Going unchecked

March 7, in an early morning Twitter rant, President* Trump made this claim:

122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!

"Gitmo" refers to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay naval base, "GTMO", that was set up in 2002 to hold terrorist suspects. A simple fact check, one phone call away for the man commanding a small army of intelligence professionals, would have told him something different. His statement is completely false, like so many other statements he has made.

The probable cause for this particular tweet was a passage an hour earlier on Fox News, where they quoted statistics from an old National Intelligence report from September 2016. Trump assumed, without bothering to ask anyone for confirmation, that all of these 122 people must have been released during Obama's presidency. That was implied by Fox by not stating when it happened, but they never said it straight out.

The reason Fox never said it is, of course, that it isn't true. Of those 122 prisoners, 113 were released by the Bush administration, and only 9 were let out under Obama's watch.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, mounted a pathetic first defense a few hours later by trying to claim that "of course the President meant in totality" and referred to prisoners released either by Bush or Obama. That is completely false on its face, because that is not what the President's tweet said. The text reads "released by the Obama administration".

The next day, Spicer instead tried a different approach and said that under the Bush administration, "most of the releases" were court-ordered, while Obama had an agenda to release everybody and close the camp. Obama certainly had that goal, and he was very vocal about it, but once again, Spicer's statement is completely false. Checking the facts, the proportion of court-ordered releases from Gitmo during the Bush presidency was around 4%. Thus, not even a handful of the 113 releases were court ordered. Calling a 4% fraction "most of the releases" is, once again, completely false. Coming from the official spokesperson of the White House, it's nothing short of a deceptive and nefarious lie.

Defending a lie with more lies, and not even bothering to make any of those lies hard to reveal, does not exactly make things better for the deeply troubled Trump administration.