Kamala Harris ...good cop or bad cop? Now that she's running for president, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is facing questions about her record as California's attorney general from...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | Kamala Harris ... good cop or bad cop? Now that she's running for president, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is facing questions about her record as California's attorney general from 2011 to 2017. At a CNN town hall event that drew nearly 2 million viewers this week, host Jake Tapper asked why Harris had opposed legislation requiring her office to investigate any deadly encounter with police. In response, Harris said her practice as attorney general was not to weigh in on any bill or ballot initiative. But that's flatly untrue. She weighed in on many, as we quickly discovered. The real reason Harris withheld her support for the bill was that she trusted the locally elected district attorneys in California to conduct investigations of any killings by police. That answer could have disappointed many advocates, and voters, calling for independent investigations because they are concerned that local prosecutors work too closely with local police. So what happened? Did Harris forget? How did her wires get so crossed? When The Fact Checker reached out for comment, Harris's spokeswoman said the senator misheard Tapper's question and misspoke in response. We withheld Pinocchios. But it's worth noting that Tapper asked a succinct and specific question and that Harris has faced criticism for years about her position on this bill. |  | | Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here, for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. Trump's snake-oil immigration numbers Beware the salesman who gives you a bunch of super-specific and unbelievable numbers. Case in point, this tweet from President Trump, which claims that: 1) There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens in the United States. 2) Illegal immigration has cost U.S. taxpayers $18,959,495,168 so far this year. Trump seems to have taken these oddly precise figures from a segment on the far-right One America News Network. But OAN appears to have inflated what were already dubious estimates to begin with of the cost of illegal immigration. Trump compounded the problem with an error of his own, mistakenly taking OAN's figure for all immigrants as a total for only undocumented immigrants. Figures from Trump's own administration peg the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States at close to 12 million. Immigration is supposed to be the central concern of Trump's administration, but after two years, his pattern of giving phony numbers on this issue has only worsened. We gave him Four Pinocchios. | | | The Colbert bump Speaking of Trump's phony immigration numbers, here's Stephen Colbert of the "Late Show" riffing on Trump and a fact-checking tweet by Glenn Kessler. The Colbert bump lives! We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. — Salvador Rizzo | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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