A CNN fact-checker just demolished President Donald Trump's repeated boast that he warned authorities about Osama bin Laden as "pure fiction."
Trump has repeated the false claim, and said it again — most recently during his visit Sunday with sailors celebrating 250 years of the U.S. Navy, CNN's Daniel Dale reported Monday.
"Trump has been claiming for the last decade that in a book he published the year before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he warned the authorities that they needed to deal with Osama bin Laden," Dale writes.
But it's not true.
"His 2000 book contained no warning at all about bin Laden," Dale writes. "His tale about the book’s nonexistent warning was conclusively debunked in 2015. CNN published another debunking when he revived the tale in 2019."
On Sunday, Trump again repeated the erroneous claim in front of the crowd.
“And please remember, I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year ago,” Trump said, before correcting himself. “One year before he blew up the World Trade Center. And I said, ‘You’ve got to watch Osama bin Laden.’ And the fake news would never let me get away with that statement unless it was true.”
“In the book, I wrote – whatever the hell the title, I can’t tell you – but I can tell you there’s a page in there devoted to the fact that I saw somebody named Osama bin Laden, and I didn’t like it, and, ‘You gotta take care of him.’ They didn’t do it; a year later he blew up the World Trade Center. So, you gotta take a little credit, because nobody else is gonna give it to me.”
This claim is inaccurate. Trump has not received credit because he did not warn about bin Laden in the book. Bin Laden was killed by NAVY Seals in 2011 under President Barack Obama.
His book, "The America We Deserve," did have a mention of bin Laden, however, he was a known threat to security. And no warning was ever issued in the book.
Here's what Trump actually wrote in his 2000 book:
“Instead of one looming crisis hanging over us, we face a bewildering series of smaller crises, flash points, standoffs, and hot spots. We’re not playing the chess game to end all chess games anymore. We’re playing tournament chess – one master against many rivals. One day we’re all assured that Iraq is under control, the UN inspectors have done their work, everything’s fine, not to worry. The next day the bombing begins. One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”