Too good to check: Sean Hannity’s tale of a Trump rescue (Another Trump lie)https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/11/too-good-to-check-sean-hannitys-tale-of-a-trump-rescue/?tid=sm_fbIt seemed like such a sweet story — Donald Trump sending his personal plane down to Camp Lejeune, N.C., when 200 Marines were stranded after fighting in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. At least that is the story that Sean Hannity of Fox News has touted on his website for several months.
But a reader, Lazer Cohen of Brooklyn, was suspicious and asked The Fact Checker to check it out.
The Hannity story mostly relied on the recollections of Cpl. Ryan Stickney, who was a squad leader in a Marine Corps Reserve antitank (TOW) company that was called up for duty for the 1990-91 conflict that took place after Iraq invaded Kuwait. After five weeks of airstrikes, the United States and its allies ousted Iraqi forces in a 100-hour ground assault.
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“Stickney recalls being told that a mistake had been made within the logistics unit and that an aircraft wasn’t available to take the Marines home on their scheduled departure date,” Hannity.com reported. But then Trump supposedly came to the rescue: “The way the story was told to us was that Mr. Trump found out about it and sent the airline down to take care of us,” Stickney said.
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Our reader was suspicious because of the language “recalls being told.” That sounds more like a rumor than any confirmation.
Moreover, take a close look at the photograph. That was not Trump’s private plane at the time. That’s a Boeing 727 jet that was part of a Trump Shuttle fleet — an airline that Trump briefly owned before it was essentially seized by the banks because he failed to make payments on his loans. It had a white fuselage.
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Well, it turns out when Trump bought the shuttle from Eastern Airlines, he made a bad deal, accepting an additional five planes instead of a lower purchase price because the market had turned south. As the Daily Beast noted, in an entertaining account of Trump’s foray into the airline business, “the shuttle needed only 16 planes to operate a full hourly schedule at its three cities, with one or two jets as spares, and extra aircraft are anathema to an airline — they don’t make money sitting on the ground.”
So some of those extra planes were contracted out to the U.S. military to ferry personnel in the United States during Operations Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-1991. Lt. Gen. Vernon J. Kondra, now retired, was in charge of all military airlift operations. He said that relying on commercial carriers freed up the military cargo aircraft for equipment transport.
Kondra graciously checked his notes for The Fact Checker; the notes have been put into an oral history and declassified. There are several references to a 1990-91 contract for Trump Shuttle to carry personnel across the United States, between the East and West coasts, on a standard LaGuardia-Dover-Charleston-Travis-Chord-Kelly-Dover-LaGuardia run.
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Despite the rumors on base, it’s clear that Trump had nothing to do with the dispatch of the jet to the troops stranded at Camp Lejeune. The aircraft that ferried the troops was part of the Trump Shuttle fleet, at a time when Trump barely had control over the airline and was frantically trying to negotiate deals with bankers to prevent the collapse of his business empire.
Trump Shuttle had a contract with the military, and this flight home was part of that contract. Simple as that.
