November 19, 2018

Trump Falsely Claims That He Predicted Bin Laden Threat Before 9/11

“Fools!”

Jim Loscalzo/ZUMA

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Fresh off his remarks deriding the former Navy SEAL who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, President Donald Trump on Monday claimed that he had predicted the national security threat posed by the Al Qaeda leader in a book published one year before the 9/11 attacks.

This isn’t the first time Trump has falsely claimed to have foreseen Bin Laden’s rise. As Mother Jones explained back when he first made the assertion on the campaign trail, Trump’s 2000 book, The America We Deserve, did not include such astute observations. Bin Laden is mentioned once in passing in the book, and the brief paragraph merely references the fact that Bin Laden had already been labeled “public enemy number one.” 

The president on Monday also repeated his insistence that Bin Laden should have been captured sooner and criticized former President Bill Clinton for “famously” missing his chance to take out the Al Qaeda leader in a 1998 bombing raid. 

The tweets come on the heels of Trump’s attacks against William McRaven, the retired four-star admiral and onetime Navy SEAL who oversaw the 2011 raid that killed Bin Laden. McRaven has been critical of Trump, writing in a scathing Washington Post op-ed this summer that Trump has “embarrassed us in the eyes of children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.” During an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace that aired Sunday, Trump dismissed McRaven as a “Hillary Clinton fan” and an “Obama backer.”  

“I did not back Hillary Clinton or anyone else,” McRaven said in a statement responding to Trump’s remarks. “I am a fan of President Obama and President George W. Bush, both of whom I worked for.”

“I stand by my comment that the President’s attack on the media is the greatest threat to our democracy in my lifetime.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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