Linda Qiu

President Donald Trump’s attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., have been the centerpiece of his political strategy in recent days, a tactic that led his supporters at a raucous rally in North Carolina on Wednesday to erupt into chants of “send her back.”

Omar is one of four Democratic members of Congress — all women of color — who have come in for intense criticism from Trump. His particular focus on Omar, who was born in Somalia and immigrated to the United States as a refugee, followed months of comments from him casting her as “ungrateful” and “unpatriotic.”

On Wednesday, Trump drew attention to rumors that Omar had married her brother. The president then dove into a litany of accusations about the congresswoman. Some, like his repeated claims that Omar had praised al-Qaida, were flatly false. Others, like his description of her citing a death toll in an infamous battle as “slander” against U.S. troops, were his subjective characterizations of her remarks.

WhatTrump Said

“Well, there is a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it.”— in remarks to reporters Wednesday

— Rumors that Omar had married her brother have been circulating since 2016, when she ran for state representative in Minnesota. No proof has emerged substantiating these claims.

In 2016, Omar released a statement denying the rumors as “absolutely false and ridiculous” and providing a timeline of her marital history.

According to that timeline, she applied for a marriage license with Ahmed Hirsi in 2002, but never finalized the application. In 2008, they ended their relationship “in our faith tradition.”

State records show that in 2009, Omar legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who she said was a British citizen. They obtained a religious divorce in 2011, according to her timeline, and Elmi returned to England.

She then reconciled with Hirsi and married him legally in January 2018, a month after she legally divorced from Elmi, according to The Associated Press. She and Hirsi have three children.

Last month, Minnesota’s campaign finance board found that Omar filed joint tax returns in 2014 and 2015 with Hirsi while she was still legally married to Elmi. She agreed to pay a fine and back taxes as a result of the amendments to her returns those years.

In 2016, a blog called PowerLine cited a now-deleted post on an internet forum that claimed Elmi is Omar’s brother.

In 2018, The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Omar showed a reporter cellphone images of documents from her family’s entry into the United States in 1995. They listed her father and siblings by order of birth, with Omar listed as the youngest of seven children. Elmi’s name did not appear in the documents. According to the couple’s marriage certificate, he is also three years younger than Omar, whose mother died when she was 2 years old.

“So Rep. Omar blamed the United States for the terrorist attacks on our country, saying that terrorism is a reaction to our involvement in other people’s affairs.”— at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday

— Trump was likely referring to comments Omar made in a 2013 interview with a local television program.

“Nobody wants to face how the actions of the other people that are involved in the world have contributed to the rise of the radicalization and the rise of terrorist acts,” she said.

Omar’s suggestion that there are links between foreign intervention and terrorism is not uncommon among scholars and world leaders and not unlike remarks from Trump himself.

“Our current strategy of nation-building and regime change is a proven, absolute failure,” Trump said in an August 2016 speech in Ohio. “We have created the vacuums that allow terrorism to grow and thrive.”

“She smeared U.S. service members involved in Black Hawk Down, in other words, she slandered the brave Americans who were trying to keep peace in Somalia.”

— “Black Hawk Down” refers to a 17-hour firefight on Oct. 3, 1993, that broke out between U.S. forces and Somali militiamen in Mogadishu during the country’s civil war. Omar and her family fled Somalia during that war.

In 2017, Omar wrote, “thousands of Somalis killed by American forces that day!”

Her figure is a matter of dispute, but whether her comment amounted to a “smear” or “slander” is a matter of opinion.

U.S. forces deployed to Somalia in 1992 as part of a humanitarian effort. Their mission culminated the next year when forces aligned with warlord Muhammad Farah Aideed shot down two Black Hawk helicopters in a battle in which 18 Americans were killed and 75 wounded. The events were depicted in the book “Black Hawk Down” by journalist Mark Bowden and a film of the same name.

