It’s an age-old contention among Republican circles that “fact checkers” like Politifact take great pains to find claims made by the GOP to be false or misleading. At the same time, those same websites take equally great pains to find Democrats telling the truth.
This isn’t an example of the worst kind of hackery, since GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump did retain a “mostly true” rating, but it irks me nonetheless.
In his speech Thursday night at the Republican National Convention, Trump said that his opponent, Hillary Clinton “wants sanctuary cities.” Politifact defines sanctuary cities as “jurisdictions that have laws or practices that limit their assistance to federal immigration officials.” These cities don’t require (or even forbid) local law enforcement officers alerting the Department of Homeland Security to illegal immigrants.
In 2008, when Clinton was running for president for the first time, she said she would not crack down on sanctuary cities when asked about them by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. She echoed the sentiments of many supporters of sanctuary cities by saying the reason she wouldn’t crack down is so that illegal immigrants wouldn’t fear the police and would be able to report crimes.
Now in 2016, a Clinton spokesman told Politifact: “Hillary Clinton believes that sanctuary cities can help further public safety, and she has defended those policies going back years.”
Sounds to me like Trump was absolutely correct when he said Clinton “wants sanctuary cities.”
So how did Politifact knock him down a peg to just “mostly true”? They did so by counting Clinton’s criticism of San Francisco for not reporting a violent illegal immigrant to Homeland Security.
“Well, what should be done is any city should listen to the Department of Homeland Security, which as I understand it, urged them to deport this man again after he got out of prison another time,” Clinton told CNN’s Brianna Keilar. “Here’s a case where we’ve deported, we’ve deported, we’ve deported. He ends back up in our country, and I think the city made a mistake. The city made a mistake, not to deport someone that the federal government strongly felt should be deported.”
She added: “So I have absolutely no support for a city that ignores the strong evidence that should be acted on.” Clinton went on to say that she didn’t think minor infractions like traffic citations should be cause to deport someone, however.
How does this criticism diminish Clinton’s support for sanctuary cities? Does Politifact think supporters of sanctuary cities don’t want any illegal immigrant reported or deported, even violent ones? I can’t imagine that’s the case.
So perhaps the more important question is: Why did Politifact count a true claim as just “mostly true”? I think the answer is pretty obvious. When the inevitable article comes out comparing the number of Trump and Clinton’s “pants on fire” and “true” statements, a systematic downgrading of Trump’s actual “true” statements will make him look like the less honest one.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
