11:35 p.m. ET, October 21, 2019
Fact check: Trump's statements on the impeachment probe
From CNN's Daniel Dale and Tara Subramaniam
President Donald Trump speaks in a cabinet meeting at the White House on October 21, 2019.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
President Donald Trump delivered a blistering monologue to the journalists he allowed into his
Cabinet meeting on Monday -- making many inaccurate or misleading claims.
Here's a fact check on his statements on the Ukraine scandal:
The whistleblower's account
- Trump said: "The whistleblower gave a false account." He also said the whistleblower's account was "totally false."
- Fact check: The whistleblower's account of Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was largely accurate. In fact, the rough transcript released by Trump himself showed that the whistleblower's three primary allegations about the call were correct or very close to correct.
The whistleblower's knowledge
- Trump said: "The whistleblower had second- and third-hand information. You remember that, it was a big problem."
- Fact check: Some of the whistleblower's information came from others, but some did not. Michael Atkinson, the Trump-appointed inspector general for the intelligence community, noted that the whistleblower had "direct knowledge of certain alleged conduct," and that the whistleblower was "credible" even about events on which the whistleblower did not have firsthand knowledge.
The call document
- Trump said: "I released a transcription then by stenographers of the exact conversation I had."
- Fact check: The document released by the White House explicitly says, on the first page, that it is not an exact transcript of the call. The document notes that "a number of factors can affect the accuracy of the record, including poor telecommunications connections and variations in accent and/or interpretation."
The whistleblower being 'gone'
- Trump said: "You never hear, what happened to the whistleblower? They're gone, because they've been discredited."
- Fact check: There is no evidence that either of the two whistleblowers are now somehow "gone." The whistleblowers have not vanished," Bradley Moss, a colleague of Mark Zaid, a lawyer for the two whistleblowers, said on Twitter.
The whistleblower and Adam Schiff
- Trump said: "So was there actually an informant? Maybe the informant was Schiff. It could be shifty Schiff. In my opinion it's possibly Schiff."
- Facts check: Schiff, a Democratic congressman and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did not have access to the internal White House information the whistleblower revealed. He could not have told the whistleblower about the contents of Trump's phone call with Zelensky or other information the whistleblower reported.