President Donald Trump held a cozy interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity this week, his first television interview since he became the 47th President of the United States.
Hannity described his and Trump’s “friendship” as the president responded to soft questioning with claims about January 6, immigration, and the size of the 2024 presidential election victory.
Despite the easy ride, Trump still peppered the conversation with a mixture of falsehoods that Newsweek’s Fact Check team has assessed.
Donald Trump chats with Fox News broadcaster Sean Hannity following a town hall at the New Holland Arena in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on September 4, 2024.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
No evidence of migrant multiple murderers
Trump has repeated recently that among the numbers of migrants with homicide convictions in the United States, a proportion around 50 percent have committed more than one murder.
“We have numbers coming out of 11,000 people that murdered are now free and walking around in our country,” Trump said.
“Of them, I think 48 percent they say, killed more than one person and they are walking around.”
In his pre-inauguration speech, Trump said it was above 50 percent but lowered the estimation with Hannity. Whatever the number may be, it is not based on evidence.
There is no public evidence showing the proportion of migrants with convictions for multiple homicides. A request to substantiate the claim requested by FactCheck.org in September 2024 was answered with an irrelevant statement by a Trump media representative.
Newsweek has contacted a White House media representative via email for comment.
This claim itself is based on a faulty statistic Trump and others have repeated about the number of murderers “free and walking around in our country.”
Claims that thousands of murderers are “walking around” are based on data compiled from more than 40 years of statistics, including data on convicts who are incarcerated or have served time. The notion that they are wandering loose is also false, as recently debunked by Newsweek.
The data on the total number of migrants with murder convictions did not show the proportion that had been convicted for more than one murder, simply the number of migrants with conviction history on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) docket.
No evidence other countries “emptied” prisons and “mental institutions” into US
Despite multiple journalistic investigations that have debunked this claim, Trump has repeated this falsehood for years.
“They’ve emptied the jails…many of them did. If you look at Venezuela, their crime rate is down now 78% because they took their street gangs and they moved them into the United States” Trump told Hannity.
He later alleged that under the Democrats other countries had “emptied” their “jails and mental institutions” into the U.S.
Immigration data from fiscal years 2021 to 2024 shows that Customs & Border Protection (CBP) agencies encountered 118,074 individuals with criminal convictions or those wanted by law enforcement.
The CBP says criminal noncitizens (referring to people convicted of a crime deemed criminal by the U.S.) encountered at ports of entry are inadmissible “absent extenuating circumstances.”
There is no evidence that other nations have been “emptying” prisons and directing their prisoners to the U.S., and information that has been provided to journalists who have asked Trump’s team to substantiate these claims has been insubstantial, as reported by PolitiFact in May 2024.
Trump’s claim that crime in Venezuela has fallen by 78 percent as a result of “emptying” its jails has not stood up to scrutiny either. Investigations by FactCheck.org and PolitiFact found no basis for a 67 percent fall in crime in recent years, with some vague official estimates showing a 32 percent drop between 2024 and 2023. Experts have attributed the drop to mass migration, caused by worsening economic and living conditions.
Newsweek has previously rated the claim that patients from “insane asylums” have been “emptied into the U.S. as false. There is no evidence to support the claim, either publicly available or made available by Trump media representatives.
Trump was not the first Republican presidential nominee to win all of Oklahoma’s counties
Discussing the 2024 results, Trump said: “I love Oklahoma, 77 out of 77 districts, and that has never been done before” adding “Ronald Reagan had the record 56, 56 out of 77, I got 77 out of 77.”
Trump is not the first Republican presidential nominee to win all of Oklahoma’s 77 districts. Mitt Romney did so in 2012, John McCain did in 2008, as did George W. Bush in 2004.
California reservoirs were not all empty, according to officials and experts
Trump also attacked Californian authorities and water availability during January’s wildfires.
“All of this money spent on reservoirs, they are fake reservoirs,” Trump said. Hannity added: “The reservoirs were empty.”
Data from the California Department of Water Resources shows that the total stored water in state-managed reservoirs was at its highest level in five months in January 2025, with five of 12 reservoirs at 75 percent capacity or more.
However, a suit against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, filed by victims of the Palisades fire, said that the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been empty since February 2024. Officials said it had been closed for repairs, with California Governor Gavin Newsom calling for an independent investigation into the situation, among other inquiries reported by the Los Angeles Times.
No evidence Trump won the youth vote by 36 points
Returning to his recent election victory, Trump said: “I won youth by 36 points. Maybe that’s because I went on TikTok, I don’t know.”
Investigations by CNN, Full Fact, and USA Today failed to find any substantive evidence to support his claim. While exit poll data shows Trump increased his youth vote share compared to previous elections, he was outpolled by Kamala Harris among younger voters.
FEMA, January 6, transgender conspiracy
Trump also made other unfounded allegations including that Democrats used FEMA “not to help” the Hurricane Helene disaster victims in North Carolina, and the baseless claim that American children can “leave home as a boy and come home two days later as a girl.”
He also repeated unsubstantiated claims that the January 6 committee destroyed all the evidence it was provided, (despite the committee publicly releasing evidence it used to support its 800-page report scrutinizing Trump’s role in the Capitol riot). On the same point he also baselessly claimed that Nancy Pelosi had rejected an offer for 10,000 National Guardsmen on January 6, 2021, adding that evidence of that offer had been deleted.
