered by foreign hackers” or that she deleted emails and “smashed” cell phones to destroy evidence, as Trump claimed. 
• He repeated (and repeated) his false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.”
• He exaggerated both how low gasoline prices got during his presidency and how high they then became under President Joe Biden. And in any case, experts told us neither president had much to do with the price fluctuations.
• Trump falsely claimed that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “confessed” that Facebook censored posts in response to the FBI feeding Facebook “the false narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop from hell was Russian disinformation.” Zuckerberg said the FBI only warned Facebook officials generally about Russian propaganda.
• He said Biden “should have never left [Afghanistan] without keeping Bagram [Air Base].” But when he was president, Trump reached an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw American forces from all bases in Afghanistan.
• Trump falsely claimed he “ended” Nord Stream 2, a pipeline from Russia to Germany, and that Biden “opened up the pipeline.”
• No one has authorized “87,000 IRS agents” to “carry guns” and “go after you,” as Trump claimed. The bureau may hire that many employees over the next 10 years, but the majority won’t be tax auditors or “special agents” who carry firearms, officials say.

Trump made his remarks Sept. 3 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, at a campaign rally for the state’s Republican candidates for governor and U.S. Senate. The rally came less than a month after FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. 

No ‘Phony Pretext’ for Mar-A-Lago Search

Claim: “There could be no more vivid example of the very real threats from American freedom than just a few weeks ago, you saw it, when we witnessed one of the most shocking abuses of power by any administration in American history. The shameful raid and break in of my home, Mar-a-Lago, was a travesty of justice that made a mockery of America’s laws, traditions, and principles before the entire world. … On a phony pretext, getting permission from a highly political magistrate who they hand-picked late in the evening, just days before the break in, and trampled upon my rights and civil liberties as if our country, that we love so much, were a Third World nation. … Can you believe it?”

Facts: There was no “phony pretext” for the search warrant, which was approved by a federal magistrate judge in Florida on Aug. 5 and lawfully executed by the FBI on Aug. 8. The timeline of events shows that government records, some of them highly classified, were taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, and Trump repeatedly thwarted efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration to recover them.

NARA has said that it worked through 2021 to retrieve the records from Mar-a-Lago. In January, NARA finally received 15 boxes of records from Trump’s representatives. NARA said it “identified items marked as classified national security information” in the boxes, and a criminal referral was made to the Department of Justice. A preliminary FBI review found the boxes contained “184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.”

The Department of Justice had reason to believe that there were more classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago, and it issued a grand jury subpoena to Trump’s office in May seeking all documents “bearing classification markings.” At Mar-a-Lago on June 3, an attorney for Trump gave three FBI agents and a DOJ official “a single Redweld envelope” that a later review revealed contained “38 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 5 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 16 documents marked as SECRET, and 17 documents marked as TOP SECRET,” a court filing said. At that meeting, Trump’s attorney gave government agents a sworn statement that said there were no other government records at Mar-a-Lago that were responsive to the subpoena, according to a DOJ court filing. But that was not the end of it. 

After the June 3 visit to Mar-a-Lago, “the FBI uncovered multiple sources of evidence indicating that the response to the May 11 grand jury subpoena was incomplete and that classified documents remained at the Premises, notwithstanding the sworn certification made to the government on June 3,” the DOJ court filing said. “The government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the [Mar-a-Lago] Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the filing said.

The Aug. 8 searched turned up more than 100 documents with classified markings: 18 marked as top secret, 54 marked as secret, 31 marked as confidential, according to an inventory of items taken from Trump’s office and a storage area at Mar-a-Lago. In addition, there were 48 “empty” folders marked as having once contained “classified” material, including 43 from Trump’s office, the inventory showed.

These were the reasons that the DOJ sought, obtained and executed a search warrant — contrary to Trump’s claim about it being the result of a “phony pretext” and “a desperate effort to distract from Joe Biden’s record of misery and failure.”

As for the claims about the judge, Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart has donated relatively small amounts to federal candidates of both parties and to McDonald Hopkins’ political action committee while working at the law firm. He was appointed a magistrate by the district court judges and received the warrant application because he was on warrant duty at the time, as explained on the National Law Journal website.

FBI Photo

Claim: “They talk about documents not being properly stored. Yet they go in and take documents, dump them on the floor, stage a photo shoot, and pretend that I had done it, like I had put them all over the floor. They took that back after a lot of prodding. Then they put out, for public consumption, a picture which is seen all over the world. This is what they do. It’s called disinformation. These are very dishonest, sick people.”

Facts: This is false. The Justice Department did not “pretend” that Trump had left the recovered documents on the floor of a room at Mar-a-Lago.

The DOJ’s Aug. 30 court filing indicates on page 13 that the classified documents and cover sheets shown in the FBI photo — which was included in the filing as an attachment — were found in a “container,” not spread across the floor.

The filing reads: “Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status. See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ’45 office’).”

Unnamed Justice Department officials told the New York Times and the Washington Post that the documents were arranged on the floor and photographed by the FBI to document the evidence that had been seized in the search.

“A person familiar with the investigation confirmed to The Washington Post that arranging seized evidence for a photo is standard FBI practice in searches and investigations,” the Post reported.

Russia Investigation Triggered by Trump Campaign Aide

Claim: “I tell this story on occasion, very seldom, because it’s too sad to tell, but I tell this story because it’s very important. Russia, Russia, Russia was a hoax. It was developed by Hillary Clinton and a group of people, small group around a kitchen table, as a way of explaining why she lost an election that a lot of people thought she would win.”

Facts: This is revisionist history. The “hoax” that Trump colluded with the Russians was not “developed by Hillary Clinton and a group of people.”

Here are the facts: In July 2016, the FBI began investigating the Russian government’s attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election, including whether Trump’s campaign associates were involved in those efforts. As explained in the DOJ inspector general’s report in December 2019, the investigation of Trump’s campaign was triggered when a “Friendly Foreign Government,” an Australian diplomat, learned from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, that the Russians had damaging information on Clinton.

“As we describe in Chapter Three, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, just days after its receipt of information from a Friendly Foreign Government (FFG) reporting that, in May 2016, during a meeting with the FFG, then Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos ‘suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton (and President Obama),'” the report said. “The FBI Electronic Communication (EC) opening the Crossfire Hurricane investigation stated that, based on the FFG information, ‘this investigation is being opened to determine whether individual(s) associated with the Trump campaign are witting of and/or coordinating activities with the Government of Russia.'”

The investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller resulted in 37 indictments or guilty pleas — including against 26 Russians and three Russian companies, as summarized by Vox. A redacted report written by Mueller’s office detailed how the Russians carried out an extensive social media campaign and targeted cyberattacks against Clinton and the Democratic Party committees to damage Clinton and help Trump.

The report, which was released April 18, 2019, said the investigation “established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government.” But the investigation “did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.” (Read our story “What the Mueller Report Says About Russian Contacts” for more information.) 

In a second redacted report, investigators detailed multiple instances of Trump’s “obstructive acts” during the DOJ investigation. The report said that while the investigation “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” (Read our story “What the Mueller Report Says About Obstruction” for more information.)

False Claims about Clinton’s Emails

Claim: “We are being assaulted by the same group at the FBI and DOJ that, just a few years ago, declared no reasonable prosecutor would charge crooked Hillary Clinton after she set up a secret illegal server to hide her family’s pay-for-play schemes, crammed it full of classified information, allowed it to be plundered by foreign hackers, you know that happened. And then deleted, acid-washed, 30,000 emails. … And what else did she do? Boom, with a hammer, smashed her phone systems to smithereens after receiving the highest level of subpoena from the U.S. Congress.”

Facts: Trump gets very little right about the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server while secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

He’s right that the FBI “declared no reasonable prosecutor would charge” Clinton. On July 5, 2016, four months before the presidential election, then-FBI Director James Comey said at a press briefing: “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

But the rest of Trump’s remarks are exaggerated or flat-out wrong.

Clinton’s server was not “crammed … full of classified information,” as Trump said. But Clinton is also wrong to continue to claim — as she did in a Sept. 6 tweet — that she kept “zero emails that were classified” on her server.

At the July 5, 2016, briefing, Comey said Clinton returned about 30,000 emails and, of those, “110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.” He also said “[o]nly a very small number of the emails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information.” Days later, when testifying before a House committee, Comey clarified that three emails had “portion markings,” which he explained under questioning meant the emails were marked as classified with the letter “C” in the body of the email and therefore could have been missed by Clinton.

“Separate from those, about 2,000 additional emails were ‘up-classified’ to make them Confidential,” which is the lowest level of classification, he said in the July 5 briefing. “Up-classified,” Comey said, means “the information in those had not been classified at the time the emails were sent.”

There is also no evidence that Clinton’s emails were “plundered by foreign hackers,” as Trump put it.

As we wrote in “A Guide to Clinton’s Emails,” foreign hackers attempted to access the server, but the FBI and the State Department’s inspector general found no evidence that any attempt was successful. Comey said, however, that doesn’t mean the server wasn’t compromised. “[G]iven the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence,” Comey said.

There is also no evidence that Clinton destroyed evidence, as Trump claimed.

After identifying work emails to turn over to the State Department, Clinton directed her staff to delete 31,830 personal emails. (As we wrote, they were not “acid-washed,” as Trump said.) 

An outside contractor for Platte River Networks wiped Clinton’s computer hard drive of all emails sometime between March 25 and March 31, 2015, according to the FBI. That was about three weeks after the House Select Committee on Benghazi served Clinton with a subpoena on March 4, 2015. 

But Comey said “we believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection” with her staff’s sorting of work and personal emails, and no evidence of “efforts to obstruct justice.”

Finally, Trump’s wrong again when he says Clinton “smashed her phone systems to smithereens after receiving the highest level of subpoena from the U.S. Congress.”

As we have written, the FBI said in its notes on the investigation (on page 8) that Clinton used eight mobile devices while she was secretary of state. It quotes Clinton aide Justin Cooper (on page 9) as saying that he could recall on two occasions that he got rid of old mobile devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer. The IG report indicated that the destruction of the cell phones occurred while she was secretary of state – contrary to Trump’s claim that she did so “after receiving the highest level of subpoena from Congress.”

The IG report said Cooper and another aide told investigators that they “wiped or destroyed Clinton’s devices once she transitioned to new devices.” Comey said that investigators “found no evidence” that “work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.”

No Evidence of a ‘Rigged Election’

Claim: “Young guys come up, beautiful staffers, there are a lot of them here right now, and here, all over the place, that just came up to me. ‘You won Pennsylvania by a lot, sir.’ I’d go, ‘That’s right. You’re right about that.’ Doug, I think at nine o’clock in the evening, we were 950,000 votes up, with 73% of the vote cast? All of a sudden, around 3:02 or something, the equipment closed down. It all closed down. And then you had that massive spike. Remember the spike that went to heaven and came back? It should have gone to hell and come back. And all of a sudden we were tied, and then all of a sudden we lost by a whisper. A rigged election.”

