CLAIM: Kaitlan Collins said then-President Donald Trump never ordered the National Guard to the Capitol.

VERDICT: MISLEADING. Trump never claimed that; he said he offered, not ordered, the National Guard.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins attempted to fact-check former President Trump in real time during the network’s town hall event on Wednesday evening. She began the event by asking nearly half an hour of questions about the 2020 election and the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. When Trump said, accurately, that he had offered the National Guard to the Capitol in advance of his rally and was turned down, she tried to counter that claim (via CNN transcript):

TRUMP: Crazy Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington were in charge as you know of security, and they did not do their jobs.

COLLINS: They are not in charge of the National Guard. You’re in charge of the National Guard.

TRUMP: They are in charge — well, I offered them National Guard. I said we’ll give you soldiers, we’ll give you a National Guard, we’ll give you whatever you want and they turned me down and in fact, she turned me down.

COLLINS: Your acting Defense secretary.

TRUMP: She turned me down — excuse me, she turned me down in writing. They turned me down.

COLLINS: But your acting Defense secretary, Chris Miller at the time, he says you never gave a formal order to deploy the National Guard. But when it came to that day —

TRUMP: Excuse me, just the opposite. Chris Miller wrote a book and he is a fantastic guy and he was ready to go. They turned him down. If you look, the mayor of Washington, DC, lovely lady. She said, we don’t want it. We don’t like to look. Nancy Pelosi said, oh, we don’t like the look.

If they would have had just — I offered them 10,000 soldiers. I said, it could be 10, it could be more, but I offered them specifically 10,000 soldiers.

If they would have taken 500 soldiers, you wouldn’t have the problem. They turned it down, and if you look at the inspector general report, he says they turned it down. They made a terrible mistake.

COLLINS: Well, Chris Miller was your acting Defense secretary. He says you never gave that order.

But back to what happened on that day.

TRUMP: He did that say that.

COLLINS: He has testified that.

TRUMP: He did not say that.

Trump did, in fact, offer the National Guard to Pelosi, who was broadly in charge of Capitol security as Speaker of the House. His administration also offered the National Guard to the mayor of Washington, DC. The offer was refused because Democrats had spent the previous summer attacking Trump for deploying the National Guard to calm Black Lives Matter riots in the city and did not like the idea of doing so again. (Pelosi and the Democrats later surrounded the Capitol with barbed wire fencing and troops in the wake of the January 6 riot.)

Collins tried to counter Trump’s claim with a tangential point: that he had not specifically ordered National Guard troops to the Capitol. But Trump did not say that he had given any such order; indeed, he could not. Doing so would have been interpreted, probably correctly, as an attempt to use the military to pressure the Congress ahead of the important meeting to certify the Electoral College votes from the presidential election.

As Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) pointed out, Miller specifically confirmed in testimony to Congress that Trump had offered the National Guard to the mayor of Washington, DC and that she had refused the offer of help.

Collins seemed uninformed on this point and others as she attempted to counter Trump with talking points that have persisted inside the CNN and Democratic Party bubble. Reality, however, is more complex than on CNN.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.