Five Republican presidential candidates participated in a debate Wednesday in Miami to make their case to the American people.
The candidates on the stage made false and misleading claims on a broad range of issues. CNN is fact checking the debate and will continue updating this article.
Fact Check: DeSantis on Biden’s efforts to combat antisemitism on college campuses
During a back-and-forth during the GOP debate on Wednesday about how the candidates would address incidents of antisemitism on college campuses in the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict, Gov. Ron DeSantis said President Joe Biden is combating Islamophobia instead of supporting Jewish students.
“Not only is he not helping the Jewish students, who are being persecuted, he is launching an initiative to combat so-called Islamophobia. No, it’s antisemitism that’s spiraling out of control,” DeSantis said.
Facts First: This is misleading. While the Biden administration announced last week that it is developing a national strategy to counter Islamophobia, the White House already released a national strategy to combat antisemitism in May.
Earlier this week, the Department of Education issued guidance reminding schools that they have a legal obligation to address incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia. The guidance specifically said that schools must address discrimination based on race, color, or national origin – including against those who are Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab or Palestinian.
“When it comes to antisemitism or Islamophobia, that has no place on our college campuses or in our schools,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told CNN.
Biden has repeatedly denounced antisemitism, both after the Hamas attack and for years before.
From CNN’s Katie Lobosco
Fact Check: Haley on US troops targeted by Iran
Copy: Asked about supporting the use of military force against Iran in response to the recent attacks on US troops in Iraq and Syria by Iranian proxy groups, Nikki Haley said, “The idea that our men and women could be targeted, and that we’ve allowed almost 100 hits to happen under Biden’s watch is unthinkable.”
Facts first: Haley’s figure is incorrect. As of Wednesday, Iranian-backed groups had targeted US and coalition forces in Iraq and Syria at least 41 times since October 17 with one-way attack drones or rocket attacks. The most recent was a multi-rocket attack on Wednesday, on forces at Shaddadi, Syria.
Haley also said that the US needed to “go and take out their infrastructure that they are using to make those strikes with so they can never do it again.” A senior military official told reporters on Wednesday that an airstrike that day by US F-15 fighter jets hit a weapons storage facility used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Corps Guard that is believed to house “weapons that we believe are likely used in many of the strikes that have taken place against our forces here in the region.”
From CNN’s Haley Britzky
Fact Check: Scott on Biden and Iran
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said during Wednesday’s GOP debate in Miami, “Frankly, President Biden has sent billions to Iran.”
Facts First: This needs context. Scott didn’t explain that the $6 billion in question was not “sent” from the US itself and is not money from US taxpayers. It is $6 billion of Iran’s own money, from oil sales, that had been frozen in restricted South Korean accounts until the Biden administration agreed in September to allow it to be transferred to restricted accounts in Qatar – to be used with US approval by Iran for certain specified humanitarian purposes – as part of a deal in which Iran agreed to free five Americans the US had deemed wrongfully detained.
The Biden administration has repeatedly said that none of the $6 billion has been spent yet. And in early October, after the Hamas attack on Israel, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told House Democrats that the US and Qatar had reached a “quiet understanding” to not allow Iran to access any of the money for the time being, a source in the room told CNN in October. (While Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not confirm that a “quiet understanding” had been reached, he made clear the US is able to freeze the funds.)
Even before that, the Biden administration emphasized that the Iranian government would not be able to pocket the money itself and that it could only be used, under strict US supervision, to make humanitarian purchases from approved vendors. Some critics of the Biden administration and the deal with Iran have fairly pointed out, however, that Iran getting access to $6 billion for humanitarian purposes could free up that same amount of its own money to be used to fund terror.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Fact Check: Ramaswamy on Hunter Biden and Ukraine
Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy claimed during the GOP debate on Wednesday that “Joe Biden’s son Hunter got a $5 billion bribe from Ukraine.” He claimed that this bribe was the reason the US has sent so much aid to Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia last year.
Facts First: The claim that any member of the Biden family received a bribe is unproven. An FBI informant who relayed the claim to the FBI in 2020 was merely reporting something he said he had been told by a Ukrainian businessman, the chief executive of the energy company where Hunter Biden had served on the board of directors; the informant provided no proof to the FBI, and no proof has publicly emerged in the subsequent years. In addition, there is no evidence that US wartime aid to Ukraine – which has been approved by bipartisan majorities in Congress – has anything to do with the president’s son.
According to an internal FBI document made public by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa earlier this year over the strong objections of the FBI, the informant told the bureau in 2020 – when Donald Trump was president – that the CEO of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, had claimed in 2016 that he made a $5 million payment to “one Biden” and another $5 million payment to “another Biden.” But the FBI document did not contain any proof for the claim, and the document said the informant was “not able to provide any further opinion as to the veracity” of the claim.
Republicans have tried to boost the credibility of the allegation by saying it was in an FBI document and that the FBI had viewed the informant as highly credible. But the document merely memorialized the information provided by the informant; it does not demonstrate that the information is true. And Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer testified to the House Oversight Committee earlier this year that he had not been aware of any such payments to the Bidens; Archer characterized Zlochevsky’s reported claim as an example of the Ukrainian businessman embellishing his influence.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale, Marshall Cohen and Annie Grayer
Fact Check: Ramaswamy on the 2016 and 2020 elections
In his opening remarks during Wednesday’s debate, Vivek Ramaswamy accused the media of interfering in the outcome of previous US elections.
“This media rigged the 2016 election, they rigged the 2020 election with the Hunter Biden laptop story and they’re going to rig this election unless we have accountability,” Ramaswamy said.
Facts First: This claim is false. Neither election was “rigged” and there is no evidence of any fraud large enough to have changed the outcome.
Officials from the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security, along with state election officials, said in a 2020 statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”
And tellingly, in Ramaswamy’s own 2022 book “Nation of Victims,” he writes that the “2016 election wasn’t stolen in a literal sense” and that he hadn’t seen “convincing evidence” that the 2020 election was stolen or rigged.
“The fact that all of our governmental institutions so unanimously found no evidence of significant fraud is telling. Furthermore, I’ve talked to many Republicans at all levels of government, and not one has ever presented convincing evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump; very few have seriously tried. I don’t believe that most Republican politicians actually think the election was stolen,” Ramaswamy wrote.
Asked about this change in his stance by NBC’s Chuck Todd in August, Ramaswamy claimed that in his books he also discussed what he did see as consequential election interference in 2020 – how “big tech” had worked to prevent the spread of a late-campaign story related to Hunter Biden’s laptop. However, Ramaswamy’s claim during the debate was directed not at tech companies but the media, who were actually the first to break the story around the laptop.
Ramaswamy has previously argued that the media spread an unfair narrative of Russian collusion in the 2016 election that robbed Trump of the ability to do the job after he was elected. However, a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee backed the US intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help then-candidate Donald Trump.
From CNN’s Tara Sumbramaniam
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