Donald Trump Keeps Saying He Opposed The Iraq War, But No One Can Find Any Evidence
The Republican candidate has yet to produce the articles he claims exist.
huffingtonpost.com
NEW YORK -- On Sunday's "Meet the Press," host Chuck Todd did something too rare in TV news this election cycle: He challenged Donald Trump’s persistent claim of being a vocal opponent of the 2003 Iraq invasion.
"None of us have been able to find any instance where before the invasion you came out against this war," Todd told Trump, who has asserted repeatedly on the campaign trail, in several debates and in numerous TV interviews that he was publicly against the invasion.
“If you look at 2003, there are articles," Trump responded. "If you look at 2004, there are articles."
Just hours before Trump's appearance on "Meet the Press," CNN's John King said on "Inside Politics" that he couldn't find any such articles, either.
“Donald Trump repeated again last night in the debate that he was an early opponent of the Iraq war. Simply not the case,” King said during a journalist roundtable.
“If you go back and look through time in 2003, before the war, there’s no public record of Trump saying ‘Don’t do this,'" King continued. "There is, in 2004, after the war was going south, he became very vocal in saying Bush was mangling the administration of the war. But he keeps saying that he was out there vocally before the war. Mr. Trump, if there’s a public record, send it on in. We’d love to see it. But it doesn’t exist if you go looking for it.”
Todd and King aren't alone, as several outlets, including this one, have failed to find evidence Trump publicly opposed the war before the March 19, 2003, invasion. His campaign has yet to produce such evidence.
The Huffington Post reported in September that there was no support for Trump’s claim and noted that a Reuters article the real estate developer frequently cited to back up his assertion was published in July 2004 -- more than 16 months after the U.S invaded Iraq. But Trump's claim continued to go unchallenged in TV interviews, as HuffPost pointed out the following month.
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