The army has cited estimates of between 500 and 1,700 Somali casualties. Bowden reported that most death toll estimates ranged from 300 to 500 Somalis. Robert Oakley, ambassador to Somalia under President George H.W. Bush, said in a 1998 interview that he believed between 1,500 and 2,000 Somalis were killed and wounded.

WhatTrump Said

“She pleaded for compassion for ISIS recruits attempting to join the terrorist organization.”

— Omar wrote a letter to a federal judge asking for leniency in sentencing on behalf of nine Somali-American men, who were found guilty or pleaded guilty in 2016 to charges that they tried to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State.

“I bring to your attention the ramifications of sentencing young men who made a consequential mistake to decades in federal prison. Incarcerating 20-year-old men for 30 or 40 years, is essentially a life sentence,” Omar wrote in November 2016. “Such punitive measures not only lack efficacy they inevitability create an environment in which extremism can flourish, aligning with the presupposition of a terrorist recruitment: ‘Americans do not accept you and continue to trivialize your value. Instead of being a nobody, be a martyr.’”

“The best deterrent to fanaticism is a system of compassion,” the letter continued.

“Omar laughed that Americans speak of al-Qaida in a menacing tone and remarked that you don’t say America with this intensity, you say al-Qaida. It makes you proud. Al-Qaida makes you proud. You don’t speak that way about America.”

— Trump distorted Omar’s remarks. In that 2013 local news interview, Omar was discussing the rhetoric around terrorism. When the host noted that “we keep the Arabic names” of terrorist groups, she responded with an anecdote about a college professor who would say the names with “intensity, so it must mean or bold a bigger meaning.”

Nowhere in the interview does she say that “al-Qaida makes you proud.”

“And at a press conference just this week when asked whether she supported al-Qaida … she refused to answer, she didn’t want to give an answer to that question.”

— Asked to respond to Trump’s false claims about her praising terrorists, Omar said she would not “dignify it with an answer.”

She also added that she did not expect white community members to respond to questions about whether they “love” a white supremacist or a white man involved in a mass shooting, “so I think it is beyond time, it is beyond time to ask Muslims to condemn terrorists. We are no longer going to allow the dignification of such a ridiculous statement.”

“Omar blamed the United States for the crisis in Venezuela.”

— In May, she appeared on an episode of “Democracy Now!” after a segment featuring an economist who estimated that 40,000 Venezuelans died from 2017 to 2018 as a result of sanctions imposed by the United States. (Others have criticized those findings.)

Omar agreed with the economist, adding, “A lot of the policies that we have put in place has kind of helped lead the devastation in Venezuela. And we’ve sort of set the stage for where we’re arriving today. This particular bullying and the use of sanctions to eventually intervene and make regime change really does not help the people of countries like Venezuela, and it certainly does not help and is not in the interest of the United States.”

“And she looks down with contempt on the hard-working Americans, saying that ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country.”

— In a May interview with a podcast from The Nation, Omar was asked about her experience being elected as a state representative in 2016 just days after Trump held a rally in Minnesota where he criticized the vetting process for Somali refugees and vowed to slow it down.

John Nichols, host of the podcast, commented that Omar might seize the “teaching moments” generated by the chasm between her personal story and Trump’s rhetoric.

“I think people have a misconception about refugees and, and the process they go through to come to the United States,” Omar responded.

As an example, she said, a Minnesota candidate for governor had vowed to stop the refugee resettlement program, prompting her to issue a Twitter post explaining how the process works.

“And so it is not that they might not be knowledgeable about this, but they use it as a tool to stir up hate and division,” she continued. “And ignorance really is pervasive in many parts of, of this country. And as someone who was raised by educators, I really like to inform people about things that they might be ignorant to, willingly or unwillingly.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/us/politics/trump-ilhan-omar-fact-check.html" id="5c348168-d789-3577-a8c3-4a590787900f">The New York Times</a>.

(Fact Check)

Examining Trump's Claims About Rep. Ilhan Omar

What President Donald Trump said:

“I’ve been hearing a lot of things: ‘Oh the wall didn’t make that much of a difference.’ You know where it made a big difference? Right here in El Paso.”

