Former president Donald Trump was arraigned in Manhattan on Tuesday on criminal charges related to his role in hush money payments to an adult-film star and a Playboy model. Both before and after the widely covered event, Trump made remarks on his social media website, Truth Social, and in an evening speech at his home in Florida. Here are 10 comments that were worthy of fact-checks.
Analysis by Glenn Kessler
Special counsel Jack Smith “is a totally biased Thug who should be let loose on the Biden Documents hidden in Chinatown, and the 1,850 BOXES secretly stored in Delaware, which Biden REFUSES to give up. Biden is guilty of Obstruction, I am not!” (Truth Social)
Biden in 2012 provided 1,850 boxes of files from his decades as a senator to the University of Delaware. The university has said that public access has been prohibited until “they have been properly processed and archived,” unless Biden gives his express consent. The files will be opened “two years after the donor retires from public life.” Contrary to Trump’s claim, in February the FBI searched the university documents. “Agents initially did not find classified information, but the material is still being reviewed,” The Washington Post reported. After classified documents were found at a Biden office and one of his homes, a special counsel also was appointed to investigate.
“VERY UNFAIR VENUE, WITH SOME AREAS THAT VOTED 1% REPUBLICAN. THIS CASE SHOULD BE MOVED TO NEARBY STATEN ISLAND — WOULD BE A VERY FAIR AND SECURE LOCATION FOR THE TRIAL.” (Truth Social)
Though Trump spent most of his life in New York City, he did not fare well there during the 2016 and 2020 elections — though he improved his showing in every borough but Staten Island when he ran for reelection. “Biden won Manhattan by 84.5%-14.5%; the Bronx 82.5%-17%; Brooklyn 74%-25%; and Queens 69%-30%,” reported the Gotham Gazette. “While Biden improved on [Hillary] Clinton’s margin on Staten Island, Trump improved on his own margin from 2016 in all the other boroughs, particularly in the Bronx, where he had won only 9.6% in 2016; Brooklyn, where he won 17.9% in 2016, and Queens, where he won 22.1% in 2016.”
Trump won 15,000 fewer votes in Staten Island in 2020 compared to 2016, but he still beat Biden 61.6 percent to 37.6 percent. As the one reliably Republican part of New York City, it’s no secret why Trump would want the jury pool to come from there.
“ADDITIONALLY, THE HIGHLY PARTISAN JUDGE & HIS FAMILY ARE WELL KNOWN TRUMP HATERS. HE WAS AN UNFAIR DISASTER ON A PREVIOUS TRUMP RELATED CASE, WOULDN’T RECUSE, GAVE HORRIBLE JURY INSTRUCTIONS, & IMPOSSIBLE TO DEAL WITH DURING THE WITCH HUNT TRIAL.” (Truth Social)
“I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala D. Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign. And a lot of them.” (speech)
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan was randomly assigned the case and there is no evidence he is “highly partisan.” Trump attorney Joe Tacopina said this week he saw no evidence of partisanship. “Do I think the judge is biased? Of course not,” Tacopina said on ABC News’s “This Week.” “How could I subscribe to that when I’ve had no interactions with the judge that would lead me to believe he’s biased?”
Merchan oversaw a trial that found two Trump companies guilty of 17 felonies, including conspiracy, tax fraud and falsifying records. He fined the companies $1.6 million — the maximum allowed by law. Trump was not charged in the case and Merchan instructed the jury to remember they had promised to set aside any personal feelings about the former president. “Donald Trump and his family are not on trial here,” he told the jurors.
Merchan is also overseeing an upcoming criminal trial of former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon, who has pleaded not guilty to state charges of fraud and money-laundering while fundraising for a wall on the United States border with Mexico. Bannon had faced federal charges related to the fundraising but was pardoned by Trump in the final hours of his presidency.
Merchan’s first ruling in the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, on April 3, sided with Trump’s legal team. Media organizations had sought to broadcast Trump’s arraignment, but Merchan agreed with the legal team’s argument that it would have created a “circus-like atmosphere” and be “inconsistent with President Trump’s presumption of innocence.”
Merchan’s adult daughter has been active in left-leaning campaigns, including doing some work for Vice President Harris’s nascent presidential campaign, according to her LinkedIn profile, which was deleted after right-leaning websites drew attention to her work.
“WHY DOES FOX KEEP PUTTING ON BILL BARR. AS ATTORNEY GENERAL HE WAS A COMPLETE COWARD WHO WAS ABSOLUTELY PETRIFIED OF BEING IMPEACHED, WHICH THE DEMOCRATS THREATENED TO DO UNTIL HE BECAME THEIR VIRTUAL “SLAVE” AND REFUSED TO INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE THE MASSIVE ELECTION FRAUD THAT TOOK PLACE IN THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, BY FAR THE RADICAL LEFT’S GREATEST CONCERN.” (Truth Social)
Trump continues to make false claims that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud — all of which have been repeatedly debunked.
What is more interesting is his attack on former attorney general William P. Barr, who appears often on Fox News. Until Trump refused to concede the presidential election, Barr had been one of Trump’s biggest defenders from potential legal liability. When special counsel Robert S. Mueller III delivered his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, Barr cleared Trump of obstruction of justice charges, relying on a memo by political appointees that, when it was finally released in 2022, was derided as a defense lawyer’s brief. He also framed the discussion of the Mueller report by first releasing a misleading summary of its findings weeks before the full memo was released. None of that matters now to Trump, apparently.
