Fact Check

Fact Checkers destroy Donald Trump’s latest conspiracy theory

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Screenshot-16The short-fingered vulgarian, Donald Trump, in the wake of the massacre in Orlando, Florida, insinuated that President Obama sympathized with terrorists, which provoked a backlash that included rebukes from members of his own party.

“The Donald” doubled down, declaring that he was not just insinuating it but that he was “right,” based upon a report from the right-wing conspiracy “news” (sic) site Breitbart.com, which has informally been acting as the media arm of the Trump campaign. Trump says he was ‘right’ about Obama and terrorists, citing unverified intelligence:

In a post to his Twitter account early Wednesday, Trump said “Media fell all over themselves criticizing what Donald Trump ‘may have insinuated’ ” about Obama. “But he’s right,” it said, linking to a story published by the conservative website Breitbart News.

The story was based on a declassified 2012 cable written by a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official, addressed to about two dozen military and national security agencies and officials, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Labeled as “information report, not finally evaluated intelligence,” it refers to “the general situation” in Iraq and Syria in the early days of the armed insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

It describes al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Islamic State precursor, as part of the anti-Assad opposition, and notes that opposition forces fighting in eastern Syria are backed by “Western countries, the [Persian] Gulf states and Turkey.”

But the document appears to be an initial intake of spot intelligence from the early days of the Syrian civil war. That intelligence had not yet been vetted or verified. Trump’s embrace of Breitbart’s interpretation of the cable fits a pattern of careless handling and circulation of facts, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Such missteps have piqued concerns among foreign policy experts and Republican strategists about Trump’s understanding of complicated policy issues and his fitness for office.

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How the ‘McMedia’ fail to hold John McCain accountable

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The “big story” in the Arizona political media over the past 24 hours is that Arizona’s angry old man, Senator John McCain, once again has demonstrated his lack of temperament, character, judgment and honesty by blaming President Obama for the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida on Sunday. McCain: Obama ‘directly responsible’ for Orlando shooting:

Sen. McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election, spoke to reporters in the Capitol Thursday while Obama was in Orlando visiting with the families of those killed in Sunday’s attack and some of the survivors.

McCain button“Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaida went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama’s failures, utter failures, by pulling everybody out of Iraq,” a visibly angry McCain said as the Senate debated a spending bill.

“So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies,” McCain said.

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Questioned on his startling assertion, McCain initially repeated it: “Directly responsible. Because he pulled everybody out of Iraq, and I predicted at the time that ISIS would go unchecked and there would be attacks on the United States of America. It’s a matter of record, so he is directly responsible.”

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David Cay Johnston exposė on Donald Trump’s mob ties

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Sen. Ted Cruz said on Meet the Press on February 28. 2016, “There have been multiple media reports about Donald Trump’s business dealings with the mob, with the mafia.” “Maybe his taxes show those business dealings are a lot more extensive than has been reported.”

politifact_rulings_rulings-tom-truePressed by host Chuck “It’s not my job to fact check” Todd to back up his claim, Sen. Cruz cited reports by ABC and CNN. A Cruz spokesman forwarded PolitiFact several other media reports detailing the real estate developer’s alleged ties to organized crime. Yes, Donald Trump has been linked to the mob | PolitiFact.

David Cay Johnston, one of America’s premier reporters, reports at POLITICO about Donald Trump’s mob ties. Just what were Donald Trump’s ties to the mob?

In his signature book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump boasted that when he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City, he persuaded the state attorney general to limit the investigation of his background to six months. Most potential owners were scrutinized for more than a year. Trump argued that he was “clean as a whistle”—young enough that he hadn’t had time to get into any sort of trouble. He got the sped-up background check, and eventually got the casino license.

Cartoon_45But Trump was not clean as a whistle. Beginning three years earlier, he’d hired mobbed-up firms to erect Trump Tower and his Trump Plaza apartment building in Manhattan, including buying ostensibly overpriced concrete from a company controlled by mafia chieftains Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano. That story eventually came out in a federal investigation, which also concluded that in a construction industry saturated with mob influence, the Trump Plaza apartment building most likely benefited from connections to racketeering. Trump also failed to disclose that he was under investigation by a grand jury directed by the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, who wanted to learn how Trump obtained an option to buy the Penn Central railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan.

Why did Trump get his casino license anyway? Why didn’t investigators look any harder? And how deep did his connections to criminals really go?

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John McCain’s bogus ad attacking Ann Kirkpatrick for voting for ‘ObamaCare’

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McCain buttonArizona’s angry old man John McCain is sounding like a broken record again, in a television ad (http://bit.ly/1svTrIg) criticizing Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick, the presumptive Democratic nominee, for her 2010 vote in favor of Obamacare. McCain hits Kirkpatrick over Obamacare in TV ad.

McCain’s ad comes at the same time the Huffington Post reported  on the latest coverage figures, by way of the CDC, with which the “McMedia” in Arizona should familiarize itself.

More than 7 million previously uninsured Americans gained health coverage in 2015, the second full year of the Obamacare coverage expansion, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

During the fourth quarter of last year, just 9.1 percent of U.S. residents, or 28.6 million people, had no health coverage, the National Health Interview Survey found. That’s a decline of 2.4 percentage points and 7.4 million people from a year before.

The additional 7.4 million insured builds on the 8.8 million previously uninsured people who got covered in 2014, the first year of the Affordable Care Act’s full benefits.

The full report from the CDC is online here (pdf).

When was the last time more than 90% of Americans had health insurance? As Sarah Kliff at Vox.com explains, 2015 was the first year 90 percent of Americans had health insurance. Thanks, Obama. And Thank you, Ann Kirkpatrick.

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Trump lies versus Clinton ‘lies’: PolitiFact’s ‘Lie of The Year’ goes to Trump

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In November, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler commented that Donald “Trump has already earned more Four-Pinocchio ratings than any other candidate this year.” Trump’s outrageous claim that ‘thousands’ of New Jersey celebrated the 9/11 attacks.

Now PolitiFact (yes, I know), gives its much coveted Lie Of The Year Award to Donald Trump, for all of his 2015 campaign misstatements:

It’s the trope on Trump: He’s authentic, a straight-talker, less scripted than traditional politicians. That’s because Donald Trump doesn’t let facts slow him down. Bending the truth or being unhampered by accuracy is a strategy he has followed for years.

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Screenshot-16PolitiFact has been documenting Trump’s statements on our Truth-O-Meter, where we’ve rated 76 percent of them Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, out of 77 statements checked. No other politician has as many statements rated so far down on the dial.

In considering our annual Lie of the Year, we found our only real contenders were Trump’s — his various statements also led our Readers’ Poll. But it was hard to single one out from the others. So we have rolled them into one big trophy.

To the candidate who says he’s all about winning, PolitiFact designates the many campaign misstatements of Donald Trump as our 2015 Lie of the Year.

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