False.

Trump is repeating his widely debunked claim made in his State of the Union address that El Paso, Texas, transformed from “one of the most dangerous cities” into one of the safest U.S. cities after the construction of barriers at the border.

El Paso was never one of the most dangerous cities in the country. It has had a consistently lower crime rate than the average among more than 20 similarly sized cities, according to FBI data. In that group, El Paso reported the second-lowest violent crime rate in 2008 — before the construction of border fencing. And after the barrier was completed, it held the rank while the violent crime rate did not change considerably.

The inaccurate claim has also drawn the rebuke of Democratic and Republican local politicians alike, including Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman from El Paso, and the Republican mayor of the city.

“I don’t care if the mayor is a Democrat or a Republican, they are full of crap when they say the border barrier didn’t help lower the crime rate,” Trump said, again adding falsely, “It didn’t stay the same. It went way down.”

What was said:

“If we cut detention space, we are cutting loose dangerous criminals into our country.”

This is disputed.

Before Trump took the stage Monday night in El Paso, lawmakers in Washington reached a tentative deal on border security that included funding for physical barriers at the border and the reduction of detention space for migrants.

Democrats had sought to limit the number of detention beds under the control of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arguing that limiting the beds would force the agency to prioritize migrants with serious criminal records. Matt Albence, the deputy director of ICE, said a reduction in the number of beds would mean the release of criminals.

Whether or not ICE would be forced to released hardened criminals is a prediction that cannot be fact checked, but available data suggests that most immigrants in detention have not committed serious crimes. Records obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University show that in June 2018, for example, ICE held more than 44,000 migrants in detention facilities across the country. Of these migrants, 58 percent had no criminal conviction and 21 percent had committed minor offenses such as traffic violations or illegal entry while 18 percent had been convicted of serious crimes.

ICE has disputed that breakdown but used a broader measure for its figures: The agency said 54 percent of detained immigrants had criminal records or faced pending charges, though it did not specify what crimes they were accused of committing.

“So we have, let’s say, 35,000 people tonight and he has 200 people, 300 people, not too good.”

This is exaggerated.

Trump overestimated his crowd size and severely understated the number of people who attended a dueling rally held Monday night by Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman.

A spokesman with the fire department told the El Paso Times that the arena Trump spoke at was filled to capacity at 6,500 people. Thousands more watched the rally outside, with a possible total attendance of 10,000, the spokesman said, noting that the department did not officially estimate the crowd outside.

Estimates for O’Rourke’s crowd have been far higher than 200 or 300, ranging from 7,000 to 15,000.

“I don’t think anybody in this room wants to pay 70, 80, 90 and 95 percent tax?”

This is misleading.

Several Democrats have introduced proposals to increase taxes, but unless the 6,500 people in the room were all among the wealthiest Americans, they would not be affected by these proposed tax hikes.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., suggested a top marginal tax rate of 60 or 70 percent on incomes over $10 million. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who is running for president, has proposed a wealth tax of 2 percent on people with a net worth above $50 million and 3 percent over $1 billion. And Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., proposed a top estate tax rate of 77 percent on inheritances over $1 billion.

For context, households in the top 5 percent earned an average income of $385,289 in 2017, according to the Census Bureau.

“I really don’t like their policy of taking away your car, of taking away your airplane flights, of let’s hop a train to California, of you’re not allowed to own cows anymore.”

Trump was referring to the Green New Deal, a proposal to combat climate change released by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass.

In its current form, the plan is a broad outline, introduced as a nonbinding congressional resolution, and proposes projects like expanding renewable power sources, upgrading energy grids and buildings, working with farmers and ranchers to reform the agricultural sector, and investing in clean transportation and high speed rail. The legislation emphasizes that it intends to meet these goals “as much as is technologically feasible.”

Though the Green New Deal would significantly alter the transportation and agriculture sectors, it does not call for the elimination of cars, airplanes or cows.

