'Fake Tweets': New Trump Twitter Bash Is A Falsehood About Obama

President Trump tweeted on March 7, "122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!"

A bold claim from a sitting president about his predecessor. Only it's not true.

Politifact, FactCheck.org and the Associated Press Fact Checks, among others, confirm that the claim in the tweet is false. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer essentially corrected the tweet Wednesday when he indicated that Trump meant to refer to all the people released from Guantanamo Bay that have "returned to the battlefield," not just those released under Obama.

Which suggests Spicer recognized that the tweet itself is inaccurate.

Nevertheless, Trump's tweet has not been removed. (Tweets cannot be edited, but they can be deleted.)

Here are the facts: Out of the 122 former prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who were released and are known to have "returned to the battlefield," the vast majority were released under George W. Bush. There's no plausible sense in which President Obama could have been responsible for their release. According to the most recent data from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, only eight prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay under Obama have "reengaged" in terrorist activities.

When asked about this Wednesday, Spicer essentially changed the subject. He ignored questions about whether Trump would personally apologize or retract the statement. He acknowledged the number 122 refers to prisoners who were also released under Bush, but he then pointed to Obama's pledge to close down the prison at Guantanamo Bay as representing a deep political divide between the former president and Trump.

Which is fine. Presidents will, inevitably, have deep ideological disagreement with their predecessors. But there's still an expectation that they will not knowingly say untrue things about each other.

If Trump didn't know the tweet was incorrect when he posted it, his own spokesman now appears to acknowledge it was inaccurate. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a part of Trump's own administration, provides information contradicting it. The tweet is still posted, free to be read and interpreted naturally by Trump's 26.2 million followers or anyone else who visits his feed (most of whom, presumably, do not watch Spicer's briefings.)

Trump has also tweeted that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the election, a very serious and potentially criminal allegation that the White House has asked Congress to investigate. Clearly, readers are meant to take the president's Twitter feed seriously.

Over the summer, the AP updated its Twitter policy on corrections. It acknowledged that tweets are a mainstream way of communicating news and information and should thus be covered by strict standards of accuracy. If the AP determines that any of its tweets "contain information that is incorrect, misleading, unclear or could be interpreted as unfair," or have a problem with tone, the organization will remove the tweet and announce why it was removed.

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