The Republican candidates for president gathered in Boulder, Colorado, for their third debate Wednesday, and CNN’s Reality Check team is spending the night putting their statements and assertions to the test.
The team of reporters, researchers and editors across CNN are listening throughout the debate, selecting key statements and then rating them: True; Mostly True; True, but Misleading; False; or It’s Complicated.
Reality Check: Bobby Jindal on cutting the Louisiana state budget
“What we did is cut (Louisiana) state spending. We cut our budget 26% … We have 30,000 fewer state employees than the day I took office,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said at the undercard debate.
Jindal says he cut the budget by 26%, but the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote in 2011 that much of the decline was due to the petering out of federal recovery funds in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the end of President Barack Obama’s federal stimulus funding.
It’s true he cut the number of state employees by 30,000. The state government payroll now stands at just under 85,000, down from just over 114,000, according to federal data.
But what Jindal didn’t say is that his state has suffered from financial shortfalls for years, in part because of the economic downturn and in part because of the governor’s refusal to raise taxes. Falling oil prices have also wreaked havoc. He and state legislators had to wrestle with a massive budget gap of $1.6 billion earlier this year.
VERDICT: True, but misleading
Reality Check: George Pataki says Hillary Clinton’s private email server was hacked and state secrets were stolen
“We have no doubt that (Hillary Clinton’s server) was hacked and that state secrets are throughout to the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese and others,” former New York Gov. George Pataki said.
Clinton has said it was a “mistake” to use a private email server in her home during her tenure as secretary of state and has apologized for the confusion it has caused. She and her aides have also asserted that there was no classified information stored or sent on the server.
Since the discovery of the arrangement, the Justice Department is now looking into how the information on Clinton’s server was handled, and Clinton’s aides have turned the server over to the FBI as part of that probe.
The intelligence community and State Department inspectors general also revealed in July that some of Clinton’s emails contained classified information that was not identified correctly, but State Department officials maintain the information was not classified at the time it was sent.
But as to whether the server itself was breached by a foreign government and its contents accessed, there were reports in August that Russian hackers tried to break into her server five times. However, reporting by CNN to date has shown that five emails sent to her under the subject line of “Uniform Traffic Ticket” were part of a widespread phishing effort dating back to 2011 that was prevalent and that New York State Police had flagged for people to be aware of. While the presence of the emails shows there was a risk of vulnerability to Clinton, there is no evidence she ever fell for the hoax. There is also no evidence the scam was specifically directed at Clinton.
And there has been no indication to date of any Iranian, Chinese or other entities penetration of the server.
VERDICT: False
Reality Check: George Pataki on Obama’s military budget veto
“Barack Obama is the first president in American history to hold our military hostage,” former New York Gov. George Pataki said at the undercard debate, going on to suggest that Obama’s recent veto of the National Defense Authorization Act was the first time a U.S. president had held up military funding.
Pataki was referring to last week when Obama rejected the bill over a disagreement with Congress — issuing a veto in public for the first time in his presidency — because of the way it circumvented mandatory spending cuts and impeded his efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay naval prison.
But at least four of Obama’s predecessors vetoed annual Defense Authorization Acts:
— President Jimmy Carter objected to the bill in 1979 because it funded a $1 billion nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
— President Ronald Reagan sent the 1988 NDAA back to Congress since it shrank U.S. missile defense programs.
— Missile defense programs were again the problem in 1996, when President Bill Clinton turned down the NDAA since he believed a new defense system violated international law.
— And in 2007, President George W. Bush vetoed an NDAA since it could have frozen Iraqi assets that were held in U.S. banks – holding up military funding as two U.S.-led wars were raging in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ultimately, Obama’s veto of the NDAA will likely have little effect on the Pentagon’s operations. If the budget agreement currently making its way through Congress passes, as is expected, caps on military spending will increase by $25 billion for the next two years.
Pataki’s suggestion that Obama is the first commander-in-chief to hold up defense funding over disagreements in Congress doesn’t match up with history.
VERDICT: False