Outside the text of the legislation, however, a blog post on Ocasio-Cortez’s website describing the plan did note, “The Green New Deal sets a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, at the end of this 10-year plan because we aren’t sure that we will be able to fully get rid of, for example, emissions from cows or air travel before then.”

Her staff has since said retracted the post and said that it was incomplete and published by accident.

“You can keep your doctor — remember that? Twenty-eight times, that didn’t happen. Turned out to be a lie. Hey, where are the fact checkers?”

When President Barack Obama encouraged lawmakers to pass the health care law during his first term, he repeatedly promised that consumers would be able to keep their doctor or health care plan under the new insurance system.

Contrary to Trump’s suggestions, fact checkers and news outlets have called out Obama for failing to fulfill that pledge. The Washington Post noted in 2009 that the claim “would not necessarily be true.” Factcheck.org wrote in 2009 that the promise would not apply to everyone. PolitiFact awarded Obama its Lie of the Year, its annual selection of the most egregious falsehood, in 2013. And The New York Times called it a “broken promise” in a 2013 article on the front page.

Other claims:

In addition, Trump repeated at least eight other claims The New York Times has previously checked:

— He exaggerated when he claimed that he had presided over an “economic miracle.” (The strong economy is a continuation of trends that began before Trump took office.)

— He falsely claimed that terminally ill patients could not get access to experimental drugs before he signed a “Right to Try” law. (A similar federal program had existed for decades before Trump signed the law last summer.)

— He claimed that the United States was “now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas.” (This has been the case since 2013.)

— He misleadingly claimed that lawmakers had been trying to pass Veterans Choice for four decades. (Although Trump has presided over reforms to the program, Veterans Choice was signed into law under President Barack Obama.)

— He falsely claimed the government “couldn’t fire anybody” before he signed a Veterans Affairs Accountability Act. (He signed a law that would make it easier to remove bad employees, but the department had been able to fire people before.)

— He falsely accused Hillary Clinton and Democrats of colluding with Russia. (There is no evidence of this.)

— He claimed that immigration officials had made 266,000 arrests of immigrants in the country illegally who had committed crimes like murder, sexual assault and kidnapping. (The most common offenses were immigration, traffic and drug violations.)

— He falsely claimed that only 2 percent of arrested immigrants in the country illegally return for court hearings. (The accurate figure is about 72 percent.)

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/us/politics/trump-rally-fact-check.html" id="f58e024a-3439-3d88-ae71-c7d2483d5423">The New York Times</a>.

Trump Repeats False Claim About El Paso Crime, This Time in El Paso

(Fact Check of the Day)

Before Trump took the stage Monday night, lawmakers in Washington reached a tentative deal on border security that included funding for physical barriers at the border and the reduction of detention space for migrants.

ICE has disputed that breakdown but used a broader measure for its figures: The agency said 54 percent of detained immigrants had criminal records or faced pending charges, although it did not specify what crimes they were accused of committing.

RUSSIA

“Nobody’s been tougher on Russia than Donald Trump.”

Whether Trump has been “tougher” than any other president is subjective. But it’s worth noting that observers of U.S. relations with Russia point to a disconnect between aggressive policies enacted by the Trump administration and not-so-tough language from Trump himself.

In his resignation letter in December, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis emphasized that his views on “treating allies with respect and also being cleareyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors” — Russia, for example — were not shared by Trump.

The Trump administration has indeed imposed sanctions, ordered a missile attack on Syria despite Moscow’s opposition and approved arms sales to Ukraine — actions that could be called “tough.”

Yet Trump himself has repeatedly denied or played down Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, contradicting his own intelligence agencies.

“My personal view is that his assertion would be laughable if it were not so dangerous,” Harley Balzer, a professor emeritus at Georgetown University and a Russia expert, previously told The Times.

Withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria, where Russia has accused a humanitarian relief group of being terrorists, “hardly sends a ‘tough’ message,” Balzer said.

This view seems to be shared by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who called Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria “correct.”

