10 Trump election lies his own officials called false
By Daniel Dale, CNN Updated 2:34 PM EDT, Thu June 16, 2022 Washington CNN — Many of former President Donald Trump’s own officials knew that his false claims about the 2020 election were false. In some cases, they told him to his face that his information was wrong.
Testimony to the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol has revealed that it wasn’t only journalists, elections officials and Democrats who were rejecting Trump’s lies about what happened in the election he lost but claimed to win. People Trump selected for important positions, from his campaign manager to the US attorney general, were also saying – mostly in private – that Trump’s fraud allegations were baseless.
The January 6 hearings are ongoing, and the public has only seen committee-selected video clips of certain former officials’ testimony. We know that some other figures in Trump’s orbit were joining him in promoting lies about the election, not rejecting those lies.
But the hearings have already shown that Trump’s government appointees or people on his campaign dismissed at least 10 of his false claims – from the overarching lie that the election was stolen to various specific tales about what happened in swing states he lost. Here’s a list.
1) The false claim of a ‘stolen’ election
Trump has incessantly repeated the false claim that the election was stolen from him – baselessly insisting that he would have been returned to the White House if not for massive fraud and other nefarious Democratic behavior.
But William Barr, who served as attorney general under Trump, testified to the committee: “I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the President was bullshit.” Barr testified that “my opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud.”
Richard Donoghue, who served as principal associate deputy attorney general and then as acting deputy attorney general, also testified that claims of major fraud were untrue – and that he told Trump directly: “I said something to the effect of, ‘Sir, we’ve done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed. We’ve looked at Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada. We’re doing our job. Much of the info you’re getting is false.’”
Jeffrey Rosen, who served as deputy attorney general and then briefly, after Barr’s resignation in December 2020, as acting attorney general, said that when Trump would cite a supposed election impropriety, claiming that “people are telling me this” or “I heard this” or “I saw on television,” they could correct him: “We were in a position to say, ‘Our people already looked at that. And we know that you’re getting bad information. That’s – that’s not correct. It’s been demonstrated to be incorrect from our point of view. It’s been debunked.”
Derek Lyons, who was White House staff secretary and counselor to Trump, testified that, at a meeting about a month and a half after Election Day, top White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann “told the group, the President included, that, you know, none of those allegations had been substantiated to the point where they could be the basis for any litigation challenge to the election.”
Alex Cannon, who was a lawyer for the Trump campaign, testified that he told Vice President Mike Pence at the White House in November 2020 that he had not found “anything sufficient to alter the results of the election” and that he had told White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on a November 2020 call that “we weren’t finding anything that would be sufficient to change the results in any of the key states.”
Matt Morgan, who was the Trump campaign’s general counsel, testified that, as of early January 2021, he and top Pence advisers – chief of staff Marc Short and attorney Greg Jacob – were in agreement that even “if aggregated and read most favorably to the campaign,” election “fraud, maladministration, abuse or irregularities” were “not sufficient to be outcome-determinative.”
2) The false claim that Trump had won on Election Night
Trump falsely claimed in a speech on Election Night that he had won the election because he had leads in the vote counts in several key states. Trump used similar language in his rally speech on January 6, 2021 – claiming that “our election was over at 10 o’clock in the evening,” when the vote counts showed him leading in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, but “then late in the evening or early in the morning, boom, these explosions of bullshit.”
But it was clear to other key figures in Trump’s orbit – as it was to millions of others – that his leads in the early Election Night count, as millions of votes remained uncounted, did not mean he had won. Bill Stepien, who was Trump’s campaign manager, testified that Election Night was “too early to call the race”: “It was far too early to be making any calls like that. Ballots – ballots were still being counted. Ballots were still going to be counted for days.”
