CNN Fabricate Wildly Dishonest Fact Check to Accuse Trump of Being Wildly Dishonest

- March 06, 2023


CNN published a fact check titled "Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC" which went so far as to call the former Presidents CPAC speech a "doozy" and one of his "most dishonest speeches".

Trump delivered the speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday, March 4tth, which was subsequently met with the accusations of falsehoods by CNN.


The National Guard and Minnesota

CNN claims that Trump is being "wildly dishonest" in stating "We saved Minneapolis. The thing is, we’re not supposed to do that. Because it’s up to the governor, the Democrat governor. They never want any help. They don’t mind – it’s almost like they don’t mind to have their cities and states destroyed. There’s something wrong with these people."

CNN: Facts First: This is a reversal of reality. Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.

CNN claims this is a reverse of reality, however, they completely omit what Trump is referring to and instead, they example a another Tweet that Trump sent which is irrelevant to the statement. 

It is NOT the threat to call in the national guard that Trump is insinuating "saved Minneapolis", rather it's the actions outlined in the later Tweet that he is referring to. Those actions included a phone call with Walz and the threat to "take over" if there is any difficulty. 


This is what Trump is claiming helped "save" the city. The "threat" Tweet CNN is referring to is irrelevant, never mentioned, and has nothing to do with what Trump said in his speech. 

This is a blatant false claim by CNN.


Trump’s Executive Order on Monuments

CNN claims Trump is being "wildly dishonest" in regards to an executive order he issued. Trumps said that "I passed and signed an executive order. Anybody that does that gets 10 years in jail, with no negotiation - it’s not ’10’ but it turns into three months." in reference to vandalizing federal statues and memorials.

CNN: Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. He did not create a mandatory 10-year sentence for people who damage monuments. In fact, his 2020 executive order did not mandate any increase in sentences.

First of all, Trump immediately corrected the "10 year" declaration and said it was not 10 years and that it turned into 3 months. What he is referring to is that after an arrest and a defendant is in federal custody, the government has 30 days to file and indictment, this can be extended to an additional 30 days, and finally, the trial may not be set in less than 30 days after the indictment is file. This equates to 90 days, or three months, exactly as Trump stated. 

Regardless of innocence, trial, or any judge at all, an arrest of this magnitude will indeed turn into 3 months, in fact, it can turn into as long as 4 and a half months because the limitation on when the trial must begin is 70 days, which results in an overall total of up to 130 days.

CNN additionally claims that "The executive order did nothing to force judges to impose a 10-year sentence."

Trump never claimed to create a "mandatory" sentence, nor did he claim to force a judge to do anything, and since this timeframe takes place pre-trial and pre-sentencing, CNN's statements are irrelevant, inaccurate, and pertaining to nothing Trump stated in his speech. 

CNN is wrong on several levels, it is their claim that is false. This is a false claim. 

Moreover, although irrelevant to this claim, CNN is also dead wrong on federal judges not being "forced" to give specific sentences. Unlike jurisdictional law where judges have the freedom to decide on punishments at their discretion, federal judges are required to sentence within specific guideline ranges that are administered by the United States Sentencing Commission under the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. They are only allowed to depart from these guidelines under certain conditions in atypical cases. 


Vandalism in Portland

CNN claims Trump was "wildly dishonest" for saying “How’s Portland doing? They don’t even have storefronts anymore. Everything’s two-by-four’s because they get burned down every week.”

CNN: Facts First: This is a major exaggeration. Portland obviously still has hundreds of active storefronts, though it has struggled with downtown commercial vacancies for various reasons, and some businesses are sometimes vandalized by protesters. Trump has for years exaggerated the extent of property damage from protest vandalism in Portland.

This was clearly a joke. 

This has no reasonable chance of being misinterpreted as anything other than a joke. 

While it is an accurate statement to say the description Trump gave was exaggerated, as most jokes are, it is a blatant false claim for CNN to insinuate that Trump offered it as "truth". That is simply and obviously false.


NATO Funding 

Trumps metaphoric statement - “And I told delinquent foreign nations – they were delinquent, they weren’t paying their bills – that if they wanted our protection, they had to pay up, and they had to pay up now.” - was again taken literally by CNN as it was multiple times when Trump told variations of the story while in office.

