White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was called out by The Washington Post’s fact checkers on Tuesday for a false claim he made about the Trump administration during a White House press briefing on Monday.
“When we took office in January, the Trump administration had not processed a single special immigrant visa since March of 2020, in nearly a year,” Sullivan claimed. State Department quarterly reports show that is not true, however. According to The Washington Post:
State Department reports show that hundreds of SIVs were processed in the last nine months of the Trump administration, although at a much slower rate. The White House says Sullivan misspoke — that he meant to refer to interviews. That’s a line also offered by the State Department on Aug. 20: “When we took office, not a single SIV interview had been conducted since March of 2020.”
But that may not be accurate either.
The quarterly reports filed on the State Department website show that a trickle of SIVs was approved in the first few months after March 2020 — after the global coronavirus pandemic struck — and then slowly regained steam in the second half of the year.
- March - June 2020: 3 SIVs approved
- July - September 2020: 283
- October - December 2020: 237
The temporary suspension of interviews and the increased processing times during the March-June 2020 period were directly due to the global pandemic, one of the reports said, citing “limited staffing as well as local safety conditions directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In all three reports, the number of people interviewed for the visas was listed as zero — in Kabul. But the reports show two Afghans were scheduled to be interviewed during the July-September period and nine were scheduled to be interviewed in October-December, apparently outside Afghanistan, according to the reports.
“There were relatively few interviews this quarter because U.S. Embassy Kabul was closed for in-person visa services due to the prevalence of COVID-19 in Afghanistan,” said the report for the quarter that ended in December. “In all nine cases, the applicants requested to have their interview conducted at an alternate post.”
The State Department was unable to immediately tell The Fact Checker whether the interviews actually took place. But the reports call into question the previous claim that “not a single interview had been conducted” in the last nine months of the Trump administration. (WaPo)
The claim was not given a Pinocchio score due to the fact that officials admitted error, WaPo said, dismissing Sullivan's false claim because he's "rather busy these days and probably sleep deprived. A slip of the tongue is easily understood."
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