Tag: liar

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White House: It’s “Highly Inappropriate” To Question Chief Of Staff Kelly Even Though He Was Wrong

Yesterday, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly asserted that Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) boasted about raising money during an FBI dedication ceremony in 2015.

Wilson denied Kelly’s claim saying she wasn’t even in Congress when the funds to build the new FBI building in question were appropriated.

Well, of course, someone was going to find that footage of Wilson’s speech. And nowhere does she take credit for raising the funds to build the new FBI building. She does take credit for having the building named after two FBI agents.

And, she spends a big part of her speech praising the FBI and our law enforcement officials.

I can’t embed the video, but you can see it over on South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel website here.

At the White House press briefing today, members of the press asked press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about the video which showed Kelly was inaccurate with his portrayal of Wilson’s speech.

Sanders told reporters that it is “highly inappropriate” to “go after” a four-star Marine general.

Since Ms. Sanders thinks it’s “highly inappropriate” to question or “go after” a military general, I wonder what she thinks of her boss, Donald Trump, “going after” these generals.

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Trump Supporter Lied About Being A Decorated Vietnam Navy SEAL On Fox News

Well, this must have taken some serious stones.

Twelve days ago, Fox News ran a story about a Trump supporter who claimed to be a decorated Vietnam War Navy SEAL. The man had created an enormous glass presidential seal with the hope that he could present it to Donald Trump.

Turns out the artist had inflated his military record. A lot.

The Washington Post is reporting today that the Trump supporter never served as a Navy SEAL or in Vietnam, much less earned commendations for his service.

In the segment, John Garafalo said he served in the Vietnam War with the U.S. Navy SEAL team. Fox News reported that he also received two Purple Hearts and about two dozen other medals for his service.

The man’s claimed record turned out to be a fabrication. It was first discovered by former Navy SEALs. Both these SEALs and family members of Garofalo contacted Fox News about the story, according to the Navy Times.

Don Shipley, a retired SEAL, told the Navy Times that he contacted Fox on Oct. 9, the day after the story ran.

But the story was still on the news outlet’s Facebook page on Oct. 19. By then it had amassed 1.5 million views.

Fox published a correction on Thursday.

“All of Garofalo’s claims turned out to be untrue,” Fox’s correction stated. “The fact is that he did not serve in Vietnam. He was never a U.S. Navy SEAL. Even though he showed us medals, Garofalo was not awarded two Purple Hearts or any of the other nearly two dozen commendations he claimed to have received, except for the National Defense Service Medal.”

Garofalo served in the Navy from Sept. 6, 1963, to Sept. 6, 1967, according to military records obtained by the Navy Times. He told the newspaper he’s been lying about being a Vietnam veteran and a Navy SEAL for years.

“It got bigger and bigger,” Garofalo told the newspaper in a telephone interview. “What I did I‘m ashamed of, and I didn’t mean to cause so much disgrace to the SEALs.”

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AL GOP Senate Candidate Falsely Announces Taking A Knee During National Anthem Is “Against The Law”

Candidate Roy Moore

TIME Magazine reports that former Alabama Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court and current candidate for the U.S. Senate, Roy Moore, erroneously believes that professional athletes who take a knee during the national anthem are breaking the law.

(p.s. They aren’t)

In an interview with TIME magazine, the Alabama Republican argued that NFL players and others who have protested police violence are violating a section of the U.S. code which outlines how people should conduct themselves when the anthem is played. (The code merely outlines proper etiquette, and there are no legal penalties outlined in the law.)

“It’s against the law, you know that?” he said. “It was a act of Congress that every man stand and put their hand over their heart. That’s the law.” “If they didn’t have it in there, it would just be tradition. But this is law,” he said. “If we disobey this, what else are we going to disobey?

As the article states, U.S. Code 301 is not law but considered proper etiquette. If you read the few short lines of text, the word “should” not “shall” is used.

Moore himself has broken the law several times in his career. Once when he defied a court order to remove a statue of the Ten Commandments he had installed at his court house; and also when he ordered judges in his state to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court ruling which made marriage equality legal in all fifty states.

