David Gergen, known to us at The American Spectator as Mr. Potato Head, was in high dudgeon last week over Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash. He claimed the book had been discredited. Well, it was used as a source by the New York Times and the Washington Post. They relied on it heavily for its stories on the Clintons’ corruption, and it sold quite well.
Mr. Potato Head was working with CNN’s posse comitatus to bring down Donald Trump for his revelations about Crooked Hillary. Alas, it was they—the so-called fact checkers at CNN—that were brought down.
The CNN fact checkers deemed Trump in error for claiming the continuing bloodshed in Syria was due to Hillary Clinton’s support of regime change. But Trump never made that claim. All he charged was that her support for regime change began Syria’s descent into a bloody civil war. He did not say that she had a hand in the ongoing bloodshed. There is a significant difference. The Syrian death toll now stands at some 250,000 Syrians.
The CNN fact checkers also assailed Trump again for claiming the U.S. trade deficit with China soared by 40% while she was secretary of state. This, the fact checkers said, is “exaggerated.” Unfortunately we have at our disposal the U.S. Census Bureau, which in its report “Trade In Goods With China” asseverated this month that from 2009 to 2012 the trade deficit with China increase by $89 billion or 39 percent. So Trump’s exaggeration was off by one percentage point. CNN’s “correction” was completely wrong.
Finally, CNN’s crack team of fact checkers rated Trump in error for saying that Clinton’s State Department refused “all” requests for additional security at Benghazi. Actually, he said the State Department received “hundreds and hundreds of requests for security…. Hillary Clinton’s State Department refused them all.” Well, there were few security personnel on the ground when Ambassador Stevens was murdered in Benghazi. Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post’s felicitously titled column “Fact Checker” claims that 581 documents have been found that deal with the security situation at Benghazi. The number is likely to climb higher if classified documents are taken into account. The stark fact is that the State Department ignored most of these requests.
I find six other open source accounts of lax security at Benghazi, among them one from USA Today on January 15, 2014 headlined “Democrats Join GOP To Blame State In Benghazi.” It reported: “Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks after having made requests for more security to the State Department. State acknowledged that security was not adequate….”
After last week’s speech it appears that Donald Trump’s charges against Hillary Clinton are absolutely copper bottom. CNN’s “fact checkers” should be retired. Like all politicians Trump might occasionally exaggerate a trivial matter. Hillary lies repeatedly on things that matter.