Watch Politifact’s Angie Holan Dissect and Dismantle Three Trump Lies In Three Minutes
Holan Debunks Trump’s Iraq War, Refugee Vetting, And Benghazi Claims
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
From the June 22 edition of MSNBC Live:
CRAIG MELVIN (HOST): Politifact has identified and fact-checked four areas of Trump’s speech as I understand it. Let’s start with what he said about his stance on the Iraq War. We’ll listen, we’ll play the sound, and we’ll have you respond on the other side. Here it is.
[START VIDEO]
DONALD TRUMP: Though I was not in government service, I was among the earliest to criticize the rush to war, and, yes, even before war started.
[END VIDEO]
MELVIN: True or false?
ANGIE HOLAN: This is wrong. He keeps saying that he opposed the Iraq [[w]]War vigorously when it was starting. There's no evidence for that. Ourselves at Politifact as well as other independent fact checkers, we keep looking, we don't find it. He keeps saying it, but it's not true.
MELVIN: Let's talk about the immigration, Syrian immigration. Donald Trump hitting Hillary Clinton on the fact that she supports Syrian immigration to the United States. This is what he said earlier about that specifically.
[START VIDEO]
TRUMP: Under her plan, we would admit hundreds of thousands of refugees from the most dangerous countries on earth with no way to screen who they are, what they are, what they believe.
[END VIDEO]
MELVIN: Any truth to that?
HOLAN: You know, he has a policy difference with Hillary Clinton. She does want to let in more refugees. She's suggesting about 65,000, but this notion that there's no vetting process is completely wrong. There's an extensive vetting process that involves the United Nations and several federal departments, and it takes well over a year. So there is a vetting process.
MELVIN: This is the accusation that he and others have made about Benghazi. Here it is.
[START VIDEO]
TRUMP: Among the victims of our late ambassador Chris Stevens, I mean, what she did with him was absolutely horrible. He was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed. That's right. When the phone rang, as per the commercial, at 3 o'clock in the morning, Hillary Clinton was sleeping.
[END VIDEO]
MELVIN: Any truth to that?
HOLAN: You know, the timeline is off here, and this is a really incorrect notion that we've been fact checking for several years now, that there was some specific action the government could have taken during the time these events were unfolding. There have been numerous investigations. It was a chaotic situation. There's not evidence that there was time for them to move military to the location in time to save lives. So this one is something, again, it's been investigated multiple times. The timing that he mentions is off, and it was just a complicated and tragic situation.
Previously:
Trump’s Benghazi Lies Came From Fox News
MSNBC's Katy Tur Fact Checks Trump's Dubious Claims In His Anti-Clinton Speech