Posted on

Trump lies about Obama trying to meet Kim Jung Un

In a news conference, Trump said, “President Obama wanted to meet, and Chairman Kim would not meet him,” the President said. “The Obama administration was begging for a meeting. They were begging for meetings constantly, and Chairman Kim would not meet with him.”

“Trump is lying,” tweeted Ben Rhodes, who served as Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications during the Obama administration. “I was there for all eight years. Obama never sought a meeting with Kim Jong Un. Foreign policy isn’t reality television it’s reality.”

Rhodes later further criticized Trump, calling his foreign policy a “failure.” “Photo ops don’t get rid of nuclear weapons, carefully negotiated agreements do,” the former official wrote.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also adamantly denied Trump’s statements. “I don’t know where he’s getting that,” Clapper said during a Sunday appearance on CNN. “In all the deliberations I participated in on North Korea during the Obama administration I can recall no instance whatever where President Obama ever indicated any interest whatsoever in meeting with Chairman Kim.”

Posted on

Update on Trump’s lie about Obama wiretapping Trump Tower – DOJ says no evidence

On Friday, lawyers for the Department of Justice (DOJ) wrote that the department has no records supporting President Trump’s claim that former President Barack Obama ordered wiretaps of Trump Tower.

“Both [the Federal Bureau of Investigation] and [National Security Division] confirm that they have no records related to wiretaps as described by the March 4, 2017 tweets,” the DOJ said in the filing, referring to Mr. Trump’s tweets.

Both the FBI and the Justice Department have now sided with former FBI director James Comey, who testified to Congress that he knew of no evidence that Obama ordered wiretapping at Mr. Trump’s namesake property in Manhattan.

In March, after watching a Fox News report, Trump tweeted, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

In another tweet, the president called Mr. Obama “low” and “sick.”

But it was just another Trump Lie.

Posted on

Trump lies about Guantanamo prisoner releases while Spicer adds extra lies

Another day, another outlandish Trump lie. This time compounded by White House Press Secretary Spicer piling it on with additional lies.

On Monday, President Donald Trump tweeted: “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!”

In fact, the overwhelming majority of those men were actually released under President George W. Bush, not by Barack Obama. Only eight or nine of those “confirmed” to be engaged in terrorist activities transferred out under President Barack Obama, according to recent intelligence reports.

Spicer then defended Bush  by telling reporters, “Just to be clear: There’s a big difference: under the Bush administration, most of those were court-ordered.”

But Spicer’s assertion that “most” or “many” of the Bush-era releases were court-ordered is a lie, according to lawyers involved in such cases and to Obama administration officials.

“That’s loony. …That’s just flat-out not true,” said Sabin Willett, a prominent lawyer for Guantanamo detainees. “You can count on one hand, and not even use all your fingers, the number of people a district court ordered released where that was not reversed on appeal.”

In fact, no more than three of the 532 Guantanamo detainees transferred out under Bush were moved because they won a court challenge, legal experts said.

“The truth is that Sean Spicer doesn’t know what he is talking about and doesn’t care enough to take the time to find out,” said former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig, who was deeply involved in Obama’s early Guantanamo policy.

And Trump tweets on.

Posted on

FBI Director Comey Demands Justice Department Reject Trump’s Wiretapping Lie

In an astonishing showdown with Trump, FBI Directory Comey has said that Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of wiretapping by President Obama are simply not true and is demanding the Justice Department reject such claims.

In a tweet storm this weekend, Trump made malicious accusations against Obama, but provided no evidence to back it up.

Comey made the request on Saturday after Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter. He been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Trump’s truthfulness.

A spokesman for Obama and his former aides have called the accusation by Mr. Trump completely false, saying that Obama never ordered any wiretapping of a United States citizen.

“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” Kevin Lewis, Obama’s spokesman, said in a statement on Saturday.

Trump’s demand for a congressional investigation appears to be based on unproven claims by Breitbart News and conservative talk radio hosts that secret warrants were issued authorizing the tapping of the phones of Trump and his aides at Trump Tower in New York.

ref: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/us/politics/trump-seeks-inquiry-into-allegations-that-obama-tapped-his-phones.html

Posted on

Trump falsely accuses Obama of wiretapping him, backfiring on himself

I’ve been meaning to catch up on the plethora of lies coming out of Trump and his administration, but this latest news tipped the scale and forces an immediate post. We can come back to a more detailed list of recent lies later. They are frankly taking a lot of time to list!

Trump, in a storm of tweets, has accused Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower phones before he left office.

Not only has Obama and representatives strongly denied this, the president doesn’t have the authority to order wire taps. If the FBI was wire-tapping, it would have been done under court order which means there is probably cause for illegal activities going on. Trump is essentially pointing a loaded gun at himself. It’s completely irrational.

Trump offered no proof for his claims. ABC News has asked the White House for comment but has yet to receive a response.

The president’s tweets came after an article ran Friday on the right-wing news site Breitbart claiming that the Obama administration obtained authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign.

Later in the morning, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, used Twitter to challenge Trump’s claims.

“No president can order a wiretap,” Rhodes, who continues to serve as a foreign-policy adviser to Obama post-presidency, said in one tweet. “Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you.”

In response to Trump’s suggestion that a good lawyer could make the case that Obama tapped his phones, Rhodes tweeted, “No. They couldn’t. Only a liar could do that.”

Read more at: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-accuses-obama-wiretapping-phones-trump-tower/story?id=45905776

Posted on

USA Today fact checks Trump’s lies at his press conference

More falsehoods from Donald Trump today. It’s getting hard to keep track of all his lies, but we will try.

USA Today reports that in his first press conference since July, President-elect Donald Trump repeated false and misleading claims on jobs, health care and his tax returns.

• Trump falsely claimed that there are “96 million really wanting a job and they can’t get [one].” There are roughly 96 million people not in the labor force, but that includes retirees, students and others who don’t want jobs. Only 5.5 million of them want work.

• Trump said that “you learn very little” from a tax return. But experts told us there’s plenty of information to be gleaned from tax returns — such as potential conflicts of interest, charitable giving habits and effective tax rates.

• Trump claimed that “some states” have seen health insurance coverage on the Affordable Care Act exchanges increase by 100%. Only Arizona has an average increase that high, and 84% with marketplace coverage in 2016 received tax credits to purchase insurance.

• Trump continues to oversimplify the rise of the Islamic State by blaming President Obama for “leaving at the wrong time” from Iraq. President George W. Bush set the withdrawal date. More important, there were numerous factors in the rise of the terrorist group.

• Trump claimed that “nobody even talked about it” when hacked emails showed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign got debate questions in advance. Actually, there was plenty of press coverage when it was revealed that former CNN contributor Donna Brazile shared questions with Clinton’s campaign.

For more details, see http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/11/fact-check-donald-trump-press-conference/96449610/