In a two-hour address to the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 2, President Donald Trump made questionable and false claims about the fight against ISIS, tariffs and African American income. He also repeated a bevy of claims we’ve debunked before.
In this fact-checking segment, CNN’s Jake Tapper reviews Vice President Mike Pence’s claim that “ISIS has been defeated.”
On the same day ISIS claimed responsibility for a deadly attack against U.S. service members in Syria, Vice President Mike Pence declared that ISIS “has been defeated.” It is true that the U.S. and its allies have retaken virtually all of the land ISIS controlled in Iraq and Syria, but experts say the group still has tens of thousands of fighters and remains dangerous.
A group calling itself DefendArizona attacks Senate candidate Kelli Ward of Arizona in a TV ad filled with images of terrorists and misstatements of facts.
Q: Did an ISIS leader have former President Obama on speed dial?
A: No. That story was first shared on a website that calls its work satire.
President Trump said nearly all of the land once controlled by ISIS in Syria and Iraq has been retaken and “it all took place since our election.” But even the State Department’s senior envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition said in December that half of the ISIS caliphate was recaptured under Trump’s leadership.
Q: Were two Democratic congressmen arrested for having ties to the Islamic State?
A: No. The two congressmen named in a fake news story don’t exist.
The president made misleading boasts about his record on the economy and foreign issues.
Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, botched two facts when speaking on Fox News about a released Guantanamo Bay detainee responsible for a recent suicide bombing in Iraq.
President Trump claimed ISIS would not exist if the U.S. “kept the oil when we got out” of Iraq. In fact, ISIS largely has been funded through extortion, robbery, taxes and Syrian oil, according to government reports and terrorism financing experts.