“In September, just before the election, the FBI told President Obama about possible Russian interference and he did nothing because he thought that Hillary Clinton, crooked Hillary was going to win, that’s why he did nothing. He did nothing.”

Trump is free to argue that President Barack Obama did not do enough in response to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, as some Democrats have. But he is wrong that Obama did nothing at all.

Privately, Obama administration officials warned Russia against meddling, and Obama confronted Putin directly at a Group of 20 summit meeting in China before the November 2016 vote. Publicly, intelligence agencies issued a joint statement in October 2016 that blamed Russia for hacked emails released on WikiLeaks and other websites.

After the election, Obama imposed sanctions on Russia and ejected from the United States 35 people who were suspected of being Russian intelligence operatives.

THE WALL

“We are building the wall. We’re going to have over 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year.”

Trump is once again mixing projects to replace existing barriers with construction of entirely new sectors of a wall along the southwestern border — and inflating the mileage.

The Customs and Border Protection agency has received funding for 258 miles of barriers: 175 miles from congressional appropriations, 30 miles from a Treasury Department asset forfeiture fund and 53 miles from the Pentagon’s coffers, according to an agency spokesman.

That’s 142 miles less than what Trump claimed. Even that figure relies on counting replacement projects as new wall, on contracts that have yet to be awarded and on funding that is tenuous. The 40 miles funded in the 2017 fiscal year, for example, is to replace old barriers with new fencing, while a federal judge in May blocked Trump from using the Pentagon funds to build his wall.

TAX CUTS

We enacted “the biggest tax cut in history.”

Despite dozens of repetitions, this claim remains false. The $1.5 trillion tax cut, enacted in December 2017, ranks below at least half a dozen others by several metrics. The 1981 Reagan tax cut is the largest as a percentage of the economy and by its reduction to federal revenue. The 2012 Obama cut amounted to the largest cut in inflation-adjusted dollars: $321 billion a year.

TRADE

“We are taking billions and billions of dollars in and — remember this, and you know it as well as I do — we have never taken in 10 cents from China. We would lose $500 billion a year with China.”

The United States had a trade deficit of $381 billion in goods and services with China in 2018. The United States has collected tariff revenue on imports since the 1700s. Data compiled by Factcheck.org shows that the United States collected more than $10 billion in customs duties on Chinese imports every year from 2010 to 2016.

THE ECONOMY

“Since the election, we have created 6 million new jobs. Nobody thought that would be possible. They said it wouldn’t be possible.”

Trump is including almost three months when he was not yet president, but his figures are accurate. The economy added about 6 million jobs from November 2016 to May 2019. In the 28 full months since he’s been president, February 2017 to May 2019, the figure was about 5.4 million jobs.

Far from being previously impossible, the economy added roughly 6.1 million jobs in the 28 months before Trump took office.

“We have lifted more than 6 million Americans off of food stamps.”

True.

Participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program did decline by about 6.9 million people from November 2016 to March 2019.

“The unemployment rate is the lowest rate it’s been in over 51 years. Think of that. And as I said before about AfricanAmerican, I now say also about Hispanic American and AsianAmerican unemployment have reached the lowest rates in the history of our country”

The unemployment rate was 3.6% in May 2019, the lowest since December 1969 when it reached 3.5%. The unemployment rate for Hispanics hit its lowest point, 4.2%, in May 2019. The rates for black Americans and Asian Americans also reached their lowest points under Trump (5.9% in May 2018 and 2.2% in April 2019) but have since increased.

THE MILITARY AND VETERANS

“VA choice for the veterans. They’ve been trying to get that passed also for about 44 years.”

The Veterans Choice Program was created in 2014 after the scandal of hidden waiting lists at the Department of Veterans Affairs and allowed veterans to seek private health care funded by the government under certain conditions. Last June, Trump consolidated that and other existing programs, and expanded eligibility requirements.

“We are rebuilding the U.S. armed forces with $700 billion last year and $716 billion this year, far more than ever before.”