Facts: Trump lost Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes, but the extended time needed to count ballots wasn’t evidence that the state’s election was “rigged.”

As we wrote before the election, it was expected that counting the mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania would extend beyond Election Day. That was due to several factors. First, Pennsylvanians voted by mail for the first time in 2020 without a specific reason, due to bipartisan legislation approved by a Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf in October 2019. That legislative change, combined with the pandemic, resulted in more than 2.6 million voters casting their ballots in the 2020 general election. 

Second, Pennsylvania election officials by law cannot begin pre-canvassing ballots — opening envelopes and preparing the ballots to be counted — until Election Day at 7 a.m. Third, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a state Supreme Court ruling that allowed Pennsylvania up to three days to count mail-in ballots that were postmarked by Election Day. Prior to the election, then-Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said it would take at least until Nov. 6 — three days after Election Day — to count all the ballots.

Also, it was not surprising that most of those ballots would be cast by Democrats, who in recent elections have used mail-in ballots more than Republicans. A March 2020 study that was coauthored by Charles Stewart, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, found a “growing tendency” of ballots counted after Election Day “to disproportionately favor Democrats in presidential elections,” which they dubbed the “blue shift.” 

Of the more than 2.6 million mail-in ballots cast in Pennsylvania, registered Democrats cast roughly 1.7 million ballots, while registered Republicans cast only about 623,000, according to the U.S. Elections Project, which is maintained by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor.

Throughout the Wilkes-Barre rally, Trump repeated his baseless claims of a “rigged election.” At another point, Trump said: “American elections should be determined only by the American people, and that did not happen in 2020.” But that’s exactly what did happen in 2020. In fact, top Justice Department officials under Trump testified at the House hearing on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that they told Trump his claims of election fraud were baseless — but he continues to repeat them, anyway. (See “Trump Ignored Aides, Repeated False Fraud Claims.”)

“My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud,” former Attorney General William Barr told the committee.

Gas Prices

Claim: “Two years ago when I was in office gas was $1.87 a gallon. … But now gas is $5 and $6 and $7 and it’s going to be going up. Think of it. And they bragged because it came down slightly. It came down about 42 cents. We actually had it down at one point to $1.42. Remember that? But I had to get it a little up. We had to let the oil companies make a couple of bucks. I didn’t want to wipe out the oil companies.”

Facts: Nearly all of Trump’s figures are wrong. Gasoline prices were $2.48 per gallon and rising in the week Trump left office in January 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Gasoline prices were once $1.87 a gallon — the figure mentioned by Trump — in the last week of April 2020. U.S. oil prices were actually negative that month for the first time ever, due to a collapse in demand related to the coronavirus pandemic. That was the lowest weekly price during his four years as president. Prices never got as low as $1.42 per gallon, as Trump claimed.

Under Biden, weekly gasoline prices rose to a high of $5.11 in mid-June. Prices never got anywhere near $6 or $7 nationally. Retail gasoline prices have been steadily dropping since mid-June and were at $3.94 the last week of August. That’s a $1.17 per gallon price drop from the peak in mid-June, not 42 cents as Trump said.

As we wrote in July, forces largely outside Biden’s control were responsible for the spike in gasoline prices this summer. Nor is Biden chiefly responsible for the more recent decline, experts told us. An analysis published July 26 by the Treasury Department estimated that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases authorized by Biden, in conjunction with the additional releases from other International Energy Agency nations, lowered the price of gasoline in the U.S. between 17 cents and 42 cents per gallon. But as we wrote on Aug. 17, global economic forces beyond Biden’s control are driving the decline in gasoline prices.

Facebook and Hunter Biden

Claim: “Weirdo Mark Zuckerberg confessed that in 2020, the FBI went to Facebook and the media and gave them the false narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop from hell was Russian disinformation, even though they knew that was not true. So they went and they said it was Russian disinformation.”

Facts: That’s not what Zuckerberg said. In an interview with Joe Rogan on Aug. 25, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that prior to the 2020 presidential election Facebook downgraded the distribution of posts about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Zuckerberg said the decision to do that came after the FBI warned members of the Facebook team, “Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.” Zuckerberg said the FBI did not warn specifically about stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, but Facebook determined those stories “basically fit the pattern.”

Meta put out a statement saying that nothing Zuckerberg shared in that interview was new, that Zuckerberg had said the same thing in an October 2020 interview with Sen. Ron Johnson.

“The FBI shared general warnings about foreign interference – nothing specific about Hunter Biden,” the Meta statement said.

Responding to news stories about Zuckerberg’s comments to Rogan, the FBI released a statement to Fox News that it “routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats.”

Zuckerberg said Facebook reduced distribution of posts about Hunter Biden’s laptop for about a week until independent fact-checkers looked into it and “no one was able to say it was false.” The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News and Politico have since confirmed the laptop was Biden’s. Zuckerberg said that while he believes the review process was “pretty reasonable,” he said “it sucks” that Facebook reduced distribution for several days related to an issue that “turned out after the fact” to be legitimate.

(FactCheck.org works with Facebook as a third-party fact-checking partner; the platform has no role in our editorial decisions.)

Bagram Air Base

Claim: “I wanted to get out [of Afghanistan] more than anybody. I’m the one that got it down to 2,000 [soldiers]. But also we should have kept Bagram because of China. Bagram Air Base cost billions and billions of dollars years ago to build. It’s one hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons. We should have never left without keeping Bagram. What a shame.”

Facts: On July 2, 2021, under President Biden, the U.S. military turned over Bagram Airfield, its largest airfield in Afghanistan, to the Afghan military ahead of the Aug. 31, 2021, deadline Biden set for full troop withdrawal. Although complete troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and the abandoning of the Bagram Air Base were criticized by some military officials, that is one issue on which Biden and Trump shared a similar goal.

In February 2020, the Trump administration negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. The so-called Doha agreement called for a complete withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, provided the Taliban upheld several conditions. As we have reported, the Trump administration kept to the pact, reducing U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500, even as the Taliban continued to attack Afghan government forces and welcomed al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership.

In addition to agreeing to a “complete withdrawal of all remaining forces from Afghanistan” by May 1, 2021, the Doha agreement said, “The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will withdraw all their forces from remaining bases.”

Biden delayed the May 1 withdrawal date that he inherited. But ultimately his administration pushed ahead with a plan to withdraw by Aug. 31, despite continued and obvious signs that the Taliban wasn’t complying with the agreement.

In a statement released on April 18, 2021, Trump criticized Biden’s delayed withdrawal deadline saying, “we can and should get out earlier.” He concluded, “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.”

Six days before U.S. troops abandoned the Bagram Air Base, Trump boasted at a rally in Ohio that the Biden administration “couldn’t stop the process” that he started with the Doha agreement, and that “all the troops are coming back home.”

On Aug. 24, 2021, days before the final pullout from Afghanistan, Trump called the decision to abandon Bagram a mistake, saying that “we should have kept Bagram because Bagram is between China.”

In a Sept. 29, 2021, hearing before a House panel, Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, then commander of U.S. Central Command, said that keeping the airbase at Bagram was “untenable” after Biden ordered all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. McKenzie added, “I did not see any tactical utility” to holding Bagram.

In late November, Trump again said that had he remained president, he planned to hold on to the Bagram airfield even after withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

“I was going to keep Bagram because of China, not because of Afghanistan,” Trump told Fox News. “Because they’re one hour away from their nuclear nuisance, because that’s exactly what it is, that’s where they make their nuclear [weapons].”

But we could find no statements Trump made while president of his intention to hold onto Bagram.  Rather, he repeatedly spoke of withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan, and he made an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw American forces from all bases in Afghanistan.

Nord Stream 2

Claim: “And now we have a war between Russia and Ukraine with potentially hundreds of thousands and even millions of people are going to die. That would’ve never happened if I was your president. Would’ve never happened. I promise you. I talked to him. ‘Vladimir, you can’t do that. Can’t do it, Vladimir. Those beautiful golden turrets in Moscow, Vladimir, I want to leave them alone please. You can’t do it Vladimir.’ He would never have done it. He would never have done it. He said, ‘Well, I sort of believe you because you actually did kill me on Nord Stream 2.’ Nobody thought that was possible. I ended Nord. … Can you imagine? Biden came in and he opened up the pipeline. I ended it.”

Facts: Trump’s claim that he “ended” Nord Stream 2 is inaccurate. As we have written several times, Congress approved a defense bill, signed into law by Trump in 2019, that included sanctions against companies building Nord Stream 2. Construction of the pipeline — which runs under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany and parallel to the already operational Nord Stream 1 — was suspended in response to the sanctions. But the pipeline was about 90% complete at the time, and construction started up again in December 2020, while Trump was still in office. So Trump can claim credit for slowing the project but not ending it.

The Biden administration also opposed the project, but, according to a Congressional Research Service Report, “U.S. officials have suggested the Administration’s ability to prevent the pipeline from becoming operational is limited, even with additional sanctions.”

Biden waived sanctions against those involved in the Nord Stream 2 project in May 2021, and the pipeline was completed in September 2021. But it’s still not operational, as Germany officially stopped the required certification process on Feb. 22 after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. (Russia also “indefinitely” halted operation of Nord Stream 1 on Sept. 2, pending maintenance that Russian President Vladimir Putin says is being delayed by Western sanctions.)

IRS Agents

Claim: “And now you have the privilege of having 87,000 IRS agents go after you. And they’ve actually been approved. I’d never heard of this one. They got approved to carry guns, so they can go after you with guns. You know, they don’t want to have guns, but it’s okay for the IRS. It’s like an army.”

Facts: This is false. No one has authorized 87,000 IRS agents to carry guns and go after law-abiding taxpayers.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in August, includes roughly $79 billion in additional funding for the IRS over 10 years. IRS and Treasury Department officials have said that a portion of the money will be used to hire new employees, potentially as many as 87,000, most of whom will replace outgoing staff and will work in customer service, doing tasks such as upgrading computer systems and answering phones.

But the IRS also plans to hire an unspecified number of tax examiners and revenue agents whose job will be to make sure that more high-income individuals and businesses — not the middle-class — are paying their taxes. 

“The majority of new employees will replace the standard level of staff departures over the next few years and will be hired to improve taxpayer services,” an IRS spokesperson told us last month. “The agency will also bring on experienced auditors who can take on corporate and high-end tax evaders, without increasing audit rates relative to historical norms for people earning under $400,000 each year.”  

Furthermore, only IRS “special agents,” who handle criminal cases and are law enforcement officers, are authorized to carry guns. That has been the case for many years, including when Trump was president. 

Only about 3% of all IRS employees work for IRS Criminal Investigation, which is the sixth-largest federal law enforcement agency in the U.S, a Treasury Department spokesperson told us. The division, which is known for the arrest of American gangster Al Capone, investigates cases related to money laundering, cybercrime, bank secrecy, national security, national defense and narcotics organizations. 

