Fox News Fact Checks Trump’s False Claim About New Orleans Attacker Immigration Status, After Retracting Its Border Crossing Report

Fox News correspondent David Spunt pushed back on President-elect Donald Trump with a fact-check of his insinuation that the suspect in Wednesday’s New Orleans attack was one of many “criminals coming in” to the United States.

In his statement posted on Truth Social, Trump blasted the New Orleans attack as “pure evil” and blamed “criminals coming in” to the country in a statement that also slammed Democrats and the “Fake News Media” for not taking his warnings about border security seriously.

Fox News itself erroneously reported on Wednesday that the driver had crossed the southern border in the U.S. this week — reporting that spread rapidly on social media before it was corrected by the network. Eight minutes after Fox first reported the false information on the air, Trump tied the attack to immigration on his social media platform.

During a live broadcast on Thursday, Spunt read out President Joe Biden’s statement, and Trump’s to Your World hosts in the studio before drawing a clear line between the president-elect’s words and the confirmed facts about the terror suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar.

To be clear, Molly and Brian, the suspect was born in the United States. He served in the United States Army. He was a veteran.

The FBI later echoed those findings, confirming Jabbar was a U.S. citizen from Texas and had previously served in the Army Reserve. Agents also stated that the flag found in the suspect’s truck “appeared to be an ISIS banner.”

Despite this, Trump doubled down on his position early Thursday in a further Truth Social post in which he said: “This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership.”

“TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!” he followed in a further post.

Watch above on Fox News.