Those are not the largest military budgets in recent history, let alone all of American history. Even if inflation is not taken into account, President Barack Obama signed a $726 billion National Defense Authorization Act for the 2011 fiscal year. Adjusted for inflation, Congress authorized more money for the Pentagon every fiscal year from 2007 to 2012, during the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We are “starting to remove a lot of troops” from the Middle East.

After Trump announced the withdrawal of 2,000 troops from Syria, The New York Times reported in March that the Pentagon was planning to cut its combat force to about 1,000 by May and then pause. In contrast, Trump in May ordered the deployment of 1,500 troops to the Middle East to counter Iran, and this week ordered the deployment of another 1,000 troops to the region.

HEALTH CARE

Terminally ill patients would “go all over the world looking for a cure. Because the FDA would not approve what we call Right to Try. What a beautiful name, right to try. After 44 years, I got it approved.”

A federal program known as compassionate use, or expanded access, has been in place since the 1970s. It allows patients with a serious disease or condition to obtain experimental medicines; the Food and Drug Administration says it authorizes 99% of the requests for expanded access that it receives.

Trump did sign a law last year that allows patients and doctors to ask drug companies directly for access to the experimental drugs, rather than wait for approval by the agency.

“For the first time in half a century, we’ve reduced the price of prescription drugs.”

This is misleading.

Multiple analyses have shown that drug prices are still increasing, albeit at a slower pace than in previous years. For example, Rx Savings Solutions, a company that advises employers on how to reduce drug costs, found that drug companies increased prices on more than 2,800 medicines in the first quarter of 2019. The average increase was 8.6%, compared with 11.3% in the same period last year.

ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT

“We’ve ended the last administration’s cruel and heartless war on American energy. What they were doing to our energy should never be forgotten. The United States is now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world.”

The Energy Information Administration estimated that the United States became the largest producer of crude oil since 2013, according to the agency, undercutting Trump’s characterization of the Obama administration’s energy policies.

“We have among the cleanest and sharpest — crystal clean, you’ve heard me say it, I want it crystal clean — air and water anywhere on Earth.”

This is exaggerated.

The United States ranked 27th out of 180 countries in an environmental performance review, compiled by Yale and Columbia university researchers in collaboration with the World Economic Forum in 2018. (Switzerland topped the list.) The index placed the United States at 10th for air quality and 29th for water and sanitation.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/us/politics/trump-fact-check-rally.html" id="95b3fd32-6d40-3fa1-a8d4-53e104e5d0a8">The New York Times</a>.

Fact-Checking Trump's Campaign Kickoff Rally: Russia, the Wall and Tax Cuts

President Donald Trump officially began his campaign for re-election Tuesday at a rally in Orlando, Florida, touching on themes and promoting accomplishments that are likely to be staples of his appearances from now until Election Day. Here’s a fact-check of his remarks.

Fact-checking Trump's campaign kickoff rally: Russia, the wall and tax cuts

CALIFORNIA’S TRUANCY LAWS

What Harris said: “What ended up happening is, by changing the education code, it also changed — it, by reference then, was in the penal code. And then that was an unintended consequence. And if I could do it over again, I would have made sure that it would not have increased penalties or the ability to prosecute anywhere in the state to prosecute parents, because that was never the intention. And it was never anything that I did.” — CNN interview in May

This is misleading.

As San Francisco district attorney, Harris started an initiative in 2006 to reduce truancy in schools that began with educating parents and students, then holding meetings to address issues that led to truancy and, as a final resort, prosecuting parents.

California law, at the time, distinguished between students with three unexcused absences (“truants”) and those with five (“habitual truants”), with repercussions that included warnings, community service or suspension of driver's licenses. If parents “cause or encourage” students to miss six or more days of school, they could be fined up to $2,500 or jailed up to a year. A state review concluded that district attorneys found that penalty difficult to pursue because of a high burden of proof.

In 2010, Harris helped draft legislation that built upon the San Francisco program.