IRS Criminal Investigation currently has about 2,100 special agents, a division spokesperson told us. That total is not much different from the 2,030 special agents in 2020, Trump’s last year as president, or the 2,159 special agents in 2017, his first year in office.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

The post Trump Distorts Facts in Pennsylvania Rally appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Quick Take

President Donald Trump and his supporters on social media are citing unverified “Russian intelligence” from 2016 as evidence that Hillary Clinton “was behind the entire Russian collusion hoax.” But that so-called intelligence is largely a reflection of publicly available information at the time. Federal investigations since then have documented multiple links between Trump associates and individuals tied to the Russian government.

Full Story

Hillary Clinton ran for president four years ago, but dubious claims about her continue to churn as the Trump administration rekindles allegations that ties between the president’s 2016 campaign and Russia are part of a “hoax.”

One such claim arose shortly before the first presidential debate on Sept. 29. Clinton, of course, is not a candidate. But Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe wrote a one-page letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham on the day of the debate that said “Russian intelligence” in July 2016 had claimed that Clinton “approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”

Ratcliffe followed with an important caveat, writing that the U.S. intelligence community “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”

Despite that unverified and questionable provenance, partisan websites and social media pages seized on the claim as proof that Clinton was responsible for the appearance of links between the Trump campaign and Russia. President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was among those who initially spread it on social media, saying, “The Russia hoax was Hillary’s plan.”

In reality, the connections between Trump campaign associates and individuals tied to the Russian government during the 2016 election have been well documented in reports from special counsel Robert S. Mueller and the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee. Both found evidence that justified the investigation into those ties, although neither report found evidence of a criminal conspiracy.

“In sum, the investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. Those links included Russian offers of assistance to the Campaign. In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer, while in other instances the Campaign officials shied away,” the Mueller report said. “Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”

The Senate report, which was released Aug. 18, detailed former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s connections to Russia and Ukraine, and found “his high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services … represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”

Manafort was one of six men involved with Trump’s 2016 campaign who have either pleaded guilty or been found guilty of crimes uncovered during the Mueller probe.

It is also well documented that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered computer networks and accounts related to the Democratic Party to be hacked in order to leak damaging information about Clinton and help Trump’s campaign. A joint assessment by the CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency resulted in a 2017 report that detailed the extent of the Russian influence campaign.

WikiLeaks released the information hacked by Russian government intelligence operatives and, according to the final volume of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, “the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects.”

The committee report said: “Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks.”

Campaign officials looked to Trump’s longtime associate and adviser Roger Stone for insights about WikiLeaks’ plans to release information, and Stone would relay his purported knowledge to Trump or senior aides, according to the report. The committee, however, couldn’t “reliably determine the extent of authentic, non-public knowledge about WikiLeaks that Stone obtained.”

Neither the Mueller report nor the Senate Intelligence Committee report suggest that Clinton orchestrated any of this.

But on Oct. 6, a week after his letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ratcliffe, who served as a Republican congressman from Texas until he became the director of national intelligence on May 26, said the president instructed him to declassify “additional documents.”

Trump took to Twitter the same day, announcing: “I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!”

So far, this has included a heavily redacted memorandum from the CIA to the FBI and two pages of heavily redacted notes that former CIA director John Brennan had taken in 2016.

According to Ratcliffe’s letter, Brennan’s notes said that the Russian intelligence analysis included the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”

Brennan dismissed the publication of those documents as being politically motivated. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, he called Ratcliffe’s move “selective declassification” that is “designed to advance the political interests of Donald Trump and Republicans who are aligned with him.”

Brennan explained, “These were my notes from the 2016 period when I briefed President Obama and the rest of the national security council team about what the Russians were up to and I was giving examples of the type of access that the US intelligence community had to Russian information and what the Russians were talking about and alleging.”

But what “the Russians were talking about” in late July 2016 merely reflected what was playing out in public at that time.

In mid-June of 2016, the Democratic National Committee disclosed its servers had been hacked and the firm it hired to analyze the breach traced the hack to Russia. On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 DNC emails, and two days later Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said in an interview with CNN that the timing of the release — shortly before the Democratic National Convention — suggested that Russia was trying to help Trump’s campaign.

At a July 27, 2016, press conference, Trump said he doubted that Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC computer network, but invited Russia to find Clinton’s personal emails that had been deleted before she left office. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said.

Four days later, Clinton suggested in an interview on Fox News Sunday that Russia was helping Trump.

“We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC and we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released and we know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin,” she said.

Clinton’s campaign also criticized Trump’s call for the Russian government to “find” her emails.

But that’s not a scandal that Clinton “stirred up.” She was responding to Russia’s actions and Trump’s words.

There is no evidence that she was responsible for the federal counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign ties with Russia. The fact is, multiple federal reports, including the Mueller and Senate reports, trace the origins of the investigation to Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos.

As we have written, the Department of Justice’s inspector general said the FBI launched its investigation after Papadopoulos told a “Friendly Foreign Government” (an Australian diplomat in London, according to the New York Times) that the campaign had received information about Russia having dirt on Clinton.

So, claims like this one — “Hillary Clinton was behind the entire Russian collusion hoax all along” — made by Republican Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, along with a call to “#LockHerUp,” are unfounded.

But that hasn’t stopped such claims from spreading. Collins’ original tweet was shared more than 14,000 times, and a conservative group called FreedomWorks made the quote into a meme that’s been shared tens of thousands of times on Facebook.

Other major Trump allies are spreading similar messages.

Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, wrote on Facebook, with a link to the Fox News story about Brennan’s declassified notes, “CROOKED Hillary denied our country a peaceful transition of power. SHE concocted the Russia hoax!”

Anti-Muslim activist Brigitte Gabriel asked for “nationally televised hearings about how the Russian probe was a HOAX.” And Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida claimed on Facebook, “The Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton regime completely fabricated the Russia hoax. It was all FAKE.”

All of those assertions ignore the findings of multiple federal investigations and they eschew confirmed U.S. intelligence in favor of unverified Russian intelligence.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here.

This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.

Sources

Ratcliffe, John. Director of National Intelligence. Letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham. Judiciary.senate.gov. 29 Sep 2020.

Trump, Donald Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr). “OMG JUST DECLASSIFIED: The Russia hoax was Hillary’s plan, and the Obama-Biden White House was briefed on it.” Twitter. 29 Sep 2020.

Mueller, Robert S. III. “Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election.” U.S. Department of Justice. Mar 2019.

U.S. Senate. Select Committee on Intelligence. Report on Russian Active Measures, Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election. 2020.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Background to “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution. 6 Jan 2017.

Singman, Brooke. “DNI declassifies Brennan notes, CIA memo on Hillary Clinton ‘stirring up’ scandal between Trump, Russia.” Fox News. 6 Oct 2020.

Trump, Donald (@realDonaldTrump). “I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!” Twitter. 6 Oct 2020.

Cohen, Zachary and Alex Marquardt. “Former CIA director accuses intel chief of selectively declassifying documents to help Trump.” CNN. 6 Oct 2020.

Kiely, Eugene. “Timeline of Russia Investigation.” FactCheck.org. Updated 20 Feb 2020.

C-SPAN (@cspan). “Donald Trump: ‘Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.’” Twitter. 27 Jul 2016.

Kiely, Eugene, et al. “How Old Claims Compare to IG Report.” FactCheck.org. 10 Dec 2019.

The post Partisan Claims of ‘Russia Hoax’ Revived Ahead of 2020 Election appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

Vice President Mike Pence and others twisted facts on the economy, some of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s positions and more:

• Pence claimed that President Donald Trump “created the greatest economy in the world.” But the economy had been growing for seven years before Trump took office.
• Pence falsely suggested Biden would “defund the police” and baselessly claimed Americans “won’t be safe” if Biden were president.
• Pence cited a federal officer’s killing during “the riots in Oakland, California.” But he didn’t explain that the death was unrelated to demonstrators protesting in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Federal prosecutors have charged a right-wing extremist with the killing.
• 1960s Civil Rights figure Clarence Henderson said Trump “created” a “record” number of jobs for Black Americans. Actually, Black employment grew faster under Obama.
• White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said that, under Trump, “the single mom with two kids, two jobs, two commutes … finally has health insurance.” But the number of uninsured women ages 19 to 64 decreased during the Obama administration and had increased under Trump, as of 2018.
• Pence misleadingly claimed that Biden “even opposed the operation that took down Osama bin Laden.” Biden said he opposed the timing of the operation, and suggested that the raid should be delayed in order to take further steps to confirm bin Laden was at the compound in Pakistan.
• Sen. Marsha Blackburn falsely claimed that “Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their radical allies … encourage protests, riots and looting in the streets.” Biden has repeatedly condemned violent protests.
• Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence, criticized the Russia investigation as unwarranted — but multiple independent reports found that there were grounds to investigate the Trump campaign’s contacts with people with ties to the Russian government.
• Rep. Elise Stefanik criticized the House impeachment of Trump last year as “illegal.” It’s not. The Constitution gives the House of Representatives the power to impeach the president.
• Pence wrongly claimed that Trump “suspended all travel from China,” when the administration’s restrictions contained exceptions.
• Pence misled when he said that “after years of scandal,” Trump “reformed the VA and veterans choice is now available for every veteran in America.” Although the Trump administration expanded the program, it began in 2014 under Obama.

And there were several repeat claims on fracking, abortion, school choice, military pay and immigration.

Analysis

Pence’s Economic Distortion

Vice President Mike Pence repeated a central theme of the Trump campaign when he said Biden “presided over the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression” and that Trump ”created the greatest economy in the world.”

It’s true that the economic recovery from 2009 to 2016 was the slowest since World War II, and probably since the 1930s Depression as well. That’s not surprising considering that the country was recovering from the most severe economic downturn since the Depression itself.

But claiming that Trump “created” the “greatest economy” is a grandiose distortion.

Pence ignores the fact that the economy had been growing without interruption for seven years before Trump took office. As we noted when he was inaugurated, unemployment was already well below the historical norm, and the economy had already racked up the longest uninterrupted stretch of monthly job gains on record. Stock prices had doubled and tripled; the S&P 500 index had gained 166% even before Trump’s surprise election victory on Nov. 8, 2016.

Trump didn’t “create” any of that; it was given to him.

Job growth has continued under Trump, but at a slower pace. The economy added nearly 2.5 million jobs in the 12 months before Trump took office, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show. It added just over 2 million during Trump’s first year. The unemployment rate continued to drop, from 4.7% when Trump took office to a 50-year low of 3.5% under Trump, before the COVID-19 pandemic sent it shooting up to the worst levels since the 1930s. It hit 14.7% in April and stood at 10.2% last month — still worse than any month of the Obama-Biden administration.

Biden and Crime

Pence said baselessly that Americans would not be safe if Biden were elected president. In doing so, he suggested that Biden would “defund the police,” something Biden has said he does not support.

And the vice president misleadingly used a response by Biden to a question in claiming the Democratic presidential nominee supported “cutting funding to law enforcement.”