At the end of the day, NATO countries were not all paying what they agreed to target (2% of their GDP), Trump did complain, and contributions did increased. 

CNN's problem with the statement is that they took the literal definition of a bill and assumed it's what Trump meant just as they did when he was President. Trump, a businessman, was speaking metaphorically, and jokingly, in terms he's familiar with to portray a point.

We'll avoid quoting CNN's Media'Splaining of how a group of peers do not create liabilities for themselves as if any person in America is unaware of this. Even small children who play little league sports and join the girl-scouts are familiar with how this works.  

This is a ridiculous false claim.


NATO Cost

CNN suggests Trump was "wildly dishonest" in claiming the NATO building cost $3 billion and state the NATO building cost the organization $1.3 billion. 

However, most of the 1.3 billion budget was allocated in 1999, with the cost of inflation adjusted, the 2023 adjustment would be $2,334,459.78 and that number doesn't include the land value. $3 billion is not as exaggerated as CNN has suggested and may not be exaggerated at all if land value is factored in.


Nord Stream 2

CNN claims Trump's statement "nobody had ever heard of Nord Stream 2" is wildly dishonest.

CNN: Facts First: This is standard Trump hyperbole; it’s just not true that “nobody” had heard of Nord Stream 2 before he began discussing it. Nord Stream 2 was a regular subject of media, government and diplomatic discussion before Trump took office. In fact, Biden publicly criticized it as vice president in 2016. Trump may well have generated increased US awareness to the controversial project, but “nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along” isn’t true.

The expression "nobody had ever heard of it" is like "everybody has a cell phone these days". It's an expression that is not meant to be taken literally. 

That said, CNN is being disingenuous. The truth is that Nord Stream 2 was not a regular subject of the media at all. A quick search of news outlets archives shows only 40 mentions of it from 2009 to 2017 when Trump took office.  Compare that to the "MyPillow" guy whose had nearly 6,000 mentions for roughly the same length of time from 2017 to 2022.


Trump and Nord Stream 2

Once again, CNN takes a literal interpretation of a metaphoric Trump statement in that Trump "killed" the project and claims he didn't kill it. This is one of CNN's famous self-incriminating fact checks where they prove themselves wrong. 

CNN: While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around an estimated 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.

The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine early last year. The pipeline was damaged later in the year in what has been described as an act of sabotage.

Thus, according to CNN, he started the chain reaction (sanctions) that ultimately led to the projects demise, a.k.a. killed. 

CNN claims Trump did not kill the project, then explains how Trump killed the project. The former being an obvious false claim they prove themselves.


Biden and a Ukrainian Prosecutor

CNN states that "Trump claimed that Biden, as vice president, held back a billion dollars from Ukraine until the country fired a prosecutor who was “after Hunter” and a company that was paying him. Trump was referring to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, who sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings".

CNN: Facts First: This is baseless. There has never been any evidence that Hunter Biden was under investigation by the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who had been widely faulted by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and European countries for failing to investigate corruption. A former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor and a top anti-corruption activist have both said the Burisma-related investigation was dormant at the time Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin. 


Trump said Biden held back a billion dollars until they fired a prosecutor who was "after hunter" and a company that was paying him. He did not say the investigation was of any particular status as offered by CNN for no reason at all.

As far as there "never" being any evidence. John Solomon reported for The Hill that the general prosecutor’s official file for the Burisma probe shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer, and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money and that Viktor Shokin said that before he was fired as general prosecutor, he had made "specific plans" for the investigation that "included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden."

This is among several pieces of evidence that contradict CNN's claim. This evidence is also documented with the House of Representatives in their ongoing investigation into the matter. 

This is a false claim by CNN.


Democrats and elections

CNN claims Trump is lying when he says Democrats are only good at “disinformation” and “cheating on elections.”

CNN: Facts First: This is nonsense. There is just no basis for a broad claim that Democrats are election cheaters. Election fraud and voter fraud are exceedingly rare in US elections, though such crimes are occasionally committed by officials and supporters of both parties. 

