NBC News journalists have publicly questioned the president’s credibility during live press conferences recently. Peter Alexander gave Pres. Trump a real-time fact-check during last month’s presser, saying that his continued assertion that he earned the biggest electoral margin of victory since Ronald Reagan was wrong.
“Why should Americans trust you?” Alexander asked.
Another NBC Newser, Chris Jansing, called the president’s credibility into question during today’s press briefing with Sean Spicer, specifically his false assertion that the Obama administration was to blame for the mass release of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. Here’s the president’s tweet Jansing was citing:
122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2017
What the president got wrong is that it was actually the Bush administration that had released 113 of the 122 prisoners from Gitmo.
The president sent out the tweet presumably after watching a Fox & Friends segment just minutes earlier. To be fair, the Fox & Friends twitter page did not make the claim that the Obama administration released all of the detainees. The president tweeted out false information.
Former Gitmo detainee killed by a U.S. airstrike in Yemen; at least 122 former Gitmo detainees have re-engaged in terrorism pic.twitter.com/y9jb420fFZ
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) March 7, 2017
Here’s the exchange between Jansing and Spicer:
Jansing: “Since you’re talking about whether things are true or not, let me follow-up on something yesterday. You seemed to acknowledge that the president was wrong when he tweeted 122 prisoners had returned from Gitmo– by the Bush administration. Will he retract or even apologize for that given that he also called it ‘a terrible decision by the Obama administration,’ and given that was incorrect, that there still has been no proof about his widespread voter fraud or wiretapping, does the president have a credibility problem?”
Spicer: “Yesterday, the president meant the total number of people released from Gitmo was 122.”
Spicer then pivoted to an attack on the Obama administration and a defense of the Bush administration, saying that the latter’s move to release prisoners was “court-ordered” while “it was an Obama campaign promise frankly from day one to close Gitmo.”
Spicer continued: “This administration understands and the president has been very clear in he understands that the people who are kept in Gitmo pose a danger to our country and to the rest of the world. there’s a big big difference between the posture of those two.”
Jansing tried to bring it back to the president’s truthfulness, stating: “The tweet was wrong.”
Spicer’s response: “I just said it, he meant the totality of the people. That’s what I said yesterday and say it again to you today.”