CLAIM: Kamala Harris claimed that Donald Trump “refused to rent property to black families” and called for the “execution” of the Central Park Five.
VERDICT: FALSE. These are both inaccurate claims, which the ABC News moderators allowed to stand uncorrected.
ABC News’ Linsey Davis and David Muir frequently tried to fact-check former President Trump and never once did the same to Vice President Harris — and it wasn’t because she was telling the truth.
In a responding to a question about race, Harris claimed that Trump had “refused to rent property to black families.”
That claim has been made for years, but it has never been proven. The Associated Press did a fact check on the claim in 2016, and reported that Trump and his father settled a government lawsuit about it with no admission of fault.
As for the claim about the Central Park Five, Trump did call for the death penalty in general, but not specifically for the “execution” of those defendants.
Breitbart News fact-checked this claim when Democrats made it at their convention last month:
Members of the Central Park Five appeared onstage on Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. They were accused of gang raping a female jogger in Central Park, New York City, in 1989.
Their guilt was widely accepted by the public, especially as several of them confessed to the crime. They were released when someone else said that he had raped the victim, Trisha Meili, and that he had acted alone.
Their story was retold by columnist Ann Coulter last year [emphasis removed]:
Four of The Five gave videotaped confessions, at least three of them in the presence of parents or guardians. Defense attorneys spent weeks attacking the confessions as “coerced,” but two multicultural juries and the trial judge concluded that the confessions were voluntary.
…
More than a decade later, when psychopathic killer Matias Reyes came forward to “confess” that he alone had raped the jogger — a crime for which he would face no additional punishment — DNA testing on the semen could prove only that he’d raped her, not that he’d acted alone, or whether, as a former cellmate says, he’d heard the jogger’s screams and ran to join the attack in progress.
Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Daily News in the aftermath of the crime. In it, he denounced the rise of crime in passionate terms. He called for the death penalty for murderers. But he did not specifically call for the Central Park Five to be executed.
In his rebuttal, Trump noted, correctly, that at the time, some of the Central Park Five had confessed their guilt.
Notably, Harris did not provide any other evidence of her claim that Trump divides Americans on racial lines.
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 Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.