The White House was reportedly going the extra mile in fact-checking President Donald Trump's speech ahead of his address to the nation on primetime television Tuesday night.
White House officials underscored the importance of internally checking the numbers and statistics of the speech Trump is set to deliver from the Oval Office, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday afternoon.
"It's really important we get this right," a senior White House official told the newspaper.
Journal reporter Rebecca Ballhaus added that Trump aides have been repeatedly challenged on the figures they are putting out as the president argues for a wall along the border with Mexico.
White House officials, aware of their credibility problem, are stressing the importance of internally fact-checking any stats ahead of Trump's address tonight. Trump aides have been repeatedly challenged on the numbers they're using to argue for a wall. https://t.co/F1Fdkq6Ydq
— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) January 8, 2019
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said late Monday that "if his past statements are any indication," Trump's address to the nation "will be full of malice and misinformation." The two plan to give a joint statement after Trump's speech that is slated for 9 p.m. and expected to run about seven to eight minutes.
Money for the border wall is the sticking point in passing funding and ending the partial government shutdown, which is on its 18th day and will be the longest in United States history if it continues into Saturday.
Trump is standing firm that he will not sign a funding bill that does not allocate $5.7 billion to the border wall.
Pelosi has challenged some statistics from White House aides on the border during private negotiations.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was fact-checked by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace when she stood by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's claim that thousands of "special interest aliens" had been stopped at the border.
"We know that, roughly, nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border," Sanders said.
The following day, Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway to explain why the White House had stated that about 4,000 terrorists were apprehended at the border, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it encountered only six immigrants with terrorist ties at the border in the first half of 2018.
Conway replied that the number, 3,755, did not refer to people at the border specifically, but instead included those apprehended at international airports.
"It got unfortunately confused by my colleague," Conway said of Sanders' statement. "That was an unfortunate misstatement and everybody makes mistakes, all of us."
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A Los Angeles native, Jessica Kwong grew up speaking Spanish, Cantonese and English, in that order. Her journalism career started ... Read more
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