Iraq

“The attack on Mosul is turning out to be a total disaster. We gave them months of notice. US is looking so dumb. VOTE TRUMP and WIN AGAIN!” – 23 October, Twitter

“They announce four months ago, three months ago, that we’re going into Mosul … guess what, 12 minutes later, the leaders, they left.” – 24 October, St Augustine, Florida

Not even two weeks into the battle for Mosul, Trump has declared it “a total disaster”. Commanders have disagreed. So far, Kurdish peshmerga have captured dozens of towns only a few miles from the city center, Iraqi forces have made steady progress from the south, and on Thursday a US general said up to 900 Isis militants had been killed. Since the campaign began, commanders have warned it could last months, though they have expressed cautious optimism.

Isis leaders are believed to be fleeing the city, but the Pentagon has refused to speculate publicly on the location of the terror group’s chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Inside the city, an anti-Isis group has said it plans to rise up against the jihadis.

And despite Trump’s insistence that the coalition should have used “the element of surprise”, Isis leaders have known ever since the US began airstrikes two years ago that it would likely mount an attack on Mosul. Iraq’s government has been encouraging civilians to flee the city for over a year. The US has dropped leaflets on the city in recent weeks, too, to warn civilians to flee or find safety, depending on the coalition’s strategy for strikes and assaults.

Trump’s declaration of “disaster” is premature, and his claim that “surprise” would be a more effective strategy suggests a dearth of knowledge about military strategy and risks to civilians.



Deportations

“As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton allowed thousands [of undocumented migrants], I mean, all of them, thousands, to be released because their home countries wouldn’t take them back.” – 21 October, Fletcher, North Carolina

Trump wrongly blames Hillary Clinton for releasing migrants when the government is in fact required to do so by law. In 2001, the supreme court barred the US from holding undocumented people, including those convicted of crimes, for longer than six months if their native country refuses to take them back.

George W Bush and Barack Obama have followed that ruling and when countries have refused to accept deportees, both presidents have declined to enact punitive measures on those countries. Secretaries of state can deny visas to countries that refuse to accepted convicted migrants, but this action is rarely used and when it is it is usually against small countries with limited relationships with the US. This summer, Trump correctly noted that the supreme court decision was responsible. He has since turned the claim into a false one that pins blame on his opponent rather than the ruling.

Trump’s campaign eventually sent the Washington Post a statement saying the businessman was accusing Clinton of failing to take punitive action against countries that refused US deportation requests.

Hacked emails



“The emails also show her staff saying ‘she has no core’.” – 22 October, Cleveland



Trump is here quoting an email that itself quoted Republican strategist Karl Rove, who in 2014 wrote that Clinton has “no core message” – not that she has “no core”. One of Clinton’s aides, Joel Benenson, cited Rove’s accusation in a question about the Clinton campaign’s central theme, especially when compared to Bernie Sanders’ clear rallying cries against Wall Street and money in politics.

In a hacked email, Benenson asked: “Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?”

“Hillary Clinton has ‘bad instincts’. This guy Podesta’s a nasty guy.” – 23 October, Naples, Florida

Trump claims to be quoting from an email released by WikiLeaks, which acquired hacked emails of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. But the email he is alluding to to was not written by Podesta but by Neera Tanden, another campaign staffer.

The email’s context shows that Tanden was speaking about a dispute on the campaign’s Twitter strategy.



She had praised a Podesta tweet about that day’s battle in the Democratic primary. Podesta told her he was angered that his tweet was delayed a day by someone in the organization. “I am passed [sic],” he wrote.

“You mean pissed?” Tanden replied. “Got held by who? Hillary. God. Her instincts are suboptimal. Pretty typical though. I would not be surprised if wjc [Bill Clinton] told him to do it. Just as I’m pretty sure [M]ark Penn [a former strategist for the 2008 campaign] didn’t do his cocaine rang [sic] against Obama without some higher up approval.”

Bleachbit is “very expensive software”. – 24 October, Tampa, Florida

Bleachbit, software that removes junk files and private information, for instance to recover disk space or to protect privacy, is free.

Paid protests

“You know the protesters? I used to think I had some of these violent protests. These turned out to be paid, you know, came out through WikiLeaks and it came out through the documentary. These turned out to be paid people. They were giving them 1,500 [dollars], people to go in there and start fistfights.” – 24 October, in an interview with New Hampshire radio

The “documentary” Trump alludes to is a 16-minute, heavily edited video released by James O’Keefe, a conservative activist whose tactics led to a misdemeanor conviction in 2010 and whose organization was paid $10,000 by the Trump Foundation last year.

In the video, a Democratic activist named Scott Foval, working as a contractor for a consultant named Robert Creamer, appears to discuss recruiting protesters to disrupt Trump events.

The heavily edited video has Foval speaking approvingly of goading Trump supporters to “freak the fuck out” and discussing “conflict engagement in, in the lines at Trump rallies”, adding: “We’re starting anarchy here. If you’re there and you’re protesting and you do these actions, you will be attacked at Trump rallies.

Donald Trump gestures at a campaign rally in Springfield, Ohio. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

“That’s what we want. The whole point of it is, we know Trump’s people will freak the fuck out, the security team will freak out, and his supporters will lose their shit.”

He mentions “a script of engagement” and “agitator training”, but does not talk about committing violence.



“They’re starting confrontations in the line, right? They’re not starting confrontations in the rally because once they’re inside the rally they’re under secret service’s control. The key is initiating the conflict by having leading conversations with people who are naturally psychotic … You can message to draw them out and message them to punch you.”

Two other activists, Zulema Rodriguez and Aaron Minter, claim credit for a March protest in Chicago. The former says she “did the Chicago event” and the latter says: “When they shut all that, that was us.”

Foval was contracted by the Democratic National Committee months after the Chicago protest, and the video does not link him to Rodriguez or Minter. Campaign finance reports show the Clinton campaign paid Rodriguez $1,610 in late February, though the video makes no mention of it. The Clinton campaign has said Rodriguez’s employment ended in late February and pertained to her organizing work in Arizona. Rordriguez also worked for MoveOn.org, which took partial credit for the Chicago protest.

The out-of-context remarks were damning enough that the current chairwoman of the DNC, Donna Brazile, immediately condemned them. Foval was laid off and Creamer said he would be “stepping back” from work with Democrats.

Trump’s claim conflates quotes into a large, sinister story, but we lack facts to actually support most of it and the heavy editing of the video forces viewers to draw their own conclusions. There might be more to this story, but neither O’Keefe or Trump have shown clear proof for it.