News Reporter: Fact Checker: Spies, lies and the Trump campaign?

Friday 10 May 2019

Fact Checker: Spies, lies and the Trump campaign?

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

Spies, lies and the Trump campaign?

President Trump has claimed the FBI spied on his campaign since his earliest days in office. Attorney General William P. Barr indicated that he is troubled by this possibility and would investigate. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said he would prefer not call what happened in 2016 "spying." So what did happen?

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tweeted,"Now we know they spied on at least two American citizens associated with the Trump campaign 1) Carter Page — using the false Dossier as the basis for a secret warrant 2) George Papadopolous — set up by an FBI agent posing as a Cambridge professor's assistant."

As a service for readers, The Fact Checker outlined what we know, based on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's report, legal filings, Papadopoulos's memoir, "Deep State Target," Greg Miller's "The Apprentice," and news reports in order to untangle these two threads. It's clear the Justice Department was investigating possible ties between Russia and Trump campaign officials. And in the process of that investigation took steps to gather more information. The question is whether the investigation ever crossed a line into spying on the campaign itself — and that so far has not been proved.

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Have Palestinians received the most foreign aid ever?

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner has been tasked with crafting a still-secret plan to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So when he claimed, "[Palestinians have] gotten more aid than any group of people in history," it peaked our ears. After all, the Palestinians have had plenty of backers (though the U.S. only began sending aid in the 1980s) and foreign aid can be a particularly sticky, political topic. Let's dig in.

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have received about $40 billion in international aid (in inflation-adjusted dollars), $9.1 billion of which is from the United States, since 1993. Israel has received $228 billion in aid just from the United States since 1951. When you look at the average per year, Israel received $3.5 billion per year from the United States alone while Palestinians received a total of $1.7 billion per year.

However, the majority of total U.S. aid to Israel is military in nature. A White House aide said Kushner was specifically talking about economic development aid. Even so, $68.9 billion of the total U.S. aid to Israel has been earmarked for economic development. In 2007, all aid to Israel was shifted to military aid, but money is fungible.

Kushner says the Palestinians have received more money than any group in history. But the Israelis have received more foreign aid in total, just from the United States. He earned Three Pinocchios.

You can't always believe what you see

False and misleading video is nothing new on the internet. But the increasing ease and remarkable accuracy of deep fakes - or computer-generated clips designed to super impose faces - could trick the most skeptical viewer. There was the now-famous example of actor Jordan Peele transforming into former president Barack Obama. And this week a local news anchor for New York Fox 5 created his own. Together with a research group at the University of Albany, he swapped his face on to another anchor's. That swap created the appearance that he said "New York City pizza is definitely not as good as Chicago's," which he would never say. In other words, he took 'fake news' to a whole new level.

We're always looking for fact-check suggestions.

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Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup.

— Meg Kelly