“Alvin Bragg shut down New York City, brought in 38,000 NYPD officers, and will spend an estimated $200,000,000 of NYC funds, for a totally legal $130,000 NDA. On top of all that, the 9th Circuit Court just awarded me $122,000 — over the $500,000 already awarded, from Stormy ‘Horseface’ Daniels!” (Truth Social)
The New York police sent “a stand-ready order to about 35,000 officers,” according to the New York Times. No one know how much the case will cost to prosecute. Whether the nondisclosure agreement is “totally legal” will be litigated, but in 2018 the agreement was deemed nonenforceable. Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen in 2018 pleaded guilty to making an excessive campaign contribution for his role in the payments to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film star. Cohen “caused and made the payments described herein in order to influence the 2016 presidential election,” the Department of Justice’s news release said. “In so doing, he coordinated with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments.”
Daniels does owe Trump substantial sums for attorney’s fees awarded in connection with two failed defamation suits. Daniels has blamed the suits on her former lawyer Michael Avenatti, who’s now in prison for defrauding her. But a court in 2018 dismissed the suit and awarded Trump $292,052.33 in legal fees, to be paid by Daniels. She was hit with another $245,209.67 in fees for an unsuccessful appeal of the dismissal. (Avenatti missed filing deadlines that led to the amounts being increased.) This month, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals awarded another $121,972.56.
This adds up to about $660,000, but Trump also owes Daniels legal fees — $44,100 awarded in 2020 and $54,436 in 2022. That’s about $100,000, leaving Daniels at this point with a bill of about $550,000. “I will go to jail before I pay a penny,” Daniels tweeted in 2022.
“From the beginning, the Democrats spied in my campaign. Remember that they attacked me with an onslaught of fraudulent investigations. Russia, Russia, Russia. Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. Impeachment. Hoax number one. Impeachment.” (speech)
Ever since Trump in early 2017 falsely accused former president Barack Obama of spying on him, based on sketchy, anonymously sourced reports, he and his allies have sought to somehow make the claim come true. But no evidence has emerged to prove this claim.
The FBI, while investigating the Trump campaign for possible ties to Russia, in late 2016 obtained a secret court order to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. The FBI did not fully disclose to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court that some of the information stemmed from intelligence reports provided by Christopher Steele, a former British spy under contract for a research firm working on behalf of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. But Page was no longer associated with the campaign when the court order was approved.
Trump frequently says the investigations against him during his presidency were hoaxes. But that’s also false.
Mueller revealed significant criminal activity by some of Trump’s campaign advisers and by Russian individuals and entities. Mueller concluded that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from people associated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and then publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks, to sow discord in the United States, hurt Clinton and help Trump.
A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, issued in 2020 by the GOP-controlled Senate, called an associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort a “Russian intelligence officer” and said the increasing contact between them during the 2016 election constituted a “grave counterintelligence threat.”
As for Ukraine, Trump was impeached because in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump made about eight requests for help with some sort of investigation involving either former vice president Joe Biden or the Democrats. Just before the call took place, Trump personally intervened to halt the expected delivery of military aid. Testimony from congressional hearings established that Trump was mainly interested in Ukraine announcing an investigation — which he hoped could be weaponized for electoral purposes.
“Just recently the FBI, DOJ, in collusion with Twitter and Facebook in order not to say anything bad about the Hunter Biden laptop from Hell, which exposes the Biden family as criminals and which, according to the pollsters, would have made a 17 point difference in the election result.” (speech)
Twitter briefly blocked users from sharing the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop — a decision officials later said was a mistake. We’ve previously examined this poll, which was done by the Polling Company, a conservative pollster founded by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, on behalf of the Media Research Center. Our analysis found that the poll conveniently supported a line that Republicans are pushing — that a lack of media coverage related to the Hunter Biden laptop made a difference in the presidential election.
But when you dig into the results, which are swayed by aggressively misleading questions, it shows that for all but a tiny percentage of Biden voters, the story would not have made a difference — even if framed as a still-unproved scandal. The questions in the poll are similar to messages the Trump campaign used in the final weeks of the campaign — and it still fell short.
“Biden was vice president. He had absolutely no right to declassify as vice president.” (speech)
This is false. Under an executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2009, the vice president has original classification authority. Trump has claimed that he declassified the documents he kept. Biden, while vice president, had the right to declassify material if he had classified the material in the first place.
“NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration, which as of this date is a radical left troublemaking organization that red flags the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights as dangerous and triggering.” (speech)
Trump is exaggerating. NARA does not single out the founding documents. Instead, it offers a warning on every page of its online catalogue: “The Catalog and webpages contain some content that may be harmful or difficult to view. NARA’s records span the history of the United States, and it is our charge to preserve and make available these historical records. As a result, some of the materials presented here may reflect outdated, biased, offensive, and possibly violent views and opinions. In addition, some of the materials may relate to violent or graphic events and are preserved for their historical significance.”
“Our incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan, where we left behind American citizens, $85 billion worth of the best military equipment in the world.” (speech)
This is a highly inflated number for which we have previously awarded Trump Three Pinocchios. It’s not invented out of whole cloth. But it reflects all the money spent to train, equip and house the Afghan military and police — so weapons are just a part of that. U.S. military equipment was given to Afghan security forces over two decades. Tanks, vehicles, helicopters and other gear fell into the hands of the Taliban when the U.S.-trained force quickly collapsed. In 2022, CNN reported that a Defense Department report estimated that $7 billion of military equipment had been left behind.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
News
Library
Technology
Giải Trí
Portals
Tin Sốt
Home