Pence, Aug. 26: When asked whether he’d support cutting funding to law enforcement, Joe Biden replied, “Yes, absolutely.” Joe Biden would double down on the very policies that are leading to violence in America’s cities. The hard truth is you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America. Under President Trump, we will always stand with those who stand on the Thin Blue Line, and we’re not going to defund the police – not now, not ever.

There is no evidence that Americans would be less safe in Joe Biden’s America. As we have written, Trump and his campaign have repeatedly and falsely claimed that a Biden administration would eviscerate law enforcement, with Americans subjected to mayhem in the streets and unanswered police calls. But Biden has said on a number of occasions that he is opposed to defunding the police, and a Biden spokesman told us the Democratic nominee supports more funding for police for some functions, such as initiatives to strengthen community relationships and for body-worn cameras.

The federal government pays a small percentage of law enforcement expenses. According to a backgrounder by the Urban Institute, 86% of police funding in 2017 was from local governments, with additional money ponied up by state governments.

Here is the context for the “Yes, absolutely” response cited by Pence.

In a July 8 interview with progressive activist Ady Barkan about police reforms, Biden was asked about shifting some funding from police to social service agencies for tasks that could be better handled by the latter. “Yes, absolutely,” Biden responded. But as we said, he would support additional funding in some categories.

In a segment of the interview that didn’t appear on YouTube, Biden said he supports reforms, but “that’s not the same as getting rid of or defunding all the police.” (The Washington Post Fact Checker obtained audio of the full conversation.)

While Pence draws a contrast between the two candidates, it’s worth noting both Biden and Trump have expressed support for the idea of social workers and mental health personnel joining forces with police in some cases, as we’ve explained.

Pence Misleads on Officer Death

Pence was the fourth speaker of the night to characterize protests that swelled across the country this summer as violent.

Those protests called for an end to racism and police brutality after George Floyd, a black man, died when a white police officer knelt on his neck in Minneapolis on May 25.

While some of the protests have led to rioting and looting, the majority have been peaceful. A New York Times analysis of four polls conducted in June found that between 15 million and 26 million people participated in demonstrations, and the Associated Press counted the number of arrests through June 4 at about 10,000, many of which were for violating curfew or failing to disperse.

“Let me be clear: the violence must stop – whether in Minneapolis, Portland, or Kenosha,” Pence said, highlighting three cities that have seen unrest recently reignited by the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Aug. 23.

Pence then praised law enforcement officers and mentioned one name in particular.

“President Trump and I know that the men and women that put on the uniform of law enforcement are the best of us. Every day, when they walk out that door, they consider our lives more important than their own,” he said. “People like Dave Patrick Underwood, an officer in the Department of Homeland Security’s federal protective service who was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California.”

Although Pence didn’t explicitly say who shot Underwood, the context of his remarks suggests that it was someone protesting police violence in the wake of Floyd’s death. But that would be wrong.

Federal prosecutors have charged Steven Carrillo, a right-wing extremist, in Underwood’s May 29 killing.

Carrillo favored the far-right movement called boogaloo, which stokes fear about impending civil war, according to the criminal complaint against him. He used the crowds gathered to protest Floyd’s death as cover to “kill cops,” according to John Bennett, special agent in charge of the San Francisco division of the FBI.

Carrillo is also charged with the murder of a sergeant in the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, Damon Gutzwiller. That killing came a week after Underwood’s death. The case is in state court.

Black Employment Spin

Clarence Henderson, who participated in the famous 1960 sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, praised Trump for the “record number of jobs he created for the Black community.”

It’s true that the number of African Americans employed hit a record under Trump. But it wasn’t all his doing. In fact, jobs for Blacks grew faster under Obama/Biden — and all of Trump’s gains and more have disappeared.

Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey, which tracks employment by race and ethnicity, show Black employment hit a peak of over 19.7 million in February (before plunging to a six-year low of 16.2 million in April due to the pandemic).

But even in Trump’s good times, Black employment grew less than under Obama/Biden. During their final three years in office, nearly 2.1 million Blacks gained employment. During the next three years, under Trump, the number grew by just over 1.1 million.

All the gains of Trump’s first years were wiped out by the pandemic. As of July, nearly 1.3 million Black Americans had lost employment since he took office.

The post Republican Convention Night 3 appeared first on FactCheck.org.

In commuting Roger Stone’s prison sentence, President Donald Trump and the White House gave a misleading account of Stone’s conviction and the federal investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

In November, a jury found Stone guilty of obstructing a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress and tampering with a witness. All of the counts were related to a House intelligence committee investigation that ran parallel with a separate investigation by the Department of Justice.

A key line of inquiry in the House investigation was WikiLeaks’ public release of documents stolen by Russian intelligence officers that were damaging to the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and whether the Trump campaign had “advanced knowledge of or access to stolen information.”

During the campaign, Stone — Trump’s informal adviser — said that he had been in contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“A jury later determined [Stone] lied repeatedly to members of Congress,” special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in a July 11 opinion piece for the Washington Post, defending his office’s prosecution of Stone. “He lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks. He lied about the existence of written communications with his intermediary. He lied by denying he had communicated with the Trump campaign about the timing of WikiLeaks’ releases. He in fact updated senior campaign officials repeatedly about WikiLeaks. And he tampered with a witness, imploring him to stonewall Congress.”

Here we review a July 10 statement issued by the White House press secretary about Stone’s case and subsequent statements made by the president.

Russia Investigation Was Not ‘Absolutely Baseless’

In its statement, the White House falsely described the special counsel’s investigation as “absolutely baseless.”

“Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency,” the statement read. “There was never any collusion between the Trump Campaign, or the Trump Administration, with Russia.”

It went on to say: “The simple fact is that if the Special Counsel had not been pursuing an absolutely baseless investigation, Mr. Stone would not be facing time in prison.”

There was ample evidence to justify opening an investigation — even if the investigation “did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities,” as Mueller’s report said.

As we wrote, the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, into whether individuals associated with the Trump campaign were coordinating with the Russian government based on information from a “Friendly Foreign Government,” according to the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General report on the origins of the investigation.

George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, told the foreign official that “the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist … with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton,” the report said.

In his op-ed, Mueller explained why the FBI opened its investigation at that time.

“By late 2016, the FBI had evidence that the Russians had signaled to a Trump campaign adviser that they could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to the Democratic candidate,” Mueller explained. “And the FBI knew that the Russians had done just that: Beginning in July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails stolen by Russian military intelligence officers from the Clinton campaign.”

Mueller called Russia’s actions “a threat to America’s democracy” and said it was “critical that they be investigated and understood.”

The inspector general’s report said the investigation “was opened for an authorized investigative purpose and with sufficient factual predication.”

After opening the investigation, the FBI found other contacts between Trump campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. On June 3, 2016, for example, Donald Trump Jr. received an email promising information damaging to the Clinton campaign as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. responded by saying, “[I]f it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” and attended the meeting in question with a Russian lawyer and others in Trump Tower on June 9. 

Jared Kushner, who was a campaign adviser to his father-in-law at the time, issued a statement a year later to congressional investigators that said “there was no follow up to the meeting that I am aware of.” 

In the end, the Mueller report “established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government,” but it “did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”

The investigation was not “baseless.”

No Evidence of ‘Malice’ Toward Stone

The White House statement also claimed — without evidence — that Stone’s conviction was the “product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice.”

“As it became clear that these witch hunts would never bear fruit, the Special Counsel’s Office resorted to process-based charges leveled at high-profile people in an attempt to manufacture the false impression of criminality lurking below the surface,” the statement reads. “These charges were the product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice. This is why the out-of-control Mueller prosecutors, desperate for splashy headlines to compensate for a failed investigation, set their sights on Mr. Stone.”

In his op-ed, Mueller said there were “two key reasons” why Stone was investigated.

“He communicated in 2016 with individuals known to us to be Russian intelligence officers, and he claimed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those Russian intelligence officers,” Mueller wrote.

According to a Feb. 10 sentencing memo, Stone made at least five public statements from Aug. 8, 2016, to Aug. 18, 2016, that indicated he had a source connected to Assange. The House intelligence committee asked Stone to name the person he was referring to in those early- to mid-August statements, but he gave the committee the wrong name and then pressured that person to lie to the committee, too.

On July 11, Trump retweeted a baseless claim that Stone “committed no crime” and “was framed by Mueller.” Similarly, the White House claims Mueller’s office manufactured “process-based charges.”

Mueller and the Department of Justice have repeatedly explained why lying to federal or congressional investigators is serious business.

Mueller last year said lying to federal investigators “strikes at the core of their government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable,” particularly in a case of such “paramount importance.”

In his op-ed, Mueller said that is true of lying to congressional investigators.

“Russian efforts to interfere in our political system, and the essential question of whether those efforts involved the Trump campaign, required investigation,” Mueller wrote in the op-ed. “In that investigation, it was critical for us (and, before us, the FBI) to obtain full and accurate information. Likewise, it was critical for Congress to obtain accurate information from its witnesses.”

On Feb. 10, the Department of Justice recommended that Stone serve a sentence ranging from 87 months to 108 months, or roughly seven to nine years, saying “[o]bstructing such critical investigations … strikes at the very heart of our American democracy.” Trump objected to the sentencing recommendation, and a day later the department filed an updated sentencing recommendation memo that left the decision up to the judge — prompting some federal prosecutors to withdraw from the case.

Trump praised Attorney General William Barr in a Feb. 12 tweet “for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought.”

But even Barr recently described the prosecution of Stone as “righteous.”

“I think the prosecution was righteous,” Barr said in an ABC News interview on July 8. “And — I think the sentence that the judge ultimately gave — was fair.”

No Evidence of ‘Spying’ on Trump Campaign

A day after his decision to grant Stone clemency, Trump tweeted — without evidence — that former President Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, “spied on my campaign – AND GOT CAUGHT!”

Roger Stone was targeted by an illegal Witch Hunt that never should have taken place. It is the other side that are criminals, including Biden and Obama, who spied on my campaign – AND GOT CAUGHT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 11, 2020

The president reiterated that claim when speaking to reporters that same day when he was asked about Stone.

“Take a look at Biden, Sleepy Joe. Take a look at Obama,” Trump said. “And they spied on Donald Trump’s campaign. Those are the people — let me just tell you something: Those are the people that should be in trouble.”

The inspector general’s report released in December focused on the origins of the investigation, but it found no evidence of illegal “spying” — either before or after the FBI opened the investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, on July 31, 2016. 

The report said that the Crossfire Hurricane team conducted an “initial analysis of links between Trump campaign members and Russia,” and then opened four individual cases in August 2016 — on Trump campaign associates Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. The IG report reviewed the department’s handling of those four cases. 

“We found no evidence that the FBI used CHSs [confidential human sources] or UCEs [undercover employees] to interact with members of the Trump campaign prior to the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” the report said. “After the opening of the investigation, we found no evidence that the FBI placed any CHSs or UCEs within the Trump campaign or tasked any CHSs or UCEs to report on the Trump campaign.”

The report said the interactions between the Trump campaign aides and the FBI’s confidential sources “received the necessary FBI approvals” and were “consensually monitored and recorded by the FBI.”

