Seeing President Donald Trump getting called out for racism happens on a near-daily basis. But what doesn’t happen too often is hearing it from his own Department of Justice.
Trump’s justice department has just called him out for spreading racist lies following a 2017 Freedom of Information Act request that was filed last year by Lawfare journalist Benjamin Wittes, who wanted to get Trump’s racist statement from his February 2017 State of the Union address fact-checked:
According to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.”
Trump has kept this terrorism lie alive, reiterating it earlier this year when he tweeted that a “new report from DOJ & DHS shows that nearly 3 in 4 individuals convicted of terrorism-related charges are foreign-born. We have submitted to Congress a list of resources and reforms we need to keep America safe, including moving away from a random chain migration and lottery system, to one that is merit-based.”
The Department of Justice had originally ignored Wittes’ FOIA request, which prompted him to file suit against the department. Eventually, Wittes got an answer from the DOJ in a letter that told him the president’s claim was false. Trump’s DOJ concluded that most people that were convicted of terrorism after 9/11 have actually come from inside the country — not outside as Trump would like America to believe so he can further his anti-immigration agenda.
Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe reacted to the news on Twitter when he found out about the DOJ’s letter. Tribe spoke about the letter and the president’s racist lies to Salon and said:
When I heard the president’s State of the Union speech and his claim that a vast majority of the terrorists’ actions in the United States subsequent to 9/11 were committed by immigrants, people who were born abroad, I had my doubts because I had never seen anything like that. But it seemed to me to be of a piece with the president’s persistent pattern of demonizing and scapegoating immigrants as part of his appeal to the hard core of his base.”
Tribe also remarked how unusual it was for Trump’s own officials to call him out like this.
For the Justice Department in effect to say that the president was lying, which is how I read their letter, is quite remarkable. I don’t think I know of any other instance in American history in which a president’s own Justice Department had to say that the president was making up information that simply didn’t exist. I think it’s quite outrageous, and I’m glad that Ben Wittes pursued the matter.”
In another troubling but true statement, Tribe explained that there was a big difference between the lies that Trump tells and the inaccurate claims of other presidents — which Tribe regards as the most troubling part about this. Tribe warned that Trump doesn’t exaggerate like his predecessors — he outright makes things up to promote his agenda:
I think things that are verifiably false, claims of a factual nature about what the data of the Department of Justice show or how many people were at the inauguration, those are not the kinds of lies that prior presidents have told.
They have exaggerated: I think President Obama, when he said you can keep your doctor under Obamacare no matter what, was not describing the truth, but I really doubt that he was deliberately fabricating. It really is hard to find instances. Maybe when George W. Bush said that there were weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq], one might call that a lie. Yet it was backed up by data from his own administration, by people under him who had massaged the information, and he probably believed it.
I think that, in Trump’s case, we have something that is qualitatively different. If he actually believes the absolutely falsifiable statements that he makes, then he is mentally ill. If he doesn’t believe it, he is deliberately lying. I don’t think in our history we’ve had any president who comes close to that.”
Trump will say anything to get his way, no matter how dangerous it is to the people who are victims of his lies. Hopefully, Trump’s team will start calling him out more often to protect America.
Featured image via screen capture