Stepien said he had explained to Trump that early returns would be “positive,” but they would then have a long night waiting for the counting of additional ballots. The fact that states’ vote counts got worse for Trump as the hours went by, Barr said, was not indicative of fraud: Barr noted that “people had been talking for weeks, and everyone understood for weeks, that that was going to be what happened on Election Night.”
Indeed, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, testified that people at the White House on Election Night were a little nervous to see what would happen with “the red wave or the red mirage.” Red mirage was a term media outlets had been citing for months to explain that early results would almost certainly be misleadingly favorable to Trump because it would take time for states to count the mail-in ballots Trump had warned his own supporters against using.
Miller testified that he recalled saying on Election Night “that we should not go and declare victory until we had a better sense of the numbers.” Ivanka Trump, Trump’s daughter and senior adviser, testified that she didn’t know if she had held a “firm view” about what Trump should say on Election Night, but she added, “The results were still being counted. It was becoming clear that the race would not be called on Election Night.”
3) A false claim about fraudulent totals in Philadelphia
Trump tweeted in December 2020 that there were “MORE VOTES THAN ACTUAL VOTERS” in Philadelphia. He repeated that claim in a January 2022 interview with NPR, though he phrased it as a question.
Barr testified that the claim was “absolute rubbish.” (In reality, about two-thirds of Philadelphia’s registered voters cast a ballot in the 2020 election.) Barr added: “The turnout in Philadelphia was in line with the state’s turnout and in fact it was not as – as impressive as many suburban counties. And there was nothing strange about the Philadelphia turnout. It wasn’t like there was all these unexpected votes that came out in Philadelphia.”
4) A false claim about absentee ballots in Pennsylvania
Trump tweeted in late November 2020 to promote a graphic that suggested Pennsylvania had recorded far more mail-in votes in the general election than the number of mail-in ballots it had actually distributed to voters. Trump added, “The 1,126,940 votes were created out of thin air.”
But the graphic was plain wrong; the supposed 1,126,940 extra votes did not exist at all, as Pennsylvania journalists quickly explained. The graphic – which had been posted by Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, now the Republican gubernatorial nominee – improperly contrasted numbers from the November 2020 general election with numbers from the state’s June 2020 primaries.
Barr explained in his testimony that Mastriano had been comparing apples to oranges. “Once you actually go and look and compare apples to apples, there’s no discrepancy at all,” he said. 5) A false claim about a truckload of ballots being driven from New York to Pennsylvania
In December 2020, Trump tweeted out a video clip featuring a Fox interview with a truck driver who claimed he had been unwittingly used in a scheme to transport numerous completed mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania.
Donoghue testified that he told Trump: “I essentially said, ‘Look, we looked at that allegation. We looked at both ends, both the people who load the truck and the people unload the truck. And that allegation was not supported by the evidence.”
6) False claims about Dominion voting technology
Trump and some of his allies made multiple false claims about the election technology provided by a company called Dominion Voting Systems. They inaccurately alleged that Dominion technology had switched Trump votes to Biden votes in large numbers and that Dominion was a company founded in Venezuela to rig elections for late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. (Dominion is pursuing a series of defamation lawsuits over such claims; the company was actually founded in Canada, is not connected to Chavez, and did not flip or otherwise manipulate 2020 votes.)
Barr testified: “I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public, that there was this systemic corruption in the system and that their votes didn’t count and that these machines controlled by somebody else were actually determining it, which was complete nonsense. And it was being laid out there. And I told them that it was – that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that. And it was doing a great, grave disservice to the country.”
Barr added of Trump and Dominion: “And I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff he has, you know, lost contact with – with – he’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff.” Barr also said of Trump: “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”
Cannon testified that he told Trump adviser Peter Navarro in mid-November 2020 that he “didn’t believe the Dominion allegations.” And Herschmann dismissed various theories put forward by lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted a variety of conspiracy theories about election technology and foreign interference. (Powell is one of the people being sued by Dominion.) Herschmann called at least one theory “completely nuts” – it wasn’t clear in the clip shown by the committee which theory he was referring to – and scoffed at claims about “Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelans.”
