Democracy Dies in Darkness
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| The truth behind the rhetoric |
Magic numbers from DHS on criminals in the migrant caravan
The Department of Homeland Security claims there are as many as 500 people with criminal records along the same route as the migrant caravan traveling from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border. How do they know? That’s a great question that they can’t answer at all.
Not only has the total magically evolved — first it was 300, then DHS said in response to our questions that 200 more had been identified — the way they describe this figure is so vague it could include people who are not part of the caravan and are just passing through Mexico on their own. It wouldn’t be the first time the administration comes up with fishy statistics to back up some eye-popping claim from President Trump.
“We’re getting a lot of heat because, I was saying, there were some bad people in that caravan. Right? So we checked, 300 people," Trump said at a recent rally. At another rally, he said, “They gave you 300 names yesterday.”
Actually, there were no names. There’s just a vague news release issued Nov. 1 titled “Myth vs. Fact: Caravan.” We gave it Three Pinocchios.
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Sarah Sanders smears CNN reporter with a video doctored by conspiracy theorists
The White House press secretary never had a stellar track record of telling the truth, but this is a new low.
Here’s a play-by-play: Trump holds a news conference and CNN’s Jim Acosta asks his usual, combative questions. Trump calls him a “rude, terrible” person. A female White House intern tries once to take Acosta’s microphone; he holds onto it. The intern tries again, forcefully reaching and tugging at the mic, but Acosta holds onto it and uses his free arm to block her reach. Acosta says, “Pardon me, ma’am," and keeps questioning Trump.
An indignant Sanders later announced that Acosta’s press pass had been yanked because the White House would “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” Gaslighting the public about an encounter everyone could see on video is nothing new for the Trump White House.
But Sanders tweeted out a video that made Acosta look much worse — since it appears to have been edited for dramatic effect. A close look at the video shows someone sped up Acosta's arm movement and appears to have inserted duplicated frames at the moment of contact with the intern, which made Acosta’s parry seem much more like a karate chop. The video was first shared by Paul Joseph Watson, known for his conspiracy-theory videos on the far-right website Infowars. (Watson claims he made the video out of a GIF, which could achieve the same effect as duplicating frames.)
There’s a real lesson for the public in this clumsy attempt by Sanders at Orwellian propaganda. As our Washington Post colleague Drew Harwell wrote, it highlights “how video content — long seen as an unassailable verification tool for truth and confirmation — has become as vulnerable to political distortion as anything else.” Viewer beware.
We’re always looking for fact-check suggestions.
Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio roundup.
— Salvador Rizzo
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