First, this is a relative opinion stated by Trump and as such, it is impossible to state that it is or isn't true or not because it is relative. Secondly, Trump said that this is what Democrats were "good" at, which again, is relative opinion, but CNN argues that there is no evidence that Democrats are cheaters and then state that both parties are cheaters. The point is that Trump merely said that they were "good" at it.

Regardless, a relative opinion is an opinion and one which asserts a relative condition which cannot be argued because it's relative. One may think Democrats are excellent cheaters while a habitual cheater may consider Democrats to be terrible at it. It's relative.. 

  

The Border Wall

CNN claims Trump was "wildly dishonest" in saying he "built hundreds of miles of wall and completed a task as promised.".

CNN: Facts First: It’s not true that Trump “completed” the border wall. According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not been completed. 

As CNN previously states, Trump said "several hundred miles" of border wall. His campaign promise was to build a wall with no definition of the entirety or length in miles that would constitute a completion other than "a wall". He did in fact build several walls equating to several hundred miles as he said. 

This is a false claim that CNN evidenced by CNN's own words.

 

Crime and Civil Unrest

CNN and Daniel Dale offered an excerpt from Trump's speech where Trump said the words "killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan".

CNN goes back over 30 years in history to find a year where more murders occurred despite the lack of  clarification of what "killings" encapsulated, they just assumed murder is the only statistic falls under the category.

CNN: Facts First: It isn’t even close to true that Manhattan is experiencing a number of killings that nobody has ever seen. The region classified by the New York Police Department as Manhattan North had 43 reported murders in 2022; that region had 379 reported murders in 1990 and 306 murders in 1993. The Manhattan South region had 35 reported murders in 2022 versus 124 reported murders in 1990 and 86 murders in 1993. New York City as a whole is also nowhere near record homicide levels; the city had 438 reported murders in 2022 versus 2,262 in 1990 and 1,927 in 1993.

Manhattan North had just eight reported murders this year through February 19, while Manhattan South had one. The city as a whole had 49 reported murders.

According to their statistic more murders occurred in 1990 than in recent years. Which is correct. However, if you just look at modern history over the past decade and a half, Trump is correct, murder is at a decade's long high and on pace to exceed 2022 in 2023. 

Moreover, nobody said anything about murder being the exclusive definition of "killings". 

CNN does not take into consideration suicide, for which there were 131 and 126 in New York county in 2020 and 2021 respectively. They do not take into account COVID-19 which killed 20,330, 9879, and 6738 in 2020, 2021, and 2022 respectively. When those addition numbers are considered, recent years are astronomically higher than in the past. 

Trump did not say anything was record-breaking as implied by CNN and the expression "like nobody's ever seen" is a common term of emphasis like saying "everybody has a cell phone" which doesn't really mean that no other human is without a cell phone. Here is exactly what Trump said in full context.

Trump: The racist Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who is presiding over one of the most dangerous and violent cities in the United States, you have to see this, the United States where killings are taking place at a number like nobody's ever seen right in Manhattan and he's doing nothing about it, nothing whatsoever. No cash bail for people that just kill people, knife them in the back, hit him over the head with a baseball bat, push him into Subways when the train is right there.

If the literal definition of "like nobody's seen" is used and timeframe is spanned over 30 years, CNN is technically accurate on the data. Technically, Manhattan has never seen an annual aggregate of 78 murders, the closes would be in 2003 with 79, so from a technical and literal perspective, Trump was accurate as well.    

Regardless, we'll call this a draw and let it slide. 


Summary

CNN claims Trump was wildly dishonest during his CPAC speech, but it is CNN who appears to be "wildly dishonest" in the false fact checks they make equally 50% or more of the total checks in the article.  The final totals were 9 false claims, and 1 accurate claim checked. Additionally they made 3 other accurate claims not listed. There were 7 claims that were questionable, however, could not be checked due to time constraints.  

Claim: "Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC"

Fact Check Verdict:   9 FALSE CLAIMS   4 ACCURATE   7 UNCHECKED   1 DRAW 

Claimant:  Daniel Dale

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