7) A false claim about Dominion machines in Michigan
Trump tweeted in December 2020 to claim that there was a “68% error rate in Michigan Voting Machines” – exaggerating a conspiratorial consultant’s finding, about a single Michigan county, that was itself quickly debunked by Michigan media.
Donoghue, too, rejected the “68% error rate” claim. He testified of a conversation with Trump: “And then I went into, for instance, this thing from Michigan, this report about ’68% error rate.’ Reality is it was only 0.0063% error rate, less than 1 in 15,000. So the President accepted that. He said, ‘OK, fine, but what about the others?’”
8) A false claim about non-citizens voting in Arizona
Trump falsely claimed in his January 6, 2021, rally speech that, in Arizona, “over 36,000 ballots were illegally cast by non-citizens.”
Stepien testified that the claim that “thousands of illegal citizens, people not eligible to vote” had cast Arizona ballots was a “wild claim” that “on its face didn’t seem, you know, realistic or possible to me.” He said that after asking Cannon to look into the claim, it turned out “the reality of that was not illegal citizens voting in the election” but rather that the votes were cast by “people who were eligible to vote.”
9) The false story about election workers in Georgia
Trump and some of his allies, notably including lawyer Rudy Giuliani, repeatedly made false claims about fraud they insisted had been committed by elections workers in Fulton County, Georgia, home to Atlanta. Trump declared in his January 6, 2021, rally speech that workers had pulled “suitcases of ballots out from under a table” and illegally scanned “tens of thousands of votes.”
Donoghue testified that he debunked the claim at length to Trump: “The President kept fixating on this suitcase that supposedly had fraudulent ballots and that the suitcase was rolled out from under the table. And I said, ‘No sir, there is no suitcase.’ You can watch that video over and over. There is no suitcase. There is a wheeled bin where they carry the ballots, and that’s just how they move ballots around that facility. There’s nothing suspicious about that at all. I told him that there was no multiple scanning of the ballots – one of the – one part of that allegation was that they were taking one ballot and scanning it through three or four or five times to rack up votes, presumably for Vice President Biden. I told him that the video did not support that.”
Byung “BJay” Pak, a Trump-appointed former US attorney in Georgia who was previously a Republican state legislator, testified that the supposed “suitcase” was actually an “official lockbox” for storing ballots at that facility and that the full video disproved the fraud claims Giuliani had tried to promote by showing Georgia legislators a limited section of the footage. Pak, who resigned in January 2021, testified: “We interviewed – the FBI interviewed – the individuals that are depicted in the videos, that purportedly were double, triple counting of the ballots, and determined that nothing irregular happened in the counting, and the allegations made by Mr. Giuliani were false.”
10) The false claim that “2000 Mules” proves the election was rigged
Trump has seized on a movie called “2000 Mules,” made by a right-wing filmmaker, that claims to contain proof of a major fraudulent scheme involving Democrats and the submission of mail-in ballots at drop boxes. Trump has suggested that the movie proves his assertion that the election was rigged.
But similar to numerous others who have pointed out major holes in “2000 Mules,” Barr described the movie’s purported cell phone evidence as “singularly unimpressive,” said its purported photo evidence was “lacking,” and noted that it “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting” of ballots.
Trump fills his CNN town hall with a fire hose of old and new false claims
"Fact check: Trump, in 2023, tells a new lie about the 2020 election"
Analysis by Glenn Kessler The Fact Checker May 11, 2023 at 12:26 a.m. EDT
Former president Donald Trump participates in a Republican town hall moderated by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., on Wednesday. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
For more than an hour, former president Donald Trump sent forth a torrent of false and misleading claims during a CNN town hall. Here’s a roundup of some of the more notable ones, arranged by subject matter.
The 2020 election
Trump repeated many of his familiar lies about the 2020 election.
