Hillary Clinton said that she “read” that Donald Trump “said he wants to … abolish the VA.” But Clinton distorted the facts, as CNN’s Jake Tapper explains in this week’s fact-checking video.
The Clinton campaign said that her claim was based on a May 12 Wall Street Journal article that said Trump’s campaign co-chair and chief policy adviser indicated that “the presumptive GOP presidential nominee would likely push VA health care toward privatization and might move for it to become more of an insurance provider like Medicare rather than an integrated hospital system.”
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Trump “wants to … abolish the VA.”
The Journal article quoted the same policy adviser as saying that “there are a lot of VA facilities that are being run very well” and that Trump doesn’t “want to take away the veterans hospitals and the things that are working well.” In fact, at a campaign rally in December, Trump said “I don’t want to get rid of it” when talking about the Department of Veterans Affairs and its health care system.
This latest video is part of our ongoing collaboration with CNN’s “State of the Union.” Past videos are available at CNN.com and FactCheck.org.