Folks on the right and left openly laughed at Moore on Twitter:

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Trump Lies Claiming Obama “Didn’t Make Calls” To Families Of Fallen Soldiers

Speaking at a press briefing with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Rose Garden at the White House today, Donald Trump outrageously claimed that Barack Obama and other presidents didn’t contact the families of fallen soldiers in the past.

Trump was answering a question as to why he hadn’t addressed the deaths of 3 Green Berets in Niger on October 4.

From CNN:

“I felt very, very badly about that,” Trump said during a press availability in the Rose Garden. “I always feel badly. It is the toughest calls I have to make are the calls where this happens, soldiers are killed.”

Trump claimed that past presidents — including Barack Obama — hadn’t written or called the families of slain service members, though Obama spoke publicly during his term about his many interactions with the families of Americans killed in action.

Later, Trump backtracked on the claim slightly, saying “I was told that he didn’t often.”

Trump’s comments today are his first since the Green Berets died on October 4. Many have wondered why the long silence from a president who is never far from his Twitter feed.

Watch Trump’s comments below.

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Jimmy Kimmel: “Sen. Bill Cassidy Just Lied Right To My Face”

Jimmy Kimmel calls out Sen. Bill Cassidy

Jimmy Kimmel proved last night that he does not suffer fools (or liars) lightly as he ripped on Sen. Bill Cassidy who is attempting to pass the latest “repeal and replace” of the Affordable Care Act.

“This guy, Bill Cassidy, just lied right to my face.”

From Variety:

“I don’t know what happened to Bill Cassidy,” Kimmel said. “But when he was on this publicity tour, he listed his demands for a health-care bill very clearly. These were his words. He said he wants coverage for all, no discrimination based on preexisting conditions, lower premiums for middle-class families and no lifetime caps. Guess what? The new bill does none of those things.”

Earlier this year, Kimmel talked about the wrenching experience of seeing his son go through open heart surgery, and he talked of the importance of lower and middle class families having such coverage in the event of such an emergency. After seeing the monologue and using the term “Jimmy Kimmel test.” Cassidy appeared on his show.

But Kimmel said that Cassidy “just lied right to my face” when he was on the show, noting that he had said that his plan would not allow insurance companies to impose annual or lifetime caps on coverage.

On Tuesday, Kimmel said that “this new bill actually does pass the Jimmy Kimmel test, but a different Jimmy Kimmel test. With this one, your child with a preexisting condition will get the care he needs — if, and only if, his father is Jimmy Kimmel. Otherwise, you might be screwed.”

In six minutes, Kimmel crystalized exactly what this legislation would do better than anyone I’ve seen try to explain it. The power of pop culture may well be the deciding factor in motivating people to call their senators.

Cassidy appeared on CNN’s New Day this morning and told host Chris Cuomo, “I’m sorry he does not understand. Under Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson more people will have coverage, and we protect those with pre-existing conditions.”

To be clear, under Graham/Cassidy insurance companies will be able to charge those with pre-existing conditions higher premiums. The bill uses very vague language like “adequate and affordable” in describing that coverage but doesn’t legally define what that would mean in practical terms.

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Rush Limbaugh Claims Hurricane Irma A Climate Hoax, Then Flees Florida

Earlier this week, far-right radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that Hurricane Irma was part of a huge “liberal media” climate change hoax and that Irma would not make landfall in the U.S.

Yesterday he announced he would not be doing his show, broadcast from South Florida because he would be busy evacuating the state.

Via ThinkProgress:

“So there is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it. You can accomplish a lot just by creating fear and panic. You don’t need a hurricane to hit anywhere,” Limbaugh said on his show Tuesday. “All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and more dangerous, and you create the panic, and it’s mission accomplished, agenda advanced.”

But on the show Thursday, Limbaugh said he would be off the air for the next few days.

“May as well… announce this. I’m not going to get into details because of the security nature of things, but it turns out that we will not be able to do the program here tomorrow,” Limbaugh said Thursday. “We’ll be on the air next week, folks, from parts unknown.”