In the case of Carter Page, a former campaign foreign policy adviser, the FBI used the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to obtain four court-approved warrants to surveil Page, beginning in October 2016. 

The IG’s reported cited at least 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in court applications for Page’s warrant – which Trump has cited in the past as evidence of political bias. But the IG report said it was unable to document any bias in the mishandling of Page’s FISA applications.

“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the FBI’s decision to seek FISA authority on Carter Page,” the report said.

Unanimous Jury Conviction

The White House statement also charged that the forewoman of Stone’s jury had “concealed the fact that she is a member of the so-called liberal ‘resistance’ to the Trump Presidency.”

“Not only was Mr. Stone charged by overzealous prosecutors pursing a case that never should have existed, and arrested in an operation that never should have been approved, but there were also serious questions about the jury in the case,” the statement said. “The forewoman of his jury, for example, concealed the fact that she is a member of the so-called liberal ‘resistance’ to the Trump Presidency. In now-deleted tweets, this activist-juror vividly and openly attacked President Trump and his supporters.”

Stone’s lawyers argued that their client should receive a new trial because social media posts by the jury forewoman suggested she had hidden a bias toward Stone when she filled out a questionnaire and was questioned in court before the jury was selected. Judge Amy Berman Jackson denied the request.

The judge wrote that “while the social media communications may suggest that the juror has strong opinions about certain people or issues” — in this case, a negative opinion of Trump — “they do not reveal that she had an opinion about Roger Stone, which is the opinion that matters.”

Judge Jackson, April 16: The assumption underlying the motion – that one can infer from the juror’s opinions about the President that she could not fairly consider the evidence against the defendant is not supported by any facts or data and it is contrary to controlling legal precedent. The motion is a tower of indignation but at the end of the day, there is little of substance holding it up. Therefore, the request for a new trial will be denied based on the facts and the case law set out in detail in the body of this opinion, and which are summarized briefly here.

The judge also said the defense had not shown that the forewoman, Tomeka Hart, lied when questioned before being seated. And she said the posts could easily have been found before the trial.

After the Stone prosecutors withdrew from the case on Feb. 12 in protest of the Justice Department overruling their sentencing recommendation, the foreperson defended them on Facebook. She came under fire from Trump after other social media comments critical of Trump surfaced.

Trump, Feb. 23: Well, I’ve seen a very sad thing going on with respect to Roger Stone. You have a juror that’s obviously tainted. She was an activist against Trump. Said bad things about Trump and said bad things about Stone.

We note, however, that criminal cases require unanimous verdicts for conviction. One of Stone’s jurors, Seth Cousins, wrote in the Washington Post on Nov. 22, 2019, that the conviction was based on the facts, not on politics.

“Let me be clear: We did not convict Stone based on his political beliefs or his expression of those beliefs,” Cousins wrote, adding that the “evidence in this case was substantial and almost entirely uncontested.”

“Our unanimous conclusion was this: The truth matters. Telling the truth under oath matters.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

The post Trump’s Misleading Spin on Roger Stone’s Conviction appeared first on FactCheck.org.

President Donald Trump has attacked reporting on the Russia investigation by the New York Times and the Washington Post as “fake news,” asserting — along with his press secretary — that the news organizations should return the Pulitzer Prizes they received in 2018 for their work.

But Trump and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany have pointed to no errors in the reporting, and a rereading of the articles shows that the work is quite solid. The reporting is heavily supported by special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and by other publicly available documents and sources.

We asked the White House what exactly was wrong with the papers’ reporting. We received no specifics, and were steered instead to McEnany’s unrelated comments criticizing the Times’ reporting on intelligence indicating Russia had offered bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Eileen Murphy, the Times’ senior vice president for communications, said the news outlet was aware of no problems with the articles and would have no comment on Trump’s and McEnany’s remarks. The Post did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s criticism of the reporting is part of a larger pattern: his relentless campaign to demonize the press, dismissing its work as “fake news” and seeking to weaken its credibility, as documented in an April report by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Times and the Post shared the 2018 Pulitzer for national reporting. Here’s what the Pulitzer board said of why the work was honored:

Pulitzer board, April 16, 2018: For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.

At the end of her briefing on June 29, McEnany criticized the Times’ article on the bounties and a number of other Times articles. She then turned her attention to the 2018 Pulitzers.

McEnany, June 29: It is inexcusable, the failed Russia reporting of the New York Times. And I think it’s time that the New York Times, and also the Washington Post, hand back their Pulitzers.

Trump assailed the Pulitzer-winning articles on June 25 during an interview with Sean Hannity at a Fox News town hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin, describing both the Times and Post as “so dishonest.”

Trump, June 25: The Pulitzer Prize is very embarrassed; it’s lost a lot of its credibility because all these writers got Pulitzer Prizes on the “Russia, Russia, Russia,” and they were all wrong.

And he demanded that the Pulitzers be returned at a meeting with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in May.

Trump, May 7: [A]ll of those journalists that received a Pulitzer Prize should be forced to give those Pulitzer Prizes back because they were all wrong. There was no — because if you saw today, more documents came out, saying there was absolutely no collusion with Russia. It came out very loud and clear.

And they wrote for years because they tried to do a number on the presidency and this president. It happened to be me. Pulitzer Prizes should all be returned. Because you know what? They were given out falsely. It was fake news. They’re all fake news. Those Pulitzer Prizes should be given back immediately.

And the Pulitzer committee, or whoever gives the prizes, they’re a disgrace, unless they take those prizes back. Because they got Pulitzer Prizes for what turned out to be false stories.

At a coronavirus task force briefing, Trump singled out Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who contributed to a number of the Russia investigation stories, for criticism.

Trump, April 18: Maggie Haberman. You know, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Russia, but she was wrong on Russia. So was everyone else. They should all give back their Pulitzer Prizes. … So Maggie Haberman gets a Pulitzer Prize? She’s a third-rate reporter. New York Times.

Trump first demanded that the prizes be returned in a tweet on March 29, 2019 — even before the Mueller report was released. Trump based his call for action on a summary of the report by his attorney general, William Barr. Barr’s four-page synopsis, submitted to Congress, was criticized by Mueller, who said in a letter to Barr that it “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of his work.

So funny that The New York Times & The Washington Post got a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage (100% NEGATIVE and FAKE!) of Collusion with Russia – And there was No Collusion! So, they were either duped or corrupt? In any event, their prizes should be taken away by the Committee!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2019

The Trump administration’s approach to the Pulitzer-winning articles reflects its stance on the Mueller report.

Since the report “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” and did not contain “a traditional prosecution decision” on obstruction of justice, Trump has taken the position that he was exonerated and that there was no obstruction of justice on his part. But that is not what the report said, as we have reported.

No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2019

Here is what the report said about collusion:

The Mueller report: In sum, the investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. Those links included Russia offers of assistance to the Campaign. In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer, while in other instances the Campaign officials shied away. Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.

Here is what the report said about obstruction:

The Mueller report: Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations. The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.

As for exoneration, the report says explicitly, “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Mueller wrote: “[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

A Review of the Pulitzer-Winning Stories

The joint Pulitzer for the Times and Post was for 20 articles, 10 from each of the papers.

Reading them several years after they were published, it is clear that they hold up well.

For example, early in 2017, the Post ran an article that began:

Washington Post, Feb. 9, 2017: National security adviser Michael Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials, current and former U.S. officials said.

Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were interpreted by some senior U.S. officials as an inappropriate and potentially illegal signal to the Kremlin that it could expect a reprieve from sanctions that were being imposed by the Obama administration in late December to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the 2016 election.

Transcripts released in May confirmed the story. The fact that Flynn publicly lied about his contacts with Kislyak put him at risk of being blackmailed. That’s what led to his firing and his legal problems.

On May 23, 2017, the Post reported that Trump in March of that year had asked two of the nation’s top intelligence officials, Daniel Coats, then-director of national intelligence, and Michael S. Rogers, then-director of the National Security Agency, to deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election. Both declined to do so.

The story was confirmed in the Mueller report.

On June 15, 2017, the Post reported that Mueller’s investigation was focusing on whether Trump tried to obstruct justice in the Russia investigation. That certainly turned out to be the case.

On May 16, 2017, the Times ran a story that began:

New York Times, May 16: President Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

“I hope you can let this go,” the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.

The Mueller report said “substantial evidence corroborates Comey’s account.”

On May 20, 2017, the Times reported that Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office that firing Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him. “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” the Times quoted Trump as saying, quoting from a memo that it said was the official account of the meeting. The Mueller report also included evidence to corroborate that account, noting that the White House did not dispute that description of the meeting.

On Sept. 7, 2017, the Times ran a piece headlined “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election.” The article began by focusing on DCLeaks, a website that had recently gone live, posting material stolen from prominent Americans by Russian hackers. The article revealed Russian efforts on social media to hurt the chances of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

This Russian meddling was extensively chronicled in the Mueller report, which we covered in our story “Kushner Distorts Scope of Russia Interference.”

As we mentioned above, Trump singled out Times reporter Maggie Haberman for criticism. Haberman was a coauthor of two of the Times’ pieces in the Pulitzer package and a contributor to two others. All of the stories have been confirmed or substantially corroborated.

For example, Haberman was a coauthor of the article cited above about Trump telling Russian officials that removing Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him. She also was a coauthor of an article that began, “Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.”

Trump Jr. posted the emails on Twitter. They said exactly what Haberman had reported.

We encourage readers to review all of the award-winning stories on the Pulitzer website. The White House has made no specific challenges to the stories, and a review of them shows that they hold up well.

Editor’s note: Rieder is a former media columnist for USA Today and, previously, the longtime editor and senior vice president of American Journalism Review.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

The post Trump’s Baseless Attacks on Times, Post Reporting on Russia Probe appeared first on FactCheck.org.

In her first press briefing, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany repeated a false talking point about the Russia investigation.

McEnany claimed the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election ended in “the complete and total exoneration of President Trump.”

In fact, on the question of whether Trump obstructed justice, special counsel Robert Mueller’s report pointedly said that the investigation “does not exonerate him.”

McEnany, who became White House press secretary early last month, held her first press briefing on May 1. Asked if she would promise not to lie to the media, McEnany said, “I will never lie to you, you have my word on that.”

She did, however, repeat a falsehood that others in the administration, including the president, have told before about the Russia probe that consumed the first two years of his administration. On the day the Mueller report was issued on April 18, 2019, Trump tweeted: “NO COLLUSION – NO OBSTRUCTION.”

It’s true that the investigation “did not establish that the [Trump] Campaign conspired and coordinated with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”

However, as we have written, the report said this about the issue of obstruction of justice: “Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations.”

“The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels,” the report said. “These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

Ultimately, the report did not recommend the prosecution of Trump and stated that the special counsel did not have the authority to do so. It cited an opinion by the Office of Legal Counsel that said “the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions” in violation of “the constitutional separation of powers.”

“Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” the report said.

Attorney General William P. Barr sent a letter to Congress on March 24, 2019, that said the department would not bring charges against the president. “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” Barr said.

But the report’s findings on obstruction of justice were reinforced in May 2019 by a statement that Mueller read at the Department of Justice.

Mueller, May 29, 2019: [A]s set forth in the report after that investigation, if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.

That’s not a “complete and total exoneration of President Trump,” as the new press secretary said.

FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

The post White House Press Secretary Repeats Russia Talking Point appeared first on FactCheck.org.

A day after his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial, President Donald Trump made celebratory remarks in the White House on Feb. 6, thanking many Republican politicians and repeating several false and misleading claims, many of which we’ve checked before.

The president twisted the facts on the Russia investigation, former FBI officials, European contributions to Ukraine, the stock market, Medicare for All and drug prices.

Russia Investigation

Recounting what he described as ongoing and unfair attempts to overturn his presidency, Trump provided this blunt assessment of the Russia investigation: “And you have to understand, we first went through Russia, Russia, Russia. It was all bullshit.”

But there was plenty to the Russia investigation.

On Jan. 6, 2017, two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence publicly released a declassified intelligence report that said: “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election,” and the goal of the campaign was “to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”

In addition to a clandestine social media campaign to discredit Hillary Clinton, the report said Russian military intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee computers from July 2015 to June 2016 and then used WikiLeaks, DCLeaks.com and “Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker,” to publicly release hacked emails and documents. The cyberattacks and public release of hacked material were part of larger “Russian propaganda efforts” to hurt Clinton and help Trump, the report said.

The special counsel’s office in February 2018 secured an indictment against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for their role in that interference. The indictment says the defendants conspired to defraud the United States. The conspiracy involved using the names of U.S. citizens and companies to illegally buy political ads on social media and stage political rallies. Some defendants also “solicited and compensated real U.S. persons to promote or disparage candidates,” according to the indictment.

The defendants are alleged to have employed hundreds of people for online operations, “ranging from creators of fictitious personas to technical and administrative support personnel, with an annual budget of millions of dollars,” then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said. In July of that year, 12 Russian military officers were also indicted.

Regarding special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russians, his report said that “the investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. Those links included Russia offers of assistance to the Campaign. In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer, while in other instances the Campaign officials shied away.”

It continued: “Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”

As we have written, Trump has provided mixed messages about the appropriateness of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 president election. At times he has acknowledged that Russia interfered in the election, and other times he has called the investigation a “hoax” and questioned whether Russians or some other group was responsible.

During the phone call in July with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that triggered the impeachment investigation, Trump raised the debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 elections and hacked the Democratic National Committee.

“The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump said, according to a memo of the call released by the White House, adding, “I would like you to get to the bottom of it.” But there is no evidence Ukraine has the servers.

‘Illegally Deleted’ Text Messages?

Trump once again falsely claimed that Peter Strzok, a former FBI senior counterintelligence agent, and Lisa Page, a former FBI lawyer, “illegally deleted” all of their emails and text messages between them. They have not been charged with violating any laws, and there is no evidence that any messages were intentionally deleted — let alone “all” of them.

The president, in the midst of celebrating his impeachment acquittal, recalled how Strzok and Page exchanged anti-Trump text messages prior to the election. Trump read from some of those messages — which resulted in special counsel Mueller removing Strzok from the Russia investigation.

Trump: When Mueller found out that everybody knew that they were 100% this way, he let them go. But they deleted all of their emails and text messages. So when we got the phone, they were all deleted. Can you imagine the treasure trove? They illegally deleted.

We covered this issue in a story in 2018, but here’s a summary: During the election, Strzok and Page were assigned to the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email for government business while she was secretary of state. In July 2016, the FBI closed the Clinton investigation without any charges being filed, and opened an investigation into reports that Russia hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s servers. Strzok was assigned to lead the Russia probe, and Page was assigned to serve as the deputy director’s liaison to the new investigation, according to a Department of Justice inspector general’s report published in June 2018.

But they weren’t on the Russia investigation for long. Both left in July 2017. Page’s assignment ended after less than two months, and Strzok was removed after the IG informed Mueller that the couple exchanged text messages that expressed “hostility” toward Trump during the 2016 presidential election, according to the IG’s June 2018 report.

“[A]fter finding responsive text messages between Page and Strzok that appeared to intermingle political comments with discussions of the [Clinton] investigation, the OIG obtained from the FBI all text messages between Strzok and Page from their FBI-issued phones for the entire period of the Clinton email server investigation as well as the period of the Russia investigation during which Strzok and Page worked on it,” the report stated. “The OIG received more than 40,000 unique text messages between Strzok and Page in response to these requests. The FBI did not provide any text messages for the period from December 15, 2016, to May 17, 2017, because of issues with the data collection and preservation software used on the FBI’s Samsung S5 mobile devices.”

Trump repeatedly has accused Strzok and Page, as well as Mueller and Mueller’s team, of deleting the missing text messages from December 2016 to May 2017.

“Biggest outrage yet in the long, winding and highly conflicted Mueller Witch Hunt is the fact that 19,000 demanded Text messages between Peter Strzok and his FBI lover, Lisa Page, were purposely & illegally deleted,” Trump tweeted on Dec. 18, 2018. “Would have explained whole Hoax, which is now under protest!”

However, the IG’s forensic agents were able to recover about 20,000 missing text messages during that “gap period” in late 2016 to mid-2017. A footnote in that June report says the failure to preserve the emails from Dec. 15, 2016, to May 17, 2017, resulted from a software problem — “not from the actions of any FBI employee, including Strzok.”

A second IG report in December 2018 detailed how the IG was able to recover the emails, and why the text message data collection tools on the FBI’s Samsung phones failed. That report similarly said, “[T]he OIG did not find that the gaps in collection were intentional on the part of the FBI or any FBI personnel.”

Contrary to the evidence, the president continues to claim that the text messages were “illegally deleted.”

Grassley and Comey Exchange

Trump falsely said that Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa got former FBI Director James Comey to admit to leaking information about the FBI’s investigations of Hillary Clinton and Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

“Chuck Grassley, he’s looking at Comey, ‘Well, you tell me, what did you say?’” Trump said Grassley asked. “And that was when Comey, I think that was when Comey announced that he was leaking, lying and everything else, right? He choked.”

That’s not what happened in the May 2017 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that Trump appears to be referencing. Comey, who was still the FBI director at the time, actually told Grassley he did not leak, or authorize anyone else at the FBI to leak, information about those investigations to the press.

Here’s the exchange:

Grassley, May 3, 2017: Director Comey, have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?

Comey: Never.

Grassley: Question two, relatively related, have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?

Comey: No.

About a month later, during a hearing before a different Senate committee, Comey did admit to Sen. Susan Collins of Maine that — after he was fired as FBI director by Trump on May 9 — he had a friend of his relay to the New York Times the contents of a memo he wrote about a conversation he had with Trump about Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, whom the FBI was investigating.

Collins, June 8, 2017: Finally, did you show copies of your memos to anyone outside the Department of Justice?

Comey: Yes.

Collins: And to whom did you show copies?

Comey: The president tweeted on Friday after I got fired that I better hope there’s not tapes. I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally, that there might be corroboration for our conversation, there might be a tape. And my judgment was, I needed to get that out into the public square, so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with the reporter. I didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. So I asked a close friend of mine to do it.

European Contributions to Ukraine

Trump falsely suggested that Germany, France and the United Kingdom don’t give money to Ukraine. In fact, as we have written, the European Union and European financial institutions have contributed $16.4 billion in grants and loans to Ukraine since 2014, considerably more than the United States. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s list of the top 10 donors of official development assistance to Ukraine has EU institutions as No. 1, with $425.2 million contributed on average for 2016-2017. The U.S. was second ($204.4 million in assistance) and Germany was third ($189.8 million on its own, in addition to what it would have given through the EU).

Trump said he would ask Vice President Mike Pence, “Tell me, why isn’t Germany paying money? Why isn’t France? Why isn’t the United Kingdom paying money? … I say, find out what the hell’s going on. And I told that to all of my people. … Why is the United States always the sucker?”

Some State Department employees did try to tell the president that EU countries contributed more money to Ukraine than the U.S., according to the congressional testimony of David Holmes, the political counselor for the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. Holmes said he and others on the Ukraine team, in coordination with other U.S. missions in Europe and NATO, began “looking into the facts” after the hold was placed on the security assistance to Ukraine and they were trying to understand why. Holmes said they found the U.S. had provided about $3 billion in combined civilian and military assistance to Ukraine since 2014, plus $3 billion in loan guarantees that he said “get paid back largely.” The EU plus member states “have provided a combined $12 billion to Ukraine” since 2014. Holmes said he believed this was communicated to the White House in late August.

Stock Market

Trump made the remarkable prediction that “if we didn’t win, the stock market would’ve crashed. The market was going up a lot before the election because it was looking like we had a good chance to win.” We wrote the day Trump was inaugurated: “Trump takes office with stock prices near historic highs, after an eight-year run-up that will be a tough act for Trump to follow.”

Over former President Barack Obama’s eight years in office, stock prices set record after record. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock average increased by 166%, from the last trading day before he took office until his final day as president. The S&P has gone up another 47.8% under Trump.

Trump boasted that stock prices “went up tremendously from the time we won the election until the time we took office,” and there was a so-called “Trump Rally” in the weeks after the election that many attributed partly to investor optimism that Trump would cut taxes and regulation as promised. But the S&P increased by just under 6% between Election Day and Obama’s last day in office.

Medicare for All

Trump claimed, in a reference to Medicare for All, that one year of the plan would cost more than the country “could make in 30 years.” That doesn’t add up.

“We’re going to give you a health care that’s going to cost more money than the country could make in 30 years if it does really well. That’s one year,” he said Democrats were saying by backing the plan.

The cost estimates for Medicare for All — a plan introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders for a universal, Medicare-like health care system — vary, as many details are yet to be determined. One recent estimate, from the Urban Institute, for a single-payer plan similar to Sanders’ legislation found federal government spending would need to go up by $2.8 trillion next year and $34 trillion over 10 years.

But federal revenues, without any changes to finance the plan, would be higher than that cost, contrary to what Trump said. The White House Office of Management and Budget estimates total federal receipts would be $3.6 trillion in 2020 and increase to $4.8 trillion by 2024. Perhaps more important, Sanders, and others who support the plan, have said they will use new revenue streams to finance it, such as payroll taxes, an income-based “premium” and increased taxes on high-income individuals. So, the revenue the government makes would increase.

Also, it’s worth noting that while the cost to the federal government would go up significantly under a single-payer plan, health spending by everyone else — individuals, employers, insurers, and state and local governments — would be largely, if not entirely, eliminated. Total national health expenditures by all payers were an estimated $3.6 trillion in 2018 and are projected to be $47 trillion over 10 years, 2018-2027, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Drug Prices

The president falsely claimed, “We had first time in 51 years where drug prices actually came down last year.” Drug prices can be measured in different ways, but using Trump’s measure — the 12-month change in the consumer price index for prescription drugs — the price decline from December 2017 to December 2018 was the first in five-and-a-half years, when the year-over-year change in the CPI for drugs dipped below zero from July 2012 to July 2013.

