Vice presidential debate fact check

Claims from the vice presidential debate between Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine, and how they stack up with the facts:

PENCE: “Hillary Clinton had a private server in her home that had classified information on it about drone strikes. Emails from the president of the United States of America were on there, her private server was subject to being hacked by foreign …”

KAINE: “A Republican FBI director did an investigation and concluded … there was no reasonable prosecutor who would take it further.”

THE FACTS: Both are right, but they left out key details. Of 30,000 emails examined from Clinton’s private server, more than 2,000 did contain some classified information. But nearly all were designated classified long after they were either sent or received by Clinton. FBI Director James Comey also said the FBI found that Clinton’s server was vulnerable to hacking by foreign powers but found no evidence that her system was breached.

Comey indeed conclude that no reasonable prosecutor would have recommended that Clinton or others face prosecution in the email probe. And while he was a Republican for most of his adult life, he says he’s no longer is registered with the party.

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KAINE: “Donald Trump during his campaign has called Mexicans rapists and criminals. He’s called women slobs, pigs, dogs, disgusting. I don’t like saying that in front of my wife and my mother. He attacked an Indiana-born federal judge and said he was unqualified to hear a federal lawsuit because his parents were Mexican. He went after John McCain, a POW, and said he wasn’t hero because he’d been captured. He said African-Americans are living in hell. And he perpetrated this outrageous and bigoted lie that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen. … I cannot believe that Gov. Pence will defend the insult-driven campaign that Donald Trump has run.”

THE FACTS: While it’s true that Trump has spewed scores of one-liners considered offensive to women, minorities, Muslims, immigrants and the disabled, Hillary Clinton isn’t entirely blameless in the battle of insults. Clinton faced heavy criticism for asserting last month that half of Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables” because they are racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic.
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TIM KAINE: “We do not think that women should be punished as Donald Trump said they should for making the decision to have an abortion….That is the fundamental difference between a Clinton-Kaine ticket and a Trump-Pence ticket that wants to punish women.”

MIKE PENCE: “It’s really not. Donald Trump and I would never support legislation that punished women who made the heartbreaking choice to end a pregnancy.”

Pence told Kaine that Trump “is not a polished politician like you and Hillary Clinton. Things don’t always come out the way he means them.”

THE FACTS: Trump said earlier this year that there should be “some form of punishment” for women who get abortions if the procedure is outlawed.

Trump later backed off that remark under fierce criticism, saying that if abortion were no longer legal, doctors who perform abortions should be penalized for performing the procedure — not the women who have it.

Trump later shifted again, saying about abortion: “The laws are set. And I think we have to leave it that way.”

While Trump supported abortion rights in his younger years, he now says he is staunchly “pro-life,” aside from exemptions in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at risk. Pence is a strong foe of abortion.

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KAINE: “We stopped the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”

THE FACTS: Kaine is right – at least for now.

One year ago, on July 14, 2015, the United States, six other world powers and Iran finalized almost two years of negotiations on a pact outlining what Tehran had to do to pull back its nuclear program from the brink of weapons-making capacity. And it spelled out the West’s obligations to end many financial, trade and oil sanctions that had battered Iran’s economy.

So far, Iran has lived up to its end of the deal. It shut down thousands of centrifuges for enriching uranium and exported almost its entire stockpile of the bomb-making material. It disabled a heavy water plant that would have produced plutonium usable in a weapon. It opened up its supply chain to far greater scrutiny. An underground enrichment facility near Fordo operates under strict limits.

But the deal could let Iran start ramping up nuclear activity again after the pact ends in eight years.

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KAINE: “Our plan is like Ronald Reagan in 1986.”

THE FACTS: Hillary Clinton’s immigration plan is certainly similar to a bill signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. But Clinton’s proposal would offer a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally and would have far broader impact. The estimated population of immigrants living in the United States illegally is now roughly 11 million. In 1986, the so-called Reagan amnesty bill legalized the immigration status of about 3 million people.

There are also some notable differences between the so-called amnesty bill signed by Reagan and Clinton’s proposal. The Reagan bill included a provision that made it illegal for businesses to hire workers who don’t have the legal right to work in the United States. Enforcement of that provision has never fully materialized.

While Clinton’s proposal does include a proposal to deport criminal immigrants, the plan also includes a plan to roll back a law that bars most immigrants who had lived here illegally from returning after either deportation or voluntarily leaving for three or 10 years, depending on how long the person had been living here. That provision actually became law in 1996, while President Bill Clinton was in office but was considered a follow-on to the bill Reagan signed.

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PENCE: “The fact that under this past administration, we’ve almost doubled the national debt is atrocious…. Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine want more of the same.”

THE FACTS: As a share of the total U.S. economy, the national debt has gone up 35 percent; not a doubling.

Still, the debt has ballooned to $19.6 trillion. This largely reflected efforts by the Obama administration to stop the Great Recession.

