Washington
CNN — 

President Donald Trump littered a Wednesday interview on Fox News with many of the same false claims he made earlier in his first three days back in the White House.


Speaking with Fox News host and ardent supporter Sean Hannity in the Oval Office, Trump delivered familiar inaccurate assertions related to the 2020 and 2024 elections, immigration and the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021 – plus a highly dubious new declaration that the assaults of police officers that day, some of them vicious, were “very minor incidents.”

Here is a fact check of 11 of his remarks.

The Capitol riot of January 6, 2021

The January 6 committee and records: Trump repeated his false claim that the House select committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol “deleted and destroyed all of the information that they collected,” reiterating later in the interview that the committee “destroyed all of the work that took place over two years


Trump’s claim that “all” information collected by the committee was deleted is not even close to true. While there has been a long-running dispute between Republicans and Democrats over the status of certain committee records that Republicans said should have been archived and that Democratic committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson argued did not have to be archived – such as because, he said, they didn’t prove useful to the committee’s investigation – the committee preserved a large volume of evidence.

As FactCheck.org reported, the committee released not only a final report that was more than 800 pages long, but also transcripts of interviews with more than 140 witnesses – and, according to Thompson, the committee’s staff worked with the National Archives and Records Administration and other government bodies “in preparing the Select Committee’s more than 1 million records for publication and archiving.”

Nancy Pelosi and January 6: Trump repeated his false claim that former House speaker Nancy Pelosi is “on tape admitting” that Trump had offered her 10,000 soldiers in advance of January 6, 2021, explaining that he was referring to footage taken by Pelosi’s daughter.

That’s not what the footage shows, and Pelosi never made any admission that she rejected a Trump offer of 10,000 troops. In fact, she has consistently said she never received such an offer – and she wouldn’t have had the power to reject the offer even if it had been made to her, since it is the president, not the House speaker, who commands the District of Columbia National Guard.


In the video recorded by Pelosi’s filmmaker daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, on January 6 and later obtained by House Republicans, who posted a 42-second snippet on social media in June, Pelosi was shown expressing frustration at the inadequate security at the Capitol, and she said at one point, “I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.” But that general statement is clearly not a specific admission that she had rejected a Trump offer of 10,000 troops.

In fact, another part of the video appears to undermine Trump’s claim that she was the person who turned down the National Guard. She said, “Why weren’t the National Guardhighly dubious new declaration there to begin with?”

After Trump began referencing this video in June, Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said in an email to CNN: “Numerous independent fact-checkers have confirmed again and again that Speaker Pelosi did not plan her own assassination on January 6th. Cherry-picked, out-of-context clips do not change the fact that the Speaker of the House is not in charge of the security of the Capitol Complex — on January 6th or any other day of the week.”

Elections

The youth vote in 2024: Trump repeated a false claim he has made repeatedly this week about his supposed performance with young voters in the 2024 election, this time declaring “I won youth by 36 points.”


He didn’t say how he was defining “the youth vote” — his transition team didn’t respond to CNN’s request for clarification earlier this week — but there is no basis for his claim by any reasonable definition.

Because votes in US elections are cast by secret ballot, there is no official source of information on who different subgroups of voters supported in any presidential election. But there is polling – and multiple high-quality surveys found that Trump did not win the youth vote in 2024, let alone by 36 points, even though it is true that he did better among young voters than he did in the 2020 election. According to CNN exit poll data, Vice President Kamala Harris beat Trump 54% to 43% among voters ages 18-24, 53% to 45% among voters ages 25-29, and 51% to 45% among voters ages 30-39.

Like every poll, exit polls are estimates of how a particular group voted, so there is the potential for error. But the Associated Press’ VoteCast estimates, collected using a different methodology, also found Harris prevailed with young voters. Even if Harris’ actual margins were smaller than those found by either CNN or the Associated Press, there is simply no sign that Trump dominated Harris with young voters as he claimed.