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On Sunday, NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor nailed an exclusive phone interview with President Trump. A good deal of news came out of that, and a story that followed highlighted Trump’s vague and ominous threat to investigate former FBI director Christopher Wray amid false claims that FBI agents were part of the January 6 crowd that stormed the Capitol. 

Another big piece of news came out of that interview, and we know about that thanks to Evan Watson, a reporter for KGW-8, the NBC affiliate in Portland, Oregon. KGW obtained a transcript of Trump’s remarks and published a story midday Sunday that highlighted a stunning quote from Trump. Here is the section, emphasis mine:

Trump referenced a weekend conversation with Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, and he alluded to being told by Kotek that the reality in Portland is different from what’s being portrayed to him.

“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”

That quote tells us a great deal about Trump’s decision to send troops to Portland, but it says even more about how our president obtains and processes information. And it jibes with a new lawsuit filed by the city and state to stop Trump’s moves into Portland. In the suit, the plaintiffs allege that Trump has been relying on clips from violent George Floyd protests in Portland in 2020 to decide how to act there in 2025. Last September 5, the suit says, “Fox News aired a report on Portland ICE protests that included misleading clips from Portland protests in 2020. Shortly thereafter, President Trump appeared to reference events in the same misleading Fox News report when speaking to the press. A reporter asked which city President Trump planned to send troops to next, and he said he was considering targeting Portland because of news coverage the night before. President Trump alleged that ‘paid terrorists’ and ‘paid agitators’ were making the city unlivable, further stating…‘if we go to Portland, we’re gonna wipe them out. They’re going to be gone and they’re going to be gone fast.’”

The quote highlighted by KGW got a lot of attention on social media, but it took a day or more for mainstream outlets like MSNBC and Politico to tell their readers about it (while many other news organizations still haven’t picked up on it). This might be because reporters were focusing on some of Trump’s other musings, including his reposting of an AI-generated video that included a fake President Trump and a fake Lara Trump promoting a fake medical remedy on a fake Fox News segment. 

In a more perfect universe, our nation’s leaders would be basing their decisions on current, verified information—not five-year-old Fox News clips that happen to cross the TV screen while the president is watching. Trump’s quote acknowledging that he got his Portland information this way tells us a lot, and I’m not sure we would’ve known about it if not for the curiosity of a local TV reporter.

You may know the feeling. A tantalizing tranche of documents gets dumped into your inbox or arrives in the mail, and it comes from an unofficial or anonymous source. Inside that pile is a ton of juicy, newsworthy detail. You’re getting more and more excited as you leaf through it, but you can’t shake that deepening pit in your stomach. 

What if… this is fake? What if I am about to be [insert foreboding music here] Dan Rathered?

For those who weren’t around in 2004, Rather’s illustrious career at CBS went askew during the lead-up to the George W. Bush/John Kerry election. He broadcast a sensational story that Bush had gotten special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s, basing this allegation on documents that soon turned out to be forgeries. It was a “permanent exclusive,” as the saying goes.

Fast-forward a couple of decades to a few weeks ago, when Bloomberg News published an exposé of eighteen thousand emails it had obtained from the Yahoo account of sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. The emails showed, among other things, the close relationship between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and the ways they both manipulated their victims with a mix of coercion and gifts. 

Excellent work, that, but also welcome and notable was Bloomberg’s sidebar showing the meticulous caution that its reporters exercised to ensure the emails were authentic. These journalists used “cryptographic analysis, metadata analysis and corroboration with external sources” to verify their provenance, and “four independent experts reviewed our methods and said they aligned with best practices.” As one of the experts told the Bloomberg team, “Short of logging into Yahoo, that’s the right way to vet an email archive.”

A couple of short takes:

• Nebraska officials are known to boast about the state’s low rate of drug-related deaths. With under twelve such fatalities per one hundred thousand people, they have billed theirs as the lowest rate in the US. Legislators have referred to the statistic as “fortunate” and “exciting.” It also appears to be flimsy or false, as we see in this deeply reported story by Destiny Herbers of the Flatwater Free Press. Nebraska has the same rate of nonfatal overdoses as such states as Montana and Texas, but those states’ death rates are twice that of Nebraska. So how is that possible? Those states “have medical examiners who determine causes of death,” Herbers notes. “In Nebraska, that job falls to county attorneys. Many haven’t reported a drug death in years, even decades.” A number of prosecutors aren’t interested in examining deaths when there’s no evidence of a crime, as in some accidental overdoses. And the impact goes beyond mere statistics: by reporting so few deaths, Nebraska loses out on millions of dollars in federal funding to address substance abuse.
  
• From the Department of Huh? A recent New York Times piece looked into a study that predicts thousands of additional deaths in coming decades from wildfire smoke. The story includes a state-by-state graphic showing how many new deaths could be attributed to the fires by midcentury, ranging from 19 in North Dakota to 4,551 in California. And at the bottom, it shows Florida, with negative 658 deaths caused by wildfire smoke. What does that mean? Were they saved by smoke? How is that possible? We never find out.

Laurels and Darts will take a short break but will return later this month.

Rebecca Blumenstein, chair of CJR’s Board of Overseers, is the president of NBC News Editorial. She was not involved in the preparation of this column. We also give hat tips to Nathan Collier, who is a member of the CJR board, and to the Local Matters newsletter, assembled by Investigative Reporters and Editors.

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