Donald Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has admitted that the White House “reconfigured” crime statistics to back up the President’s claims of lawlessness in Washington.
Despite the Department of Justice probing D.C. officials for allegedly manipulating crime data, Leavitt told reporters the administration had in fact reconstructed their own statistics in response to “false” media reports about the president’s crackdown.
“I believe it was The Washington Post who put out a map claiming it to be fact-based when it was just based on, I don’t know, accounts that they’ve heard on the street, not actual statistics and data,” she told reporters at the White House.
“So we went and reconfigured the numbers and as I said, half, nearly half of all the non-illegal alien related arrests have occurred in wards seven and eight in the District of Columbia, where we know there’s the highest rate of crime. So we’ll continue to do that.”
Crime rates in the nation’s capital have been hotly contested in recent weeks as the president moved to federalize the D.C. police and bring in the National Guard to tackle what he has depicted as a city of lawlessness.
In another escalation of the debate, the Department of Justice is also investigating allegations that D.C. officials had manipulated crime data to make the nation’s capital seem safer than it is.
Alarm bells rang out last month when a Metropolitan Police Department commander was suspended for allegedly making changes to crime statistics in his district.
The commander, Michael Pulliam, was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May—one week after he reportedly filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against an assistant chief. He has denied wrongdoing.
But the DOJ investigation, which is reportedly being run out of the office of U.S. Attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, is believed to be broader, examining other police and city officials for possible wrongdoing.
Trump referenced the probe on Monday, when he put out a post declaring that “D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety. This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for doing so!”
He also made the same claims last week, and even suggested he would release his own crime stats to counter D.C.’s official figures.
According to the White House, 465 arrests have been made since the start of Trump’s operation on Thursday, August 7, to Tuesday.
On Monday night, 52 people were arrested, including “an illegal alien MS-13 gang member with convictions for DWI and drug possession.”
“The press says, ‘He’s a dictator, he’s trying to take over.’ No, all I want is security for our people,” Trump said on Monday during an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“But people who haven’t gone out to dinner in Washington, D.C., in two years are going out to dinner, and the restaurants the last two days were busier than they’ve been in a long time.”
