Trump Misleads Rallygoers on IG Report, Impeachment
During his first campaign rally after Democrats announced two articles of impeachment and the Justice Department inspector general released a report on the FBI’s Russia investigation, President Donald Trump distorted the facts on both topics.
- The White House memo on Trump’s July 25 phone call with the president of Ukraine corroborated the whistleblower complaint’s description. Yet, Trump continued to falsely claim otherwise, and once again distorted the timeline of events to leave the false impression that his release of the memo exposed the Democrats as liars.
- Trump accused the FBI of framing him, saying it “hid” evidence that showed his campaign “did absolutely nothing wrong.” The IG report found the FBI omitted some “exculpatory information” when obtaining a surveillance warrant for one campaign official, but it did not find any “intentional misconduct.”
- The president claimed that the articles of impeachment showed Democrats are “now admitting there was no collusion, there was no obstruction of justice and there were no crimes whatsoever” related to the Russia investigation. But that’s not what the articles say.
- Trump said he “heard” that former FBI lawyer Lisa Page requested a restraining order against former FBI senior counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, with whom Page had an affair. On Twitter, Page called Trump’s statement “a lie.”
Trump’s campaign rally was held Dec. 10 in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Ukraine Call and Whistleblower Repeats
The president continued to rattle off a string of false claims about his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the whistleblower complaint. We’ve written about all of these before.
Trump released the White House memo on the phone call on Sept. 25. The following day, the House intelligence committee released a redacted copy of the whistleblower complaint, which includes an account of the phone call that largely mirrors an embellished version of the call memo before a committee hearing.
