News Reporter: Fact Checker: Did Clinton tell the truth about her 1969 law school exam? Readers, help us out with this one.

Friday, 16 September 2016

Fact Checker: Did Clinton tell the truth about her 1969 law school exam? Readers, help us out with this one.

The truth behind the rhetoric

Did Clinton tell the truth about her 1969 law school exam? Readers, help us out with this one.

Politicians often tell stories they supposedly experienced many years ago that can’t be confirmed without a time machine.

Readers have helped us figure out several such stories, like whether Hillary Clinton could’ve been rejected by NASA as a teen after she wrote a letter asking to be a female astronaut. And whether former presidential candidate (and briefly, VP hopeful) Carly Fiorina could’ve gotten a draft notice because of her male-sounding name.

This week, we looked into Clinton’s story of sexism that went viral after she shared it on Humans of New York. Men blamed her for taking the law school admissions test in 1969, Clinton said, saying things like: “If you take my spot, I'll get drafted, and I'll go to Vietnam, and I'll die.”

Readers were skeptical of this tale, and asked us to check it out: At the time Clinton took the test, graduate-school deferments had been eliminated for law school.

Yet it’s plausible. The draft was in flux in 1968, and there was a lot of flexibility in the system, given the independence of local draft boards. A “de facto deferment” remained in place, and many young men at the time worked the system to avoid being sent to war — including Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.

But it is odd that the first time Clinton appears to have mentioned this is 45 years after it happened. There’s no way for us to figure out if this happened, so we gave it a Verdict Pending rating.

Any readers out there with more info? E-mail us.

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Dubious claims in Trump’s economic speech

Donald Trump delivered an economic policy speech this week to the Economic Club of New York, and repeated debunked claims — like the Three Pinocchio claim that more Hispanics are in poverty under Obama.

One of the statistics that stood out to us was that 92 million Americans are “on the sideline, outside of the workforce … it’s a silent nation of jobless Americans.” This is absurd; you can’t be jobless if you don’t want a job.

Trump is referring to people “not in the labor force,” meaning they’re not employed and not looking for jobs. The latest figure for that is 94 million. The official government unemployment rate is 4.9 percent, because 7.8 million people are actively looking for a job and can’t find one. Out of the 94 million Trump talks about, 87.5 million — 93 percent — do not want a job at all. We awarded Four Pinocchios.

Trump also blamed President Obama and his opponent Hillary Clinton for “one in six” young men being jobless or in jail. This figure is based on calculations by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, using data from 2014. But the policies that have led to this figure date to the 1980s and 1990s, and weren’t limited to the Obama administration. We awarded Two Pinocchios.

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Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio roundup.

— Michelle Ye Hee Lee