“That was a rigged election, and it’s a shame that we had to go through it. … If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes. … If you look at what happened in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, if you look at what happened in Detroit, Michigan, if you look at what happened in Atlanta, millions of votes, and all you have to do is take a look at government cameras.”
Trump has claimed that in Philadelphia, there were more votes than voters. This falsehood is based on a misunderstanding of an incomplete voter registration database, which was missing numbers for some of the most populous counties in the state. “To put it simply, this so-called analysis was based on incomplete data,” said Pennsylvania’s Department of State, which labeled the claim .. https://wjactv.com/news/local/pa-republican-lawmakers-analysis-finds-presidential-election-numbers-dont-add-up .. “obvious misinformation.”
He also made the same claim about Detroit — more votes than there were voters. Detroiters cast 257,619 ballots in the Nov. 3 election. There are 506,305 registered voters in the city. Trump’s falsehood is based on a ridiculous misunderstanding: An affidavit .. https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.283580/gov.uscourts.gand.283580.7.1_2.pdf .. filed in a Georgia election case that made this claim mixed up two states that started with “Mi.” The precincts were not in Wayne County, Mich., but in some of the reddest parts of Minnesota — Trump country.
First of all, there was no “water main break.” A urinal simply leaked in the State Farm Arena, where absentee and military ballots were counted in the state.
Additionally, the video doesn’t even prove Trump’s frequent assertion that GOP monitors were told to leave the counting room for poll workers to engage in illegal ballot counting. Georgia elections official Gabriel Sterling, a Republican, at the time said no formal announcement to clear the room was ever made. Sterling added that the full surveillance feed shows workers handling ballots that were stored and processed in full view of the news media and partisan monitors earlier in the evening.
“Even if you just look recently with the 51 intelligence agents, that made a 16-point difference.”
Trump is referring to a letter .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-biden-laptop-claims-russian-disinfo/?itid=lk_inline_manual_21 .. signed by more than 50 former senior intelligence officials, including five CIA chiefs, that said the release of the emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Joe Biden cited the letter in a presidential debate to dismiss allegations Trump made regarding the laptop. But there’s no evidence it made a difference in the election result.
Twitter briefly blocked users from sharing the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop — a decision officials later said was a mistake. We’ve previously examined .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/21/lawmakers-cite-fishy-poll-suggest-laptop-tale-would-have-swayed-vote/?itid=lk_inline_manual_49&itid=lk_inline_manual_23 .. a poll often cited by Trump allies that suggests telling the tale would have swayed the election. The poll was done by the Polling Company, a conservative pollster founded by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, on behalf of the Media Research Center. Our analysis found that the poll conveniently supported a line that Republicans are pushing — that a lack of media coverage related to the Hunter Biden laptop made a difference in the presidential election.
But when you dig into the results, which are swayed by aggressively misleading questions, it shows that for all but a tiny percentage of Biden voters, the story would not have made a difference — even if framed as a still-unproved scandal. The questions in the poll are similar to messages the Trump campaign used in the final weeks before the election — and it still fell short.
“The Constitution says that we’re supposed to have legal and well-maintained and well-looked-at elections.”
The Constitution .. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text .. has a number of provisions on elections, such as “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof,” but it does not say what Trump claimed.
Jan. 6 attack
Trump continued to repeat previously debunked statements about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
“January 6, it was the largest crowd I have ever spoken to. That was prior to the walk down to the Capitol building. I don’t think — and I have spoken to hundreds of thousands of people. I have never spoken to a crowd as large as this.”
Trump routinely exaggerates the size of crowds attending his rallies. At the time he claimed the crowd was about 250,000 people. The Associated Press estimated the crowd at Trump’s rally on The Ellipse was about 10,000 people. The final report of the Jan. 6 select congressional committee quoted one official as saying the crowd was 30,000 to 35,000.
