On May 6, RNC head Reince Priebus was asked about Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric. His answer? “He’s trying.” Over the next month, Trump attacked a federal judge for his Mexican heritage, called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” and implied that President Obama was a terrorist sympathizer.
Still think Priebus has any credibility?
We’ll pile on. In 2011, Priebus said the unemployment rate “rivals the Great Depression.” PolitiFact called that “herculean cherry picking.” A few weeks later, he tweeted that the average ER wait time in California is five hours due to Obamacare. The actual number was 31 minutes. Priebus even claimed that Hillary Clinton lied to the FBI—a charge FBI Director James Comey entirely dismisses.
It’s no wonder that pathological liar Donald Trump consistently praises the GOP chair.
REINCE PRIEBUS LIED ABOUT JOB LOSSES UNDER OBAMA
In 2011, Reince Priebus claimed the U.S. had lost 26 million jobs under President Obama.
Asked by host Meredith Vieira whether the recent run of job growth and falling unemployment numbers ‘throw a real monkey wrench’ into his party’s argument, Priebus said, ‘No, not at all. Under this president, he’s promised millions and millions of jobs. We’ve lost 26 million jobs, Meredith, since he’s been president. He promised under an $850 billion stimulus program that we’d be on a path to recovery. We’ll none of that has come true. … I think that pointing out a snail’s pace in the job (growth) numbers is not going to be enough to undo 26 million jobs that are lost, Meredith.’
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PolitiFact:
The 26 million figure he cited on the Today show was ridiculously wrong. We rate it Pants on Fire.” “Perhaps Priebus simply misspoke, or perhaps he misplaced a decimal point and ended up wrong by a factor of 10. Whatever the reason, the 26 million figure he cited on the Today show was ridiculously wrong. We rate it Pants on Fire.
REINCE PRIEBUS LIED ABOUT UNEMPLOYMENT
Priebus: “We have unemployment that rivals the Great Depression.”
Priebus said, in part, ‘Look, I’m not defending these guys, but the fact of the matter is, we have big issues here to tackle in this country. We have unemployment that rivals the Great Depression.
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PolitiFact: There is “little statistical support that it [unemployment] ‘rivals’” the Great Depression, any comparison “requires herculean cherry picking.”
First, is it fair to say that ‘we have unemployment that rivals the Great Depression’? As bad as the unemployment situation is currently — and it’s unquestionably bad — there’s little statistical support that it ‘rivals’ the situation that existed during the Great Depression…Any way you cut it, peak unemployment since the start of the most recent recession, as bad as it has been, remains well under half of the peak it reached during the Great Depression. For more than a decade, annual unemployment never fell below 14.3 percent, or a level about 40 percent higher than the worst of what we’ve seen recently. Any suggestion that the two situations are equivalent requires herculean cherry picking. So Priebus is wrong on the first claim.
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PolitiFact rated Preibus’ comparison of the unemployment rate to Great Depression numbers as “False.”
So where does this leave us? Today’s jobs picture is the worst it has been in decades, not just measured by unemployment rates but also by duration of unemployment. However, all of the available statistics — imperfect though they may be — suggest that today’s numbers aren’t anywhere near high enough to ‘rival’ those that prevailed for more than a decade during the Great Depression. We rate Priebus’ statement False.
REINCE PRIEBUS LIED ABOUT OBAMACARE
Preibus: “Thanks to #ObamaCare, average E.R. wait in California is 5 hours.”
On July 7, 2014, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus sent the following tweet: ‘Thanks to #ObamaCare, average E.R. wait in California is 5 hours: http://gop.cm/6015YqKd And ‘it’s only going to get worse.’
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PolitiFact ruled the claim in Priebus’ tweet “False.”
In a tweet, Priebus said, ‘Thanks to #ObamaCare, average E.R. wait in California is 5 hours.’ The statistic was based on data from 2012 — two years before the provisions of the ACA could have had any impact. Meanwhile, the five-hour figure is just one of three measurements of E.R. wait times — and not even necessarily the best one. If you count from the time of a patient’s arrival to being seen by a health care professional, the wait time was 31 minutes in California. Even the strongest support for the claim is far from solid: A survey of emergency physicians found signs that E.R. traffic had increased since the ACA took effect in January, but the results were mixed, and this documents patient volume, not wait times. We rate the claim False.
REINCE PRIEBUS LIED ABOUT EMAIL INVESTIGATION
Priebus claimed Hillary Clinton lied to the FBI.
I think she should worry about telling the truth to federal investigators and quit lying to the American people. And she should look in the mirror and ask herself what character is and what integrity is, and she’s not going to see it if she’s looking at herself. I think anyone that lies to the FBI and having an FBI Director tell the whole world that she is a bonafide liar in regard to national secrets, the most precious secrets that our country has, and she lied about them, I think that, I think someone like that isn’t even qualified to be president.
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FBI Director James Comey testified that Hillary Clinton did not lie to the FBI.
FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers on Thursday that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton did not lie to the FBI about her handling of emails as secretary of state and did not break the law. Comey told a Republican-led oversight panel in the U.S. House of Representatives that no reasonable prosecutor would charge Clinton with a crime over her use of private email servers while she was secretary of state, some of which were used to transmit classified information.