A spokesman for the senator said she had always pledged to prosecute parents as a last resort during her time as district attorney, and her efforts were “not about punishment, but support of parents.” The spokesman also cited a HuffPost article that said that, as California’s attorney general, Harris had limited influence over whether local prosecutors carried out the spirit of the law she sponsored.

Still, contrary to Harris’ claim that the penalties were an “unintended consequence,” Senate Bill 1317 specifically amended both the state penal and education codes and included imprisonment as a punishment.

The bill added a category for “chronically truant” students, those who missed 10% or more of the school year, and enacted a new misdemeanor charge for parents of chronic truants in kindergarten through eighth grade. If those parents still failed to send their children to school after warnings and being offered help, they could face a $2,500 fine, jail time up to one year or both.

Harris described the bill as a carrot-and-stick approach: “combining meaningful services with smart sanctions in the California Penal Code” to “compel families to get their young children back in school.”

The deputy district attorney for Alameda County told the San Jose Mercury News that the misdemeanor charge would give prosecutors “more teeth and more tools.” And a law review article said the bill “explicitly puts parental responsibility for truancy in the penal code and is a clear legislative mandate of the state’s intention to prosecute parents.”

Harris is correct that the San Francisco district never jailed any parents, but several other counties did after the law’s enactment in 2011.

THE DEATH PENALTY

What Harris said: “I am, in my entire life, have been opposed and personally opposed to the death penalty. I believe it be a very flawed system. DNA has proven that there have been people who have been convicted and sentenced to the death penalty who turned out to be innocent. In fact, the numbers I know tell me that one in nine people who have been prosecuted under the death penalty led to an exoneration.” — MSNBC interview in March

This is exaggerated.

While Harris has long personally opposed the death penalty, her actions did not always reflect that conviction. And false convictions among those sentenced to death are not an aberration, but do not occur at the rate Harris cited.

Harris opposed the death penalty in 2003, when she ran for San Francisco’s district attorney. After she won, Harris refused to seek capital punishment against a man accused of killing a police officer, despite pressure from law enforcement and other state politicians.

When she became California’s attorney general, however, Harris defended the state’s death penalty after a court ruled that it was unconstitutional. Her spokeswoman said the Department of Corrections and the governor were her clients, and she also disagreed with the judge’s argument that capital cases took too long between conviction and execution.

Some commended Harris for fulfilling her professional obligation, while others argued she did not need to do so, since she had declined to defend a state ballot initiative that prohibited same-sex marriage (she said that measure violated the Constitution).

Harris misstated a common talking point from those opposed to the death penalty: For every nine to 10 people who have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in the United States, one person has been set free. But that’s not quite the same thing as an exoneration rate of 11%.

From 1973 to 2016, the United States put 9,178 prisoners on death row, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. But that figure counts some inmates twice, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, so the actual number is about 8,600. Since 1973, 165 people have exonerated, according to a database maintained by the center, for an exoneration rate of about 1.9%.

There is credible research to show that more people facing the death penalty could have been exonerated. A 2014 study found that at least 4.1% of those sentenced to death between 1977 and 2004 were convicted erroneously. Dunham said his group has estimated a similar figure, about 4%, of people on death row who were innocent or pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit.

INVESTIGATING THE POLICE

Jake Tapper, CNN anchor: “When you were attorney general, you opposed legislation that would have required your office to investigate fatal shootings involving police officers. Why did you oppose that bill?”

Harris: “So, I did not oppose the bill. I had a process when I was attorney general of not weighing in on bills and initiatives, because as attorney general, I had a responsibility for writing the title and summary. So I did not weigh in.” — CNN town hall in January

The legislation, Assembly Bill 86, would have required the attorney general’s office to appoint a special prosecutor to examine fatal shootings by the police.

Harris did not take a public position on the bill, but she had expressed a general disagreement with its aims, saying in interviews that it would have taken away “discretion from elected district attorneys.” The bill’s sponsor told The New York Times in January that she declined to support it at the time, but commended Harris for eventually supporting independent investigations.

