Fact-Checkers Weigh In on Debate

The first presidential debate was a busy night for the fact-checkers—who were asked to "get to work" by Hillary Clinton after Donald Trump said she had been fighting ISIS her "entire adult life," the Los Angeles Times reports. ISIS, in fact, first emerged in 2004 as al-Qaeda in Iraq, meaning Clinton could not have started fighting the group when she was an 18-year-old at Wellesley College in 1965. Some other contentious claims, from both sides:

• Trump: "I was endorsed by ICE." Trump was not endorsed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which as a government agency, can't endorse anybody, though he was endorsed this week by a union of ICE employees, reports Politico.

• Trump: Clinton called the Trans-Pacific Partnership the "gold standard' of trade deals and the "finest deal" she had ever seen. Clinton did indeed say the deal "sets the gold standard" and praised it on many other occasions, though there's no record of her calling it the finest deal she'd ever seen, ABC News reports.
• Clinton: "Donald says climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese." Trump denied having said this, but he was proved wrong by a tweet he made in 2012.
• Trump's claim to have been against the invasion of Iraq. The Washington Post takes a close look and finds there's nothing in the public record to support it: He told Howard Stern "Yeah, I guess so" in September 2012 when asked if he supported the invasion. He does, however, say he told Sean Hannity he was against the war in what were apparently private conversations.
• Trump: NAFTA is "the worst trade deal" in American history. According to the New York Times, the North American Free Trade Agreement was not a "big deal in economic terms," largely because trade with Canada and Mexico doesn't make up a huge portion of American economic activity.
• Clinton: Under the current mayor, crime in New York City "has continued to drop, including murders." The murder rate actually rose the year after Bill de Blasio became mayor in 2015, Politico reports, though it has fallen again so far in 2016, according to NYPD statistics.
• Trump: "My father gave me a small loan in 1975." Clinton says Trump received $14 million in loans from his father, which is the figure that appeared in a 1985 financial disclosure document, the New York Times notes. Trump's father acted as guarantor on his early project and loaned him $1 million in 1978, which works out to $3.7 million in today's dollars, according to the Guardian.

(More presidential debate stories.)