Donald Trump has said that he likes to use Twitter because of all the fake news from media outlets, but it turns out the president himself is spreading fake news.

On Monday, Trump retweeted a message from Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich, who stated that former President Barack Obama pardoned a traitor and terrorist killer, that is actually false information. Trump not only retweeted the inaccurate message, he later repeated versions of it at a White House press conference.

The bogus claim was made as a defense for Trump’s controversial pardon of Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who was set to serve a jail sentence for his discriminatory policing.

Ben Rhodes, a former Obama foreign policy adviser, criticized Trump and noted that the 44th President “used his pardon and commutation power to give a second chance to people who deserved empathy, not racists who showed none.”

Pavlich wrote to Rhodes, “Your boss pardoned a traitor who gave U.S. enemies state secrets, he also pardoned a terrorist who killed Americans. Spare us the lecture.”

Pavlich is apparently referring respectively to Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army soldier convicted of leaking military documents, and Oscar López Rivera, a former leader of FALN, a Puerto Rican paramilitary group responsible for the deaths of six Americans. Also, López Rivera didn’t exactly “kill Americans.” He aided FALN members who did, but López Rivera was convicted on charges including conspiracy and robbery — not murder. Manning and Rivera were two of Obama’s most controversial clemency cases, but neither of them was pardoned, which is a totally different process.

Obama granted them commutations, which allowed Manning and López Rivera to leave prison years before the end of their sentences, but after they had already served several years behind bars. They also still have their crimes on their record. That is not the same as a pardon, which absolves a citizen of a conviction.

Trump not only cleared Arpaio of a recent criminal contempt conviction, but he also spared him from a jail sentence he hadn’t even received yet. Arpaio was scheduled to be sentenced in October and faced up to six months in jail. The U.S. Justice Department recommends waiting at least five years before pardoning a conviction.

Pavlich did not delete or correct her tweet, and Trump did not remove his retweet.

VIA