And contrary to her claim that her silence on legislation was a matter of policy, she weighed in a host of other bills. Her staff said that comment was an error.

GUN SALES TO FUGITIVES

What Harris said: “Because none of us have been sleeping over the last two years, part of what has happened under the current administration is they took fugitives off the list of prohibited people. I’d put them back on the list, meaning that fugitives from justice should not be able to purchase a handgun or any kind of weapon. So that’s what I’d do.”

Current law prohibits the sale of firearms to fugitives from justice (in addition to several other classes of people), and the Trump administration has not removed fugitives from the list. As of May 31, the FBI’s criminal background check database still included 2,320 records of fugitives prohibited from buying a gun.

Harris’ team cited news reports about tens of thousands of fugitives removed from the database after the Justice Department settled a long-standing dispute between the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The FBI’s policy was to deny purchases to people with outstanding warrants if they tried to buy a firearm outside the county or local jurisdiction that issued the warrant, while the ATF did not consider people with warrants “fugitives from justice” if they remained in the same state, the Justice Department’s inspector general explained in a 2016 report that urged the agencies to resolve the issue.

The department ultimately agreed with the ATF definition and applied it only to people who had left the state to avoid prosecution or giving testimony, according to a February 2017 memo obtained by The Trace, a news organization that reports on gun violence. David Bowdich, deputy FBI director, testified to Congress in March 2018 that the decision was made under the Obama administration. Harris pledges to reverse that definitional change, her spokesman said.

The background check database declined to 24 fugitives from justice in 2017 from 511,855 in 2016. But Massachusetts alone accounted for about 430,000 names because the state submits outstanding warrant records for both misdemeanors and felonies. Those records instead moved to a different category of prohibited purchasers in the database: banned because of state laws.

FUNDING A BORDER WALL

WhatHarris said: “Members of our military have already given so much. Raiding money from their pensions to fund the President’s wasteful vanity project is outrageous. Our service members deserve better.” — Twitter post in March

To build his border wall without the approval of Congress, Trump will draw from an account for military construction projects, a Treasury Department forfeiture fund and a Pentagon drug interdiction program. He has not announced plans to “raid” military pensions.

Harris’ tweet included a link to an Associated Press story with the headline “Pentagon may tap military pay, pensions for border wall.” But the first sentence of the story specifies that it refers to “$1 billion in leftover funds from military pay and pension accounts.”

In other words, the money will not come from the pensions of active or retired military members. The fund exist because the Army did not meet its recruiting targets and fewer personnel opted for an early retirement program than expected.

“This is pay that would have gone to Army recruits that we can’t recruit,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told The Associated Press. “So there’s a ‘savings’ because we can’t recruit. The other part was they offered a voluntary change in military pensions, and they overestimated how many people would sign up for it.”

Harris on the campaign trail on positions past and present

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., is aiming to reset her presidential campaign after a strong start and subsequent slump by highlighting her career as a glass-ceiling-shattering prosecutor and making the case against President Donald Trump.

Harris on the campaign trail: on positions past and present

What Trump Said

“They broke the deal. They can’t do that. So they’ll be paying — if we don’t make the deal, nothing wrong with taking in over $100 billion a year, $100 billion, we never did that before.”

A Chinese delegation is expected to travel Thursday to Washington to resume trade talks after negotiations faltered. Trump said Wednesday on Twitter that he would be “very happy” to keep existing tariffs on Chinese products and fill government coffers with $100 billion in tariff revenue, a sentiment he repeated during the rally Wednesday night.

That figure, however, is an exaggeration of an estimate. The Congressional Budget Office projected that tariffs would generate $74 billion in revenue in 2019, nearly double the $41 billion from 2018.

President Donald Trump, at a rally Wednesday night in Panama City Beach, Florida, wrongly described the revenue generated from tariffs on China and exaggerated the effect of a trade deal with South Korea.

Linda Qiu

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