“Well, I offered them [Rep. Nancy Pelosi and District Mayor Muriel E. Bowser] National Guard. I said, we will give you soldiers. We will give you National Guard. We will give you whatever you want. … I offered them 10,000 soldiers. I said it could be 10,000. It could be more. But I offered them specifically 10,000 soldiers.”
This is false. The evidence shows Trump did not issue any formal request — so there was nothing for Pelosi or Bowser to heed. The Jan. 6 committee report says it found “no evidence” to support the claim that he ordered 10,000 troops.
Moreover, the committee said that when he referenced so many troops, it was not because he wanted to protect the Capitol. He “floated the idea of having 10,000 National Guardsmen deployed to protect him and his supporters from any supposed threats by left-wing counterprotesters,” the report says.
The report says that Trump brought up the issue on at least three occasions but in such vague and ambiguous ways that no senior official regarded his words as an order.
His presidential policies
Trump repeated a number of exaggerated claims about his presidential record.
“We had the greatest economy in the history of our country, probably the greatest economy in the history of the world.”
Trump made a variation of this claim almost every other day in the last two years of his presidency, even after the pandemic tanked the economy — about 500 times .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/fact-checker-most-repeated-disinformation/#U.S-economy?itid=lk_inline_manual_48 . It’s wrong. By just about any key measure in the modern era, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton presided over stronger economic growth than Trump. The gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in 2019, slipping from 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.4 percent in 2017. But in 1997, 1998 and 1999, GDP grew 4.5 percent, 4.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively. Yet even that period paled in comparison with the postwar boom in the 1950s or the 1960s. Growth between 1962 and 1966 ranged from 4.4 percent to 6.6 percent. In 1950 and 1951, it was 8.7 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate reached a low of 3.5 percent under Trump, but it dipped as low as 2.5 percent in 1953. Advertisement
“I got you the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country, bigger than the Reagan cuts.”
“We got the biggest regulation and regulatory cuts.”
Trump may have grounds to brag about his efforts to peel back regulations, but his claim of the most or biggest regulation cuts cannot be easily verified and appears to be false. There is no reliable metric on which to judge this claim — or to compare him to previous presidents. Many experts say the most significant regulatory changes in U.S. history were the deregulation of airline, rail and trucking industries during the Carter administration, which are estimated to provide consumers with $70 billion in annual benefits. A detailed November 2020 .. https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/11017-coglianesesarinshapirotrumpderegulationreport11012 .. report by the Penn Program on Regulation concluded that “without exception, each major claim we have uncovered by the President or other White House official about regulation turns out to be exaggerated, misleading, or downright untrue.” The report said that the Trump administration had not reduced the overall number of pages from the regulatory code book, and it completed far more regulatory actions than deregulatory ones once the full data were examined.
“I took in hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes from China.”
Through the end of his presidency, Trump-imposed tariffs garnered about $75 billion on products from China .. http://wapo.st/trumpclaimsdb?claim=31586 ,, . But tariffs — essentially a tax — are generally paid by importers, such as U.S. companies, who in turn pass on most or all of the costs to consumers or producers who use Chinese materials in their products. So, ultimately, Americans footed the bill for Trump’s tariffs, not the Chinese. Moreover, the China tariff revenue was reduced by $28 billion in payments the government made to farmers who lost business because China stopped buying U.S. soybeans, hogs, cotton and other products in response.
“We were going to make so much money from oil, we were going to start paying off [national] debt.”
The federal budget deficit soared under Trump and the United States was never close to paying off any debt.
Presidential papers
Trump reprised false talking points about the criminal investigation into whether he failed to return presidential documents he took to his estate in Florida.
“I had every right to under the Presidential Records Act. You have the Presidential Records Act. I was there and I took what I took and it gets declassified … it says you talk, you negotiate, you make a deal. It’s not criminal, by the way.”