Would Clinton similarly increase the debt? Not according to an analysis by the independent Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The Clinton plan with its tax increases would increase the gross debt — both privately and publicly held— by $450 billion over 10 years. Mind you, that is on top of an $8.8 trillion increase already projected by the government under current law.

As for Donald Trump, the committee says his tax-cut-heavy plan would increase the gross debt by $4.3 trillion —nearly 10 times more than Clinton’s plan would do.

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PENCE: “When African American police officers are involved in a police action shooting involving an African American, why would Hillary Clinton accuse that African American police officer of implicit bias?” Pence accused Clinton and Kaine of using recent police shootings “as a reason to use a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of implicit bias, or institutional racism.”

THE FACTS: The idea of potential racial bias in police departments has become a center of concern among law enforcement officials across the nation. Police departments are increasing implicit-bias training for their officers, including in large cities where protests over the over the killings of black men by white officers sparked a debate about the role race plays in policing. Experts say the focus on implicit bias is the next frontier of police training and the Justice Department has increasingly pushed for implicit bias training at troubled law enforcement agencies.

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PENCE: She was the “architect of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.” He said the Middle East is “spinning out of control” and suggested that the ongoing crisis in Syria was the result of a “failed and weak foreign policy that Hillary Clinton helped lead” in the Obama administration.” Moreover, he said that that President Barack Obama and Clinton gave Russia room to launch its aggressive moves in Ukraine.

THE FACTS: Clinton pushed for increased U.S. intervention after Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against rebels. But Obama is the commander in chief and nothing has swayed him thus far.

On Russia, Clinton as secretary of state helped seal a nuclear arms-control treaty and secure Russia’s acquiescence to a NATO-led military intervention in Libya. By comparison, Republican Donald Trump has rung alarm bells in Washington and Europe with his overtures to Russia’s authoritarian leader.

Clinton and her supporters say she would be far tougher on Moscow than Trump, whose unusual foreign policy statements include musings about NATO’s relevance and suggestions that he could accept Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

“You guys love Russia,” Kaine said, reminding Pence that he and Trump have praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a great leader.

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KAINE on fighting the Islamic State: “Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan.”

THE FACTS: Hillary Clinton also doesn’t have a plan that is materially different than what President Barack Obama is already doing.

She’s described a three-part strategy that involves crushing IS “on its home turf” in the Middle East, disrupting its infrastructure on the ground and online, and protecting America and its allies. All are current elements of the Obama administration’s strategy, so it’s not clear what would change or if she would accelerate any portions of it.

It’s also the case that Trump has not laid out a clear plan.

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PENCE: “Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine want to build on Obamacare, they want to expand it into a single-payer program, and for all the world Hillary Clinton just thinks Obamacare is a good start.”

THE FACTS: Pence has been both for and against the Affordable Care Act at different times. He railed against it while in Congress, but one of his chief accomplishments as governor was Indiana’s expansion of Medicaid under President Barack Obama’s health care law.

The Healthy Indiana Plan 2.0 uses federal dollars to help provide health insurance to more than 200,000 low-income Indiana residents who get coverage in exchange for paying a small fee. Pence and his allies have presented the policy as a conservative approach to the Affordable Care Act and have suggested it could be used in other Republican-leaning states that have resisted taking federal money under Obamacare. But he’s taken flak over the law from some conservatives who say no matter what it’s called, it is still a big-government entitlement program.

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PENCE: “The fact that under this past administration, we’ve almost doubled the national debt is atrocious…. Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine want more of the same.”

THE FACTS: As a share of the total U.S. economy, the national debt has gone up 35 percent, not a doubling.

Still, the debt has ballooned to $19.6 trillion. This largely reflected efforts by the Obama administration to stop the Great Recession.

Would Clinton similarly increase the debt? Not according to an analysis by the independent Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The Clinton plan with its tax increases would increase the gross debt — both privately and publicly held— by $450 billion over 10 years. Mind you, that is on top of an $8.8 trillion increase already projected by the government under current law.

As for Trump, the committee says his tax-cut-heavy plan would increase the gross debt by $4.3 trillion —nearly 10 times more than Clinton’s plan would do.

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PENCE: The economy has stagnated under President Barack Obama, with the Democrat waging a “war on coal.”

THE FACTS: The coal industry is struggling, but the Indiana governor incorrectly blamed its woes solely on new federal regulations, omitting the effects of steep competition from cheap natural gas.

A string of major coal companies has filed for bankruptcy in recent years, including Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources and Peabody Energy. Layoffs and cutbacks have spread economic suffering through coal country in the Appalachians and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.

By contrast, these are boom times for natural gas extraction.

Still, the Obama administration has implemented rules that aren’t making the coal industry’s life any easier. Obama last year imposed a rule requiring coal-fired power plants to cut their carbon emissions as part of his effort to combat climate change. The rule has been suspended pending a legal challenge. Obama also has halted new coal leases on federal lands until it completes a comprehensive review.

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PENCE, saying he’s proud that “the state of Indiana has balanced budgets.”

THE FACTS: True, but that’s not exactly to his credit. A balanced budget is required by law, as it is in every state except Vermont.

Associated Press