Fact check: Trump litters Oval Office interview with false claims

Washington (CNN) — President Donald Trump littered a Wednesday interview on Fox News with many of the same false claims he made earlier in his first three days back in the White House.

Speaking with Fox News host and ardent supporter Sean Hannity in the Oval Office, Trump delivered familiar inaccurate assertions related to the 2020 and 2024 elections, immigration and the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021 – plus a highly dubious new declaration that the assaults of police officers that day, some of them vicious, were “very minor incidents.”

Here is a fact check of 11 of his remarks.

The Capitol riot of January 6, 2021

The January 6 committee and records: Trump repeated his false claim that the House select committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol “deleted and destroyed all of the information that they collected,” reiterating later in the interview that the committee “destroyed all of the work that took place over two years.”

Trump’s claim that “all” information collected by the committee was deleted is not even close to true. While there has been a long-running dispute between Republicans and Democrats over the status of certain committee records that Republicans said should have been archived and that Democratic committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson argued did not have to be archived – such as because, he said, they didn’t prove useful to the committee’s investigation – the committee preserved a large volume of evidence.

As FactCheck.org reported, the committee released not only a final report that was more than 800 pages long, but also transcripts of interviews with more than 140 witnesses – and, according to Thompson, the committee’s staff worked with the National Archives and Records Administration and other government bodies “in preparing the Select Committee’s more than 1 million records for publication and archiving.”

Nancy Pelosi and January 6: Trump repeated his false claim that former House speaker Nancy Pelosi is “on tape admitting” that Trump had offered her 10,000 soldiers in advance of January 6, 2021, explaining that he was referring to footage taken by Pelosi’s daughter.

That’s not what the footage shows, and Pelosi never made any admission that she rejected a Trump offer of 10,000 troops. In fact, she has consistently said she never received such an offer – and she wouldn’t have had the power to reject the offer even if it had been made to her, since it is the president, not the House speaker, who commands the District of Columbia National Guard.

In the video recorded by Pelosi’s filmmaker daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, on January 6 and later obtained by House Republicans, who posted a 42-second snippet on social media in June, Pelosi was shown expressing frustration at the inadequate security at the Capitol, and she said at one point, “I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.” But that general statement is clearly not a specific admission that she had rejected a Trump offer of 10,000 troops.

In fact, another part of the video appears to undermine Trump’s claim that she was the person who turned down the National Guard. She said, “Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?”

After Trump began referencing this video in June, Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said in an email to CNN: “Numerous independent fact-checkers have confirmed again and again that Speaker Pelosi did not plan her own assassination on January 6th. Cherry-picked, out-of-context clips do not change the fact that the Speaker of the House is not in charge of the security of the Capitol Complex — on January 6th or any other day of the week.”

Elections

The youth vote in 2024: Trump repeated a false claim he has made repeatedly this week about his supposed performance with young voters in the 2024 election, this time declaring “I won youth by 36 points.”

He didn’t say how he was defining “the youth vote” — his transition team didn’t respond to CNN’s request for clarification earlier this week — but there is no basis for his claim by any reasonable definition.

Because votes in US elections are cast by secret ballot, there is no official source of information on who different subgroups of voters supported in any presidential election. But there is polling – and multiple high-quality surveys found that Trump did not win the youth vote in 2024, let alone by 36 points, even though it is true that he did better among young voters than he did in the 2020 election. According to CNN exit poll data, Vice President Kamala Harris beat Trump 54% to 43% among voters ages 18-24, 53% to 45% among voters ages 25-29, and 51% to 45% among voters ages 30-39.

Like every poll, exit polls are estimates of how a particular group voted, so there is the potential for error. But the Associated Press’ VoteCast estimates, collected using a different methodology, also found Harris prevailed with young voters. Even if Harris’ actual margins were smaller than those found by either CNN or the Associated Press, there is simply no sign that Trump dominated Harris with young voters as he claimed.

CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this item.

Trump’s vote total in 2020: Trump said “it was reported that I got almost 75 million votes” in the 2020 election he lost, then falsely claimed that this was not an accurate figure: “That was their numbers. That wasn’t the numbers, it was their numbers.” This is nonsense; the votes were counted and reported accurately, and Trump’s vote total – about 74.2 million – is his actual total.

The legitimacy of the 2020 election: Trump defended his supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, claiming, “They knew the election was rigged and they were protesting the vote.” Leaving aside Trump’s description of the violent riot as a mere protest, his description of the election is false – his usual long-debunked lie; Trump’s loss to Joe Biden was entirely legitimate.

Democrats and elections: Trump described the Biden administration as election cheaters, saying that “the only thing they’re good at, really, is cheating” and that “anybody that cheats that much and that well is not stupid.” This is nonsense. US elections are free and secure; Biden beat Trump in a free and fair 2020 election held while Trump was president, and Trump beat then-Vice President Kamala Harris in a free and fair 2024 election held while Biden was president.

Immigration

The number of migrants under Biden: Trump said he believes the number of migrants who have entered the country under President Joe Biden is “21 million.” This figure is incorrect. Through December, the country had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during the Biden administration, including millions who were rapidly expelled from the country; even adding in so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2.2 million, there’s no way the total is “21 million.”

Migration, prisons and mental institutions: Trump repeated his frequent unsubstantiated claim that foreign countries have “emptied their jails” to somehow bring prisoners into the United States; he singled out Venezuela, then, later in the interview, repeated that “prisons from all over the world have been emptied out into our country.”

There is no evidence for Trump’s claims, which Trump’s own presidential campaign was unable to corroborate, and experts on Venezuela and the global prison situation have said they have seen no such evidence.

“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying its prisons or mental health institutions to send them outside the country, in other words, to the U.S. or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, an independent organization that tracks violence in the country, said in an email to CNN in June, after Trump made similar claims.

Trump has sometimes tried to support the claims by making another claim that the global prison population is down. But that’s wrong, too. The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List compiled by experts in the United Kingdom.

“I do a daily news search to see what’s going on in prisons around the world and have seen absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending them all to the US,” Helen Fair, co-author of the prison population list and research fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London, said in June, when Trump made a similar claim.

“The Congo,” prisons and migration: Trump repeated his baseless claim that “the Congo” has “emptied their prisons out into the United States.” Experts on both the Democratic Republic of Congo and the neighboring Republic of Congo have told CNN there is no evidence for these claims, which Trump’s own presidential campaign was unable to corroborate, and the government of each of these countries has told CNN that the claims are baseless.

Miscellaneous

Adam Schiff and Trump’s Ukraine controversy: Trump reprised a false story he has told for years about something that happened during the impeachment saga related to the 2019 phone call in which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden.

Trump claimed that Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who was then a member of the House and is now a member of the Senate, “made up the story,” but then, “after he made it up, they found out that there was a tape of the conversation made by – you know, I guess, the State Department, I don’t know, when you make calls they make tapes sometimes.”

In reality, no tape of Trump’s call with Zelensky was ever released or revealed; more than five years later, there is no known US recording of the conversation. What Trump’s White House released, before Schiff made the 2019 comments Trump was criticizing here, was a rough written transcript of the call – and it was this very rough transcript that Schiff used as the basis for an exaggerated, sometimes misleading rendition of what Trump supposedly said on the call.

In other words, there is no basis for Trump’s tale of Schiff making up what Trump supposedly told Zelensky and then being embarrassed by a subsequent disclosure of what Trump actually said; the disclosure of what Trump actually said happened first.

The Trump tax cuts: Trump repeated his familiar false claim that “we got the largest tax cut in history” during his first presidency. Expert analyses have found that his 2017 tax cut law was not the largest in US history, either in percentage of gross domestic product or in inflation-adjusted dollars.

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