Anchor Chris Wallace is a rare, desert flower. He’s a yellow cardinal. He’s the glimmering ring around a black hole, offering hope in the bleakest of circumstances. For Wallace has that rare Fox News quality – journalistic integrity.
Wallace offers a sweet respite from the network’s blatantly pro-Trump administration content, as evidenced by this segment from “Fox News Sunday” with White House press secretary Sarah Sanders. In 13 minutes, Wallace skated through everything from Trump’s tax returns to the administration’s scrapped plan to bus illegal immigrants into San Francisco. FYI: Sanders doesn’t think Congress is “smart enough” to go through Trump’s tax records and she seems to think busing migrants to sanctuary cities is a legitimate option.
Here is a closer look at some of the other things Sanders said.
Fact or fiction: Did President Donald Trump say that Congress doesn’t “have a right” to see the Mueller report?
Basically, yeah. On Saturday, Trump wrote a Tweet asking why Democrats in Congress should “have a right” to examine special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. House Republicans appear to support the release of the report, as well, after an overall vote of 420-to-0 for a resolution supporting the report’s release with only four Republicans voting present.
When Wallace asked her if Trump meant that Congress doesn’t have a right to read the report, Sanders said no, that wasn’t what he was saying. She then moved past the question by saying that Congress doesn’t get “a second chance at trying to re-investigate the president after two years and millions and millions of taxpayer dollars wasted on a complete hoax that we all knew was a lie from the very beginning.” This argument against releasing the report, the notion that Democrats will use it to launch a frivolous investigation into Trump, is common in conservative circles right now.
Politifact has details here on the cost of the Mueller investigation, but the idea that the investigation was a hoax was a gripe that Trump repeated since its inception. Sanders and other conservatives tend to focus on the Russian collusion portion of the investigation, while the other part (whether or not Trump obstructed justice) goes unmentioned. That omission is likely due to the fact that according to Attorney General William Barr, Mueller’s report didn’t “exonerate” Trump when it came to obstruction of justice.
Fact or fiction: Was the sole purpose of the Mueller investigation to look into possible collusion with Russia?
Wallace directly mentioned that Mueller’s report didn’t “exonerate” Trump in the investigation into potential obstruction of justice and asked Sanders how the administration would deal with potentially damaging information coming out in the report.
Sanders answered: “I don’t think it is going to be damaging to the president, because the entire purpose of the investigation was whether or not there was collusion.”
The investigation initially set out to determine whether or not the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. During the course of the investigation, however, Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey after asking him to stop investigating Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser. That termination led to the appointment of Mueller to lead the investigation, but it also led to a second investigation – whether or not Trump had obstructed justice.
Conservatives often argue the FBI never should have investigated the obstruction angle, typically suggesting that that the FBI acted inappropriately. That position assumes it is ethical for law enforcement officials to not investigate potential crimes they discover while investigating something else.
Fact or fiction: Was Trump joking when he said he loved Wikileaks during his 2016 campaign?
Wallace played a series of clips of Trump saying things like, “I love Wikileaks,” during the 2016 election, contrasted with his statement from last week that he doesn’t know anything about Wikileaks and “it’s not (his) thing.”
Sanders said Trump was joking back in 2016, and although that’s not something I can factcheck, I wanted to include it here to note that politicians have used this excuse a lot the last few years to dismiss things they got caught saying. Example: Deputy Attorney General said he was just kidding when he suggested invoking the 25th Amendment against Trump.
Fact or fiction: Is Trump’s video of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) “speaking out” against violence?
On Friday, Trump posted a video of Omar’s out-of-context quote that on September 11, “some people did something.” In the full quote, she claimed that the Council on American-Islamic Relations was established after 9/11 “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” CAIR was founded before September 11, but far-right conservatives have lighted on this quote as proof of Omar minimizing 9/11.
The actual video Trump posted is propaganda that repeats audio of Omar’s spliced quote times in between visceral images of the World Trade Towers on September 11. Wallace noted that the show’s team only felt comfortable showing the first few seconds of the video, but he didn’t call it propaganda.
When Wallace asked if the president is worried about inciting violence against Muslims, Omar in particular, Sanders said, “The president is not trying to incite violence against anybody. He’s actually speaking out against it.”
The purpose of the video speaks for itself, and it’s not to decry violence. Instead, it’s repeating violent images alongside Omar so that people watching the video will associate her with 9/11.
Note: American Mythology is a weekly series where we factcheck an entire piece or debunk a topic across multiple publications or platforms. You can learn more about our approach to factchecking here.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
An excerpt from this piece also ran in our newsletter, Hard Reset. Sign up for Hard Reset here.