The CPI for prescription drugs is a measure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that aims to capture what consumers, plus their insurance companies or other payers, are paying for a basket of retail prescriptions. As we found when we wrote about this issue last year, Trump has used the December 2017 to December 2018 decline of 0.6% as the first “calendar year” drop since December 1971 to December 1972, which is 46 years prior, not 51. But that’s not the last year-to-year drop for these figures.

Trump has a point that the CPI for prescription drugs has appeared to show good news, with a year-to-year decline in nine out of the 13 months from December 2018 through December 2019, the most recent figures available. However, those year-to-year figures have gone up for the last three months of 2019, so drug prices, by this measure — at the point of sale and for all payers combined — are again rising.

We explained in detail the limitations to the CPI and what other measures of drug prices show. For instance, brand list prices, inflation-adjusted, had gone up by 3.3% in the first quarter of 2019, but net prices (after rebates, discounts, coupons and fees are deducted) had dropped by 4.1%, according to an analysis by SSR Health, an investment research firm.

The post Trump Repeats Falsehoods in Celebrating Acquittal appeared first on FactCheck.org.

White House lawyers distorted the facts on the impeachment process and other issues during the Jan. 21 Senate trial:

• White House counsel Pat Cipollone falsely suggested Republicans were barred from the closed-door depositions conducted by the House intelligence committee. But members of three committees — both Democrats and Republicans — participated.
• Jay Sekulow, President Donald Trump’s attorney, falsely said, “During the proceedings that took place before the Judiciary Committee, the president was denied the right to cross-examine witnesses … the right to access evidence and … the right to have counsel present at hearings.” The committee chair invited Trump and his lawyers to participate, but they declined.
• Cipollone claimed Rep. Adam Schiff, the House intelligence committee chairman, “manufactured a false version” of the July 25 phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president and “he didn’t tell” the American people “it was a complete fake.” Schiff indicated he was giving “the essence” of Trump’s remarks and about an hour later said it was “at least part in parody.”
• Sekulow said the special counsel’s report on Russian interference during the 2016 election found Trump committed “no obstruction.” That’s not what the report said. While the report “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” it said, citing “multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence.” 

In addition, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said his resolution outlining the impeachment trial procedures “tracks closely” with the rules of trials for other presidents. How closely McConnell’s resolution tracks with the procedures used in the past may be a matter of opinion. However, there are some differences between the rules for Trump’s trial and President Bill Clinton’s.

The lawyers and McConnell made their remarks during the opening comments and debate over the rules for the trial of the president.

Republicans Weren’t Blocked from Closed-Door Interviews

White House counsel Cipollone falsely suggested that Republicans weren’t given the same access as Democrats to the closed-door depositions in the fall led by the House intelligence committee.

Cipollone, Jan. 21: The proceedings took place in a basement of the House of Representatives. … Not even [House intelligence committee chairman Adam] Schiff’s Republican colleagues were allowed into the SCIF.

Cipollone was referring to the closed-door interviews conducted in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a secure room used to discuss or view classified and sensitive material. But both Democrats and Republicans on the committees leading the impeachment inquiry in the House had access to the SCIF.

Transcripts of the closed-door proceedings, which were held before public hearings began on Nov. 13, show Republican committee members asking questions of the witnesses. For instance, the Oct. 17 closed-door testimony of Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, was later publicly released, and it shows several Republican lawmakers were present, including the ranking minority members of the intelligence, oversight and foreign affairs committees: Republican Reps. Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan and Michael McCaul. They all asked questions of Sondland, the transcript shows. The House intelligence committee Democratic and Republican lawyers — Daniel Goldman and Steve Castor — also were present and questioned Sondland.

Similarly, the Nov. 16 deposition of Mark Sandy, the deputy associate director for national security at the Office of Management and Budget, shows both Democrats and Republicans from the committees were present and asked questions. 

During the Jan. 21 Senate proceedings, Schiff, who is also one of the House impeachment managers, later addressed Cipollone’s claim, saying: “He’s mistaken. Every Republican on the three investigative committees was allowed to participate in the depositions. And more than that, they got the same time we did.”

Cipollone may have been misleadingly referring to an effort by Republicans who weren’t on the intelligence, oversight or foreign affairs committees to gain entrance to the SCIF. That Oct. 23 event, led by Reps. Matt Gaetz and Steve Scalise, was held to protest the non-public aspect of the impeachment inquiry at that point, the lawmakers said.

Cipollone further complained that “the president was forbidden from attending” the closed-door depositions and that “the president was not allowed to have a lawyer present.”

The depositions weren’t hearings or trials, but rather a congressional inquiry. As we mentioned, Republican counsel — though not the president’s — did participate.

Trump Declined to Participate in Judiciary Hearings

In his opening remarks, Sekulow, one of Trump’s personal attorneys representing him at the Senate impeachment, criticized how the House Judiciary Committee conducted its impeachment hearings. But he got the facts wrong.

Sekulow’s comment came after Schiff spoke of “the trifecta of constitutional misconduct justifying impeachment.”

Sekulow, Jan. 21: Mr. Schiff also talked about a trifecta. I’ll give you a trifecta. During the proceedings that took place before the Judiciary Committee, the president was denied the right to cross-examine witnesses, the president was denied the right to access evidence, and the president was denied the right to have counsel present at hearings.

None of that is true. Trump was offered all of that, but he declined to participate in the House Judiciary Committee hearings.

In a Nov. 26, 2019, letter, Rep. Jerry Nadler — the chairman of the Judiciary Committee — invited Trump and his lawyer to attend the committee hearings and ask questions of the witnesses (subject to Nadler’s approval).

The letter also offered to provide Trump with evidence gathered during the impeachment inquiry – including transcripts of the closed depositions and appending information and materials.

“I write to ask if — pursuant to H. Res. 660 and the relating Judiciary Committee Impeachment Inquiry procedures — you and your counsel plan to attend the hearing or make a request to question the witness panel,” Nadler’s letter said.

The resolution itself, which was included in the letter, said: “The House authorizes the Committee on the Judiciary to conduct proceedings relating to the impeachment inquiry referenced in the first section of this resolution pursuant to the procedures submitted for printing in the Congressional Record by the chair of the Committee on Rules, including such procedures as to allow for the participation of the President and his counsel.”

In a section of the letter that bears the headline “Impeachment Inquiry Procedures in the Committee on the Judiciary,” Nadler laid out the procedures – including this offer to the president and his legal team:

Nadler letter to Trump, Nov. 26, 2019: The President’s counsel shall be furnished a copy of the report(s), record(s) or other materials referenced in section 2(5) and (6) or section 3 of H. Res. 660, and any material furnished to the Committee pursuant to this section. The President and his counsel shall be invited to attend and observe the initial presentations, and the President’s counsel may ask questions, subject to instructions from the chair or presiding member respecting the time, scope and duration of the examination.

Section 2 of H. Res. 660 refers to these records:

(5) The chair is authorized to make publicly available in electronic form the transcripts of depositions conducted by the Permanent Select Committee in furtherance of the investigation described in the first section of this resolution, with appropriate redactions for classified and other sensitive information.

(6) The Permanent Select Committee is directed to issue a report setting forth its findings and any recommendations and appending any information and materials the Permanent Select Committee may deem appropriate with respect to the investigation described in the first section of this resolution. The chair shall transmit such report and appendices, along with any supplemental, minority, additional, or dissenting views filed pursuant to clause 2(l) of rule XI, to the Committee on the Judiciary and make such report publicly available in electronic form, with appropriate redactions to protect classified and other sensitive information. The report required by this paragraph shall be prepared in consultation with the chairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Oversight and Reform.

The records referenced in section 3 described “additional materials” that may be transferred from the House intelligence committee to the Judiciary Committee.

Nadler gave the president until Dec. 1 to respond — three days before the first hearing, which was scheduled for Dec. 4.

Cipollone, the White House counsel, replied by the Dec. 1 deadline with a letter that said the president and his legal team would not participate in the Dec. 4 hearing, but reserved the right to decide if he will attend future hearings. Cipollone criticized the hearing format, which he described as “an academic discussion” that would not “provide the president with any semblance of a fair process.”

The Dec. 4 hearing was limited to testimony from four constitutional scholars on the constitutional grounds for impeachment.

“[A]n invitation to an academic discussion with law professors does not begin to provide the President with any semblance of a fair process,” Cipollone wrote. “Accordingly, under the current circumstances, we do not intend to participate in your Wednesday hearing.”

On Dec. 6, Cipollone wrote a second letter to Nadler that called the impeachment inquiry “completely baseless” and a “waste” of time. He didn’t say whether the White House would participate in any future hearings, but that same day an unnamed White House official told CNN: “The letter communicates that we will not participate in this process.”

The Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Dec. 9 that was limited to testimony from the majority and minority committee lawyers for the House intelligence and judiciary committees.

On Dec. 13, the committee voted along party lines, 23-17, to approve two articles of impeachment against Trump.

In a 658-page report, “Impeachment of Donald J. Trump President of the United States,” the committee said, “Consistent with House precedent, after the evidence arrived at the Judiciary Committee, the Committee invited President Trump and his counsel to participate in the process. Notably, and unlike past Presidents, President Trump declined to attend any hearings, question any witnesses, or recommend that the Committee call additional witnesses in his defense.”

Schiff’s Dramatic Reading, Misrepresented

Cipollone repeated a false talking point about a dramatic interpretation Schiff once gave of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Cipollone, Jan. 21: Let’s remember how we all got here: They made false allegations about a telephone call. The president of the United States declassified that telephone call and released it to the public. How’s that for transparency? When Mr. Schiff found out that there was nothing to his allegations, he focused on the second telephone call. … When Mr. Schiff saw that his allegations were false, and he knew it anyway, what did he do? He went to the House and he manufactured a fraudulent version of that call. He manufactured a false version of that call; he read it to the American people, and he didn’t tell them it was a complete fake.

On Sept. 25, Trump did release a White House memo of his July 25 phone call, which was at the heart of an anonymous whistleblower complaint that prompted the impeachment inquiry. That memo backed up the main points the whistleblower made about the phone call. In fact, Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testified that the complaint “is in alignment with” the memo.

There was a second, previous phone call on April 21, for which Trump released a memo in mid-November, but that call wasn’t the focus of the complaint.

Schiff did give an embellished rendition of the White House memo of the July phone call at the start of a Sept. 26 House intelligence committee hearing. As we’ve explained before, Schiff said he was recounting “the essence of what the president communicates” and “in not so many words.”

We leave it for readers to judge whether or not it was immediately clear that Schiff was giving his own take on the call. Some of what he said was similar to the memo, and some of it wasn’t. But it was clear to at least one Republican member in the hearing, who called out Schiff for the embellishments about an hour after the chairman’s dramatized remarks.

A few minutes later, Schiff responded: “My summary of the president’s call was meant to be at least part in parody.”