As Collins noted, this is not what the PRA says .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/20/trumps-misleading-evocation-presidential-records-act/?itid=lk_inline_manual_61 . Under the PRA, a president has a lot of leeway to deem something a presidential paper while he is president. But the possibility of such give-and-take ended when the clock struck noon on Jan. 20, 2021. “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President,” the law says.
For all of Trump’s focus on the PRA, there is another law at play here — the Federal Records Act. The PRA does not have a criminal enforcement provision. But a 2012 ruling .. https://casetext.com/case/judicial-watch-inc-v-natl-archives-records-admin .. by Judge Amy Berman Jackson — rejecting a lawsuit by a conservative group that Clinton’s sock-drawer tapes should be part of the Archives — said that the FRA grants the National Archives and Records Administration the authority to initiate “action through the Attorney General for the recovery of records wrongfully removed and for other redress provided by law.”
In other words, NARA cannot act alone but must work with the Justice Department. That’s what NARA did when it concluded Trump had not returned all of the records sought by the agency. The case eventually moved beyond a possible failure to comply with the PRA — or even whether the documents Trump kept were classified. The FBI’s search warrant cited statutes .. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10810 .. related to three possible offenses, such as willfully retaining national defense information and destruction of evidence in a criminal investigation.
“Biden, on the other hand, he has 1,850 boxes. He had boxes sent to Chinatown, Chinatown, where they don’t speak even English in that Chinatown we’re talking about. … And nobody even knows where they are, 1,800. … Why is it that Biden had nine boxes in Chinatown? And he gets a lot of money from China.”
After his term as vice president ended, Biden had a temporary office in Chinatown in the District. There is no evidence he has received money from China.
“The other thing, the vice president cannot declassify. He didn’t have the right to declassify.”
This is false. Under an executive order .. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2010-title3-vol1/pdf/CFR-2010-title3-vol1-eo13526.pdf .. signed by President Barack Obama in 2009, the vice president has original classification authority. Trump has claimed that he declassified the documents he kept. Biden, while vice president, had the right to declassify material if he had classified the material in the first place.
“NARA has red-flagged a thing called the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights, because they consider them dangerous documents.”
Trump is exaggerating. NARA does not single out the founding documents. Instead, it offers a warning on every page of its online catalogue: “The Catalog and webpages contain some content that may be harmful or difficult to view. NARA’s records span the history of the United States, and it is our charge to preserve and make available these historical records. As a result, some of the materials presented here may reflect outdated, biased, offensive, and possibly violent views and opinions. In addition, some of the materials may relate to violent or graphic events and are preserved for their historical significance.”
Miscellaneous
“Millions and millions of people are coming here. They’re being released from prisons. They’re being released from mental institutions. And we have millions of people pouring into our country.”
“My poll numbers went up and they went up with the other fake charge, too, because what’s happening is they’re doing this for election interference.”
Trump falsely suggests E. Jean Carroll filed suit against him for defamation because he’s doing well in GOP presidential preference polls. She first filed suit against him in November 2019.
“If you look at Chicago, Chicago has the single toughest gun policies in the nation. They are so tough, you can’t breathe … All of those places are the worst and most dangerous places.”
“We’ve given [to Ukraine] so far $171 billion. They’ve given — they, meaning European Union, which is approximately the same size, altogether, as our economy, they’ve given about 20.”
“When you have that policy, people don’t come. If a family hears they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come. So I know it sounds harsh, but if you remember, remember they said I was building prisons for children? It turned out that it was Obama that was building the prisons for the children.”
As president, Trump repeatedly sought to deflect criticism over his separation policy by noting that the Obama administration used cage enclosures to hold migrants before he did. The Obama administration never separated families systematically like Trump; there may have been some separation if there was suspicion that the children were being trafficked or a claimed parent-child relationship did not actually exist. A 2021 Justice Department Inspector General report documented that the separation policy was implemented after pressure from Trump for more dramatic action on the southern border. After the report was released, former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein issued a statement: “It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better.”
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