Fact Check: Trump trashes Oval Office interview with false claims

Washington
CNN
—

President Donald Trump filled 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 to Fox News host and ardent supporter Sean Hannity in the Oval Office, Trump made well-known inaccurate claims related to the 2020 and 2024 elections, immigration and the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021 — plus a highly questionable new statement that the assaults on police officers that day, some of them vicious, were “very minor incidents.”

Here’s a fact-check of 11 of his remarks.

January 6. the committee and records: Trump repeated his false claim that the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol “deleted and destroyed all the information they gathered,” and later in the interview repeated that the committee “destroyed all the work that took place over two year.”

Trump’s claim that “all” information gathered by the committee was deleted is not even close to true. While there has been a long-standing dispute between Republicans and Democrats over the status of certain committee documents that Republicans said should have been archived and that Democratic Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson argued did not need to be archived — such as because, he said, they turned out not to be useful to the Committee’s investigation – the Committee preserved a large body of evidence.

Like FactCheck.org reportedthe committee released not only one final report that was more than 800 pagesbut also prints of interviews with more than 140 witnesses – and, according to Thompsoncommittee staff worked with the National Archives and Records Administration and other government agencies “to prepare the select committee’s more than 1 million records for publication and filing.”

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 troops ahead of Jan. 6, 2021, explaining that he was referring to footage taken by Pelosi’s daughter.

That’s not what the footage shows, and Pelosi never admitted she turned down a Trump offer of 10,000 troops. In fact, she has consistently said that she never received such an offer – and she would not have had the power to reject the offer even if it had been made to her, since it is the President, not the Speaker of the House, who heads the District of Columbia National Guard.

In the video recorded by Pelosi’s filmmaker daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, on January 6 and later achieved by House RepublicansWHO posted a 42-second snippet On social media in June, Pelosi was shown expressing frustration with inadequate security at the Capitol, at one point saying, “I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.” But the 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 wasn’t the National Guard there to begin with?”

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

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 did not say how he defined the “youth vote” — his transition team did not 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 about who different subgroups of voters supported in a presidential election. But there is polling — and several high-quality surveys found that Trump did not win the youth vote in 2024, let alone by 36 points, although it is true that he did better among young voters than he did in the 2020 election. According to CNN’s exit poll data Vice President Kamala Harris beat Trump 54% to 43% among voters aged 18-24, 53% to 45% among voters in aged 25-29, and 51% to 45% among voters aged 30-39.

Like any poll, exit polls are estimates of how a particular group voted, so there is a risk of error. But that one Associated Press’ VoteCast estimatescollected using a different method, also found Harris winning with young voters. Although Harris’ actual margins were smaller than those found by either CNN or the Associated Press, there is simply no evidence that Trump dominated Harris with young voters as he claimed.

CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this post.

Trump’s 2020 total vote tally: Trump said “it was reported that I got almost 75 million votes” in the 2020 election he lost, then falsely claimed this was not an accurate number: “It was their number. It wasn’t the numbers, it was their number.” This is nonsense; the votes were counted and reported accurately, and Trump’s 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 protested 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 perfectly legitimate.

Democrats and Elections: Describing the Biden administration as election cheats, Trump said “the only thing they’re really good at is cheating” and that “anyone who cheats this much and this well is not stupid.” This is nonsense. American elections are free and safe; Biden beat Trump in a 2020 free and fair election held while Trump was president, and Trump beat then-Vice President Kamala Harris in a 2024 free and fair election held while Biden was president.

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 number is incorrect. Through December, the country hadbusy under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during the Biden administration, including millions who were quickly expelled from the country; even adding so-called fugitives who avoided detection,estimatedof the House Republicans as being about 2.2 million, there is no way the total is “21 million.”

Migration, prisons and psychiatric institutions: Trump repeated his frequent unsubstantiated claim that foreign countries have “emptied their prisons” to somehow bring prisoners into the United States; he singled out Venezuela and repeated later in the interview that “prisons from all over the world have been emptied 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 United States 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 is also wrong. The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024 from approx 10.77 million peopleto approx 10.99 million people according to the World Prison Population List prepared by experts in Great Britain.

“I do a daily news search to see what is going on in prisons around the world and I have seen absolutely no evidence of any country emptying its prisons and sending them all to the United States.” Helen Fairco-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.

“Congo”, prisons and migration: Trump repeated his baseless claim that “Congo” has “emptied their prisons in the United States.” Experts from 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 confirm, and the government of each of those countries has told CNN the claims are baseless .

Adam Schiff and Trump’s Ukraine Controversy: Trump repeated a false story he has told for years about something that happened during the impeachment trial related to 2019 phone calls 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 of Representatives and 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 sometimes make tapes.”

In reality, no tape of Trump’s call with Zelensky was ever released or revealed; more than five years later there is no known American recordingof the conversation. What the Trump White House released before Schiff made the comments Trump criticized here in 2019 was a rough written transcript of the call — and it was this very rough transcript that Schiff used as the foundation for an exaggerated, sometimes misleading rendering of what Trump allegedly said during the call.

In other words, there is no basis for Trump’s narrative that Schiff made up what Trump allegedly told Zelensky and then was embarrassed by a subsequent disclosure of what Trump actually said; the revelation of what Trump actually said happened first.

Trump tax cuts: Trump repeated his famously false claim that “we got the biggest tax cut in history” during his first term as president. Expert analysis has found that his 2017 tax cut bill was not the largest in American history, either as a percentage of gross domestic product or in inflation-adjusted dollars.