Mueller Report on Collusion, Obstruction

Sekulow also made a misleading claim about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The Mueller report concluded that “[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” in a successful attempt to help elect Trump.

Russia did this through two operations: “a social media campaign that favored … Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,” and “computer-intrusion operations” that allowed Russia to steal and then release emails and documents that were damaging to the Clinton campaign.

The special counsel’s office also investigated whether Trump or his campaign associates and allies coordinated with Russia on any of this illegal activity. Sekulow said that part of the investigation came up “empty.”

Sekulow, Jan. 21: And then we had the invocation of the ghost of the Mueller report. I know something about that report. It came up empty on the issue of collusion with Russia. There was no obstruction. In fact, the Mueller report — to the contrary of what these managers say today — came to the exact opposite conclusions of what they say.

It’s true that the Mueller report did not conclude that Trump committed a crime by either coordinating with the Russians or obstructing justice, but the investigation did not come up “empty” on either obstruction of justice or collusion.

On obstruction of justice, the Mueller report documented 11 “key events” where the president attempted to influence the investigation.

“Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” the report said. “The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

The report, however, said there were “difficult [legal] issues that would need to be resolved,” in order to reach a conclusion on Trump’s conduct.

Factoring into his decision not to weigh in on prosecution, Mueller wrote, was an opinion issued by the Office of Legal Counsel finding that “the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions” in violation of “the constitutional separation of powers.”

Mueller report: Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

The special counsel’s investigation also “did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.” But it presented evidence of “multiple contacts … between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government.”

Those contacts included Donald Trump Jr.’s eagerness to accept “very high level and sensitive information” that promised to “incriminate Hillary” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” as laid out in an email Trump Jr. received from a Russian acquaintance. “[I]f it’s what you say I love it,” responded Trump Jr., who days later attended a meeting expecting to obtain the material from a Russian lawyer who “had previously worked for the Russian government and maintained a relationship with that government throughout this period of time,” the Mueller report said. 

Among other incidents, Trump Jr. also made direct contact with WikiLeaks’ Twitter account and Trump confidant Roger Stone exchanged Twitter messages with Guccifer 2.0, which the Mueller report describes as one of two “online personas” used by Russian military intelligence to release hacked Clinton campaign emails to media outlets and WikiLeaks.

“In sum, the investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. Those links included Russia offers of assistance to the Campaign. In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer, while in other instances the Campaign officials shied away,” the report said. “Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”

Differences Between Trump and Clinton Trial Rules

Senate Majority Leader McConnell claimed that his resolution outlining the Senate impeachment trial procedures “tracks closely” with the rules in trials of former presidents.

McConnell, Jan. 21: The organizing resolution we’ll put forward already has the support of a majority of the Senate. That’s because it sets up a structure that is fair, evenhanded, and tracks closely with past presidents that were established unanimously.

But the proposed Senate impeachment trial procedures that McConnell released on Jan. 20 — and the amended ones the Senate later adopted in a party-line vote the next day — differ from the unanimously approved Clinton trial rules in a few ways.

For example, McConnell’s original resolution does not automatically admit into evidence records from the House impeachment inquiry, which is what happened during the Clinton impeachment trial. Instead, McConnell was pressured by Democrats and some Republicans into amending his resolution to state that materials from the House inquiry “will be admitted into evidence,” rather than “may be admitted into evidence” based on a vote. Still, McConnell added language stipulating that the admission of such evidence was subject to an objection from Trump’s defense team.

McConnell’s original proposal also called for members of the House and the president’s defense team to make their respective opening cases for or against impeachment in 24 hours, over no more than two days. But during the Clinton trial, House managers and the president’s lawyers were given 24 hours to do the same, with no restriction on the number of days it could take.

McConnell ended up changing his resolution to permit both sides up to three days to make their arguments.

And while the Clinton trial rules called for senators to vote on a motion to dismiss the impeachment, that same language was not included in the rules for the Trump trial. It’s possible, though, that Trump’s defense could still propose such a motion.

During Trump’s trial, after both sides make their opening case, senators will be given 16 hours to ask questions. That is to be followed by an additional four hours of arguments, split equally between the House managers and the team representing the president. This will occur before the senators debate and then vote on whether to subpoena new witnesses or documents not already admitted into the record.

Those additional rules are much like those for Clinton’s trial in 1999.

The post False and Misleading Claims at Impeachment Trial appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler went too far when he claimed that President Donald Trump “worked with the Russians to try to rig the 2016 election.” The special counsel investigation found there were “multiple contacts … between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government,” but it “did not establish … coordination” between the two.

Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, made his remarks on CBS’ “Face the Nation” while discussing the Senate impeachment trial. Margaret Brennan, the host, asked Nadler about the White House legal team’s response to the articles of impeachment.

The impeachment trial deals with a different set of allegations against Trump, stemming from the president’s attempts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, and to look into CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm the Democratic National Committee hired after its server was hacked during the 2016 election.

Nadler, Jan. 19: The GAO, the General Accountability Office, just came out this week and pointed out that withholding money from– from Ukraine that Congress had appropriated is against the law. But we didn’t need them to tell us that. And the reason he did that was in order to extort a foreign government to — to — to smear his political opponents for his personal benefits and to help try to rig the 2020 election as he worked with the Russians to try to rig the 2016 election. Same pattern.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation “did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities,” according to a redacted report released on April 18, 2019. 

Nadler’s spokseman, Daniel Schwarz, told us in an email that Mueller’s report found evidence that the Trump campaign attempted to “solicit help from the Russians.”

“Mueller did not criminally charge, but he did not in fact find that there was no attempt to collect information or solicit help from the Russians,” Schwarz said. “In fact, that is exactly what was found.”

That’s true, but that’s not what Nadler said.

As the Mueller report says, there were “multiple contacts … between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government.” For instance, Donald Trump Jr. received an email on June 3, 2016, promising information from the Russian government that would damage Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign. The email was sent by music publicist Rob Goldstone at the direction of Russian pop star Emin Agalarov and on behalf of Agalarov’s father, Aras, a Russian real estate developer.

“Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting,” Goldstone wrote to Trump’s eldest son. “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump — helped along by Aras and Emin.”

Trump Jr. responded, “[I]f it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Six days later, he attended a meeting arranged by Goldstone with Natalia Veselnitskaya, who the Mueller report said “had previously worked for the Russian government and maintained a relationship with that government throughout this period of time.” Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and senior adviser Jared Kushner also attended the June 9, 2016, meeting. But the investigation found it lasted just 20 minutes, and there is no proof that anything came of it.

“[T]he Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist candidate Trump’s electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer’s presentation did not provide such information,” the Mueller report said. 

It’s also true, as the Mueller report says, that the Trump campaign took political advantage of emails and other documents stolen by the Russian government hackers and released by WikiLeaks that were damaging to Clinton’s campaign. In the final weeks of his campaign, Trump repeatedly read from the documents released by WikiLeaks and, as we wrote, often distorted the facts.

As they would later disclose, Trump Jr. made direct contact with WikiLeaks’ Twitter account and Trump confidant Roger Stone exchanged Twitter messages with Guccifer 2.0, which the Mueller report describes as one of two “online personas” used by Russian military intelligence to release hacked emails to media outlets and WikiLeaks.

According to the Mueller report, “The release of the documents was designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and undermine the Clinton Campaign.”

Trump himself at a July 27, 2016, press conference invited Russia to find tens of thousands of Clinton’s personal emails that had been deleted. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. Within five hours of that statement, Russian intelligence officers “targeted for the first time Clinton’s personal office,” the Mueller report said.

But, again, the investigation did not establish that Trump or anyone affiliated with his campaign was involved in the hacking or coordinated the release of the hacked materials with the Russian government.

“The Office investigated several other events that have been publicly reported to involve potential Russia-related contacts,” the Mueller report said. “For example, the investigation established that interactions between Russian Ambassador [Sergey] Kislyak and Trump Campaign officials both at the candidate’s April 2016 foreign policy speech in Washington, D.C., and during the week of the Republican National Convention were brief, public, and non-substantive. And the investigation did not establish that one Campaign official’s efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican Party platform on providing assistance to Ukraine were undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia. The investigation also did not establish that a meeting between Kislyak and [Trump campaign surrogate and Sen. Jeff] Sessions in September 2016 at Sessions’s Senate office included any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.”

(We covered examples of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives in our April 18, 2019, story “What the Mueller Report Says About Russian Contacts.”)

Nadler’s spokesman has a point that the Trump campaign made the “attempt to collect information or solicit help from the Russians.” That’s clear from the Mueller report, which says just because “the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.”

But, in the end, the special counsel’s office summarized its findings on the coordination this way: “In sum, the investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. Those links included Russia offers of assistance to the Campaign. In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer, while in other instances the Campaign officials shied away. Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”

That said, Nadler went too far when he stated as fact that Trump “worked with the Russians to try to rig the 2016 election.”

The post Nadler’s Russia Claim appeared first on FactCheck.org.

In this week’s fact-checking video, CNN’s Jake Tapper looks at President Donald Trump’s claims, past and current, about the FBI’s now-concluded investigation into the Trump campaign, and how his statements compare with the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General report on that investigation.

At a Dec. 10 campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump said that “the FBI failed to disclose the nature of the political hit job to the FISA court,” referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that established secret courts to authorize surveillance warrants to intelligence agencies investigating matters involving national security. The FBI obtained approval for surveillance of one person — Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser — during its investigation of whether Trump campaign officials coordinated with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. 

Trump is correct that the FBI failed to disclose some exculpatory material about Page in its FISA application. The IG report detailed at least 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the four FISA applications targeting Page.

However, the IG report also found no “documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation” influenced the opening of the investigation or decision-making during it.

As for past comments on the Russia investigation, Trump tweeted in March 2018 that the special counsel investigation of possible campaign coordination with Russia “was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC.” That’s false. The IG report said it “determined that Steele’s reports played no role in the Crossfire Hurricane opening.”

The FBI investigation, the report said, was launched based on information from a “Friendly Foreign Government” about George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, claiming the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

In four tweets on March 4, 2017, Trump alleged “that [President Barack] Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” during the campaign. Trump called this a “fact,” and compared the alleged wiretapping to the criminal acts of “Nixon/Watergate.” That’s false. The IG report said it found no evidence of illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign — before or after the FBI opened its investigation on July 31, 2016. 

During a Dec. 11 hearing, Inspector General Michael Horowitz also dismissed Trump’s claim about Obama wiretapping his phones at the Trump campaign headquarters at Trump Tower. “We didn’t find any evidence the FBI had tapped any other phones or anything else other than the FISA [application for Page] that we addressed,” he said.

For more about the IG report, please see our stories “How Old Claims Compare to IG Report” and “Trump Misleads Rallygoers on IG Report, Impeachment.”

CNN’s “State of the Union” and FactCheck.org launched a partnership in 2015 to produce online fact-checking videos. All of the videos are available on our website.

The post Video: Trump’s Claims on IG Report and Russia Investigation appeared first on FactCheck.org.