It was perhaps the ultimate fact check.
Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris claimed during last week's "debate" that, under the Biden-Harris administration, no U.S. military personnel were currently in combat zones.
“As of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world, for the first time this century,” Harris boasted during.
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Actually, U.S. military are on active duty in recognized combat zones including Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
A Reuters report from February noted that there are roughly 30,000 U.S. troops deployed in the Middle East, with thousands of additional troops sent to the region since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip.
During the debate, Harris was not fact-checked by ABC moderators.
Active military members who were watching the debate, however, are seen on video delivering the fact check:
Kamala Harris just got hit with the biggest fact check in human history pic.twitter.com/LDeniMIO88
— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) September 13, 2024
Meanwhile, ABC "moderator" Linsey Davis has admitted that the network chose to only fact-check GOP candidate Donald Trump during the "debate."
Davis told the Los Angeles Times that ABC had deliberately targeted Trump — and only Trump — because of perceptions that he had been allowed to get away with false statements in the CNN debate against Joe Biden in late June.
As the New York Post noted:
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Davis said she wanted to address concerns that Trump’s statements could be allowed to “hang” there unchallenged by his opponent or the moderators, as they were when Trump and Biden debate on CNN in June.
“Davis, wearing pink glasses while speaking to The Times over breakfast at the Ritz Carlton in Philadelphia, said the decision to attempt to correct the candidates was in response to the June 27 CNN debate between Trump and Biden, whose poor performance led to his exit from the race,” the Times reported.
“People were concerned that statements were allowed to just hang and not [be] disputed by the candidate Biden, at the time, or the moderators,” Davis told the outlet.
Davis said moderators studied past statements — “Politicians tend to say the same things again and again.”
But only Trump's past statements were checked. Harris repeated several lies, including the “very fine people” hoax she used in 2020 during the vice presidential debate with Mike Pence, who fact-checked her onstage at the time.
Biden also used the “fine people hoax” and other lies in the June debate, and CNN did not fact-check him, either while Trump did.