Limbaugh said the show will be back on the air Monday, but to be on the air Friday would be “legally impossible” for them do to the show out of South Florida.

Listen to him admit he’s evacuating below:

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Don Trump Jr. Says He Attended Russian Trump Tower Meeting To Determine Hillary’s “Fitness” For Presidency

Don Trump Jr.

The eldest son of Donald Trump gave hours of testimony to Senate investigators today regarding his June 2016 meeting with a “Russian government attorney” regarding information about his father’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

From the New York Times:

Donald Trump Jr. told Senate investigators on Thursday that he set up a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer because he was intrigued that she might have damaging information about Hillary Clinton, saying it was important to learn about Mrs. Clinton’s “fitness” to be president.

But nothing came of the Trump Tower meeting, he said, and he was adamant that he never colluded with the Russian government’s campaign to disrupt last year’s presidential election.

In a prepared statement during an interview with Senate Judiciary Committee investigators, the younger Mr. Trump said he was initially conflicted when he heard that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, might have damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Despite his interest, he said, he always intended to consult with his own lawyers about the propriety of using any information that Ms. Veselnitskaya, who has ties to the Kremlin, gave him at the meeting.

Don Jr. initially told the media that he attended the meeting to talk about Russian adoptions.

Shortly after Don Jr.’s testimony, Sen. Chris Coons send the media the specific statute that addresses lying to Congress.

I’m guessing that’s a not-so-subtle hint he didn’t believe Uday?

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Donald Trump Lies Again That U.S. Is “Highest Taxed Nation In The World”

Repeating an oft-told lie, Donald Trump tweeted again today that the U.S. is the “highest taxed nation in the world.”

This has been proven over and over to be incorrect.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning website Politifact has debunked myth this several times.

When we looked at this claim in the past, we compared the United States to the 33 other industrialized nations in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Data from 2014, the most recent year available, shows that the United States wasn’t the most highly taxed by the typical metrics and actually places near the bottom or around the middle of the pack.

Click image to enlarge

The Twitterverse chimed in:

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FBI & Dept Of Justice: No Evidence Of Surveillance Of Trump Tower

The Department of Justice and the FBI have confirmed that neither has found any evidence that Trump Tower was ever “wiretapped” under orders of the Obama administration.

Via The Hill:

The motion confirms that neither the FBI nor the Justice Department’s National Security Division have records documenting wiretaps as alleged by President Trump in a series of tweets earlier this year.

The Friday filing marked the Justice Department’s first official denial of the substance of Trump’s wiretapping tweets earlier this year.

In March, Trump wrote on Twitter that he had discovered that former President Barack Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped during the run-up to the November election, which he called “McCarthyism.”

But the Trump administration did not provide evidence that such surveillance took place, and a spokesman for Obama rejected that the administration wiretapped the real estate mogul’s building.

Likewise, former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired in May, denied that the Obama administration surveilled the Trump campaign.

Basically, this was just another episode of a Trump tantrum with no sense of responsibility for the language he was using.

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Trump Claims To Have Witnessed Horror & Devastation Of Harvey “Firsthand”

The above image, captioned “After witnessing first hand the horror & devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey, my heart goes out even more so to the great people of Texas,” was posted to Donald Trump’s Instagram account last night.

Of course, the fact is Trump did not witness “first hand” any devastation or horror caused by Hurricane Harvey because he didn’t visit any of the devastated areas during his hours long-visit to Texas yesterday.

Nor did he meet or console any of the victims of the flooding caused by the storm.

His press secretary was asked what he meant by “first hand,” and this was the response:

“He met with a number of state and local officials who are eating, sleeping, breathing the Harvey disaster. He talked extensively with the governor, who certainly is right in the midst of every bit of this, as well as the mayors from several of the local towns that were hit hardest. And detailed briefing information throughout the day yesterday talking to a lot of the people on the ground — that certainly is a firsthand account.”

Actually, being told information you haven’t experienced yourself is the very definition of a “second-hand account.”

And the Twitterverse jumped right in: