Donald Trump on national security: CNN’s Reality Check team vets the claims

“My opponent has called for a radical 550% increase in Syrian — think of this, this is not believable but this is what’s happening. A 550% increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country already under the leadership President Obama,” he said. “She proposes this despite the fact that there’s no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from.”

In September 2015, the White House announced it planned to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees this fiscal year. Shortly after that, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the US would gradually increase the total number of refugees accepted from any country to 100,000 in 2017 from the current cap of 70,000.

Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, fewer than 2,500 Syrian refugees had been admitted to the U.S. as of last year. More than half of those refugees are children, according to senior administration officials.

On CBS News’ “Face the Nation” last September, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was asked if the current U.S. plan to increase the number of admitted Syrian refugees to 10,000 was enough. She replied, “I would like to see us move from what is a good start with 10,000 to 65,000 and begin immediately to put into place the mechanisms for vetting the people that we would take in.”

Clinton’s proposed increase in Syrian refugees is a 550% increase of the Obama administration’s plan, which also aims to increases the total amount of refugees from all countries admitted to the U.S. So the first half of Trump’s claim is true.

Where he goes awry is in the second half, when Trump says there’s “no way to screen these refugees.”

Several government and law enforcement agencies are engaged in the process of screening refugees.

Refugees that come to the U.S. undergo several screenings, such as biographic checks, in-person interviews, fingerprinting and medical screenings — all of which involve multiple federal intelligence and security agencies.

Syrian refugees in particular go through additional screening, called the Syria Enhanced Review process, which uses information collected from the UN refugee agency to determine whether an applicant needs to go through a fraud or national security unit. Those units then conduct individualized research on each applicant’s story and records. Syrian refugee applications can take much longer to process than the average case processing time of 18 to 24 months. Mark Toner, a deputy State Department spokesman, called the refugee vetting process “the most stringent security process for anyone entering the United States.”

The effectiveness of these procedures may be a matter of debate, but to say that there is “no way to screen” refugees is false.

By Tal Kopan, CNN

Trump asserted that Clinton’s private email server was hacked when she was secretary of state.

“Her server was easily hacked by foreign governments, perhaps even by her financial backers in communist China,” he said. “I’m sure they have it, putting all of America and our citizens in danger.”

While it is true that Clinton used a privately-run server for email during her time as secretary of state, there has been no conclusive evidence that the server was compromised, nor any indication that foreign governments were involved in any attempts to do so.

Two law enforcement officials told CNN that security logs turned over from the server showed no apparent signs of hacking. They cautioned, though, that does not show definitive proof that no one ever got in, as skilled hackers may have been able to cover their tracks.

In a May inspector general report from the State Department, the IG cited instances where hacking attempts were suspected as part of evidence that officials were aware of her email practices. The IG said that in January 2011, a Clinton technical adviser notified her deputy chief of staff for operations that he shut down the server “because he believed ‘someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to.'” He shut the server again down later in the day because of another attack attempt. The next day, the deputy chief of staff emailed officials above him to not email Clinton “anything sensitive” and that he would explain “in person.”

In May 2011, Clinton’s staff discussed via email her receiving a suspicious link to her email, and she later that day replied to a message from the account of the undersecretary for political affairs with a suspicious website link in it, “Is this really from you?” The IG dinged Clinton and her staff for not reporting the incidents.

In none of the accounts, though, was there a record of the attempts being successful, nor indication of who was behind it.

The BBC also reported last year that there was other evidence of hacking attempts in the emails that were released by the State Department. Five so-called “phishing” emails were sent to Clinton’s email that contained malicious software disguised as speeding tickets. If someone had opened the malware, data would have been transmitted overseas, including one based in Russia. But again, there was no evidence the phishing attempts were ever opened.

There have also been boastful claims by a hacker that he broke into Clinton’s server — with no evidence to back it up. Recently convicted Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, who pleaded guilty to hacking email accounts belonging to figures including former Presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush and Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal, made such a claim from prison in an interview with NBC News.

Verdict: Because there is no conclusive indication that Clinton’s email was ever breached, let alone proof that foreign governments were behind even such attempts, we rate Trump’s claim as false.

By Tal Kopan, CNN

Trump hit Clinton on China on a number of points. He alleged that she was responsible for the theft of “billions and billions of dollars in our intellectual property, and China has taken it. And it’s a crime which is continuously going on, and it’s going on right now.”

His prepared remarks were even more direct: “She let China steal hundreds of billions of dollars in our intellectual property — a crime which is continuing to this day.”

While it is true that China has stolen intellectual property from United States entities for years, he offered no explanation for his assertion that Clinton let it go on.

China has waged a steady campaign to take trade secrets and intellectual properties from American companies both through traditional espionage and cyberespionage. The Justice Department has gone after Chinese individuals on both accounts, charging five Chinese military officials in 2014 for hacking American companies and stealing intellectual property, a case that took years to build, and have charged other individuals with infiltrating companies as employees to steal information for China.

In 2012, former National Security Agency director and Cyber Command chief Keith Alexander called Chinese hacking “the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” a line that has often been repeated by top officials.

President Barack Obama himself has called out this behavior, pressing Chinese President Xi Jinping in face-to-face talks in 2013 in California on the topic of cybersecurity and continuing the pressure today.

In a report this week, cybersecurity firm FireEye found that successful Chinese hacking against U.S. companies has decreased since the two countries signed an agreement in September to not engage in cybertheft of intellectual property — but found that it still continues at a substantial level.

The State Department is not responsible for stopping Chinese hacking. The Treasury Department ultimately decides on sanctions, the Justice Department brings legal actions, and the White House and State Department work together to apply diplomatic and public pressure. Clinton engaged in this process as secretary of state, issuing a statement after a hack of Google in 2010 that they suspected originated in China, saying, “We look to the Chinese government for an explanation.” And the Chinese behavior also started before the Obama administration and has vexed the U.S. government for years.

For these reasons, we rate Trump’s claim that Clinton let China steal intellectual property as false.

By Jamie Crawford, CNN

“Thousands of people are being allowed into this country over short periods of time, coming supposedly from Syria,” Trump said during a Town Hall in Milwaukee. “We have no idea who they are, we have no idea where is their paperwork. They have no paperwork, they have no identification. They’re coming into this country, and it’s going to be a big, big problem.”

While the Obama administration has said it has a goal of admitting 10,000 refugees from Syria before the end of the fiscal year on September 30, the United States has only admitted approximately 1,200 refugees at this point. In fact, U.S. government data show that just under 2,200 refugees from Syria have been admitted to the United States since the civil war in Syria began in March 2011.

The process for Syrians to gain admittance into the United States is actually quite cumbersome comparatively. While the average processing time for refugee applications is 18 to 24 months, applications for Syrians can take significantly longer because of security concerns and difficulties in verifying the information they provide for processing.

Based on Trump’s comments that “thousands” of people “supposedly from Syria” have entered the United States with no accounting for who they are, we rate this statement false.