{"id":21990,"date":"2018-03-29T06:26:43","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T12:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=21990"},"modified":"2018-03-29T06:53:39","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T12:53:39","slug":"fact-check-senate-candidates-tweet-misses-the-mark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2018\/03\/fact-check-senate-candidates-tweet-misses-the-mark\/","title":{"rendered":"Fact Check: Senate candidate’s Tweet misses the mark"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Troy\"<\/a>

U.S. Senate candidate Troy Downing, who is running in the Republican primary, pulled a Tweet that included a questionable claim about Sen. Jon Tester.<\/p><\/div>\n

Editor’s note<\/strong>: This is the first offering, from the Montana Free Press, of what will likely be many reports fact-checking the claims and statements of candidates, campaigns and third-party political groups in the run-up to\u00a0the 2018 midterm elections.<\/em><\/p>\n

Montana Republican Senate Candidate Troy Downing deleted a Tweet on Wednesday that falsely claimed that \u201cThe VA in\u00a0#<\/span><\/span>Montana<\/span><\/span>\u00a0has been caught hiring doctors with revoked licenses from other states & former felons.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Downing is among\u00a0four Republicans<\/a>\u00a0vying for their party\u2019s nomination to challenge Tester in the Nov. 6 midterm election.<\/p>\n

Downing\u2019s tweet included a link to a\u00a0December 2017 USA Today report<\/a>\u00a0about a doctor who is licensed in Montana and once practiced in Billings, but was not a VA employee in Montana. (The doctor, neurosurgeon John Henry Schneider, has been licensed to practice medicine in Montana since 1997. According to the Board of Medical Examiners, that license is set to expire on March 31). The USA Today report did not include any information about the Montana VA hiring doctors with\u00a0revoked licenses or felons.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The tweet lays blame for the VA hiring scandal at the feet of incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, who is the\u00a0ranking member on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Montana Free Press\u00a0responded<\/a>\u00a0to Downing\u2019s tweet requesting source information to corroborate his claim. Shortly after that the tweet was\u00a0deleted<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Reached by email, Downing\u2019s campaign manager, Kevin Gardner, said:<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>\u201cThanks for pointing that out, it has been corrected to say the VA, not the Montana VA. But the point is the VA is the VA and Jon Tester is the #2 guy on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee and under his watch the VA has hired doctors with licenses revoked and former felons.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few days after USA Today investigation was published,\u00a0Tester sent a letter<\/a>\u00a0to Dr. Carolyn Clancy, executive in charge, Veterans Health Administration, urging her to give medical directors \u201cclear and direct guidance about compliance with existing Federal law as well as their responsibility to hire qualified clinicians who will not abuse the trust of our nation\u2019s veterans.\u201d<\/p>\n

We rate Downing\u2019s initial claim via Twitter that \u201cThe VA in #Montana has been caught hiring doctors with revoked licenses from other states & former felons\u201d\u00a0FALSE<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

While its true Tester sits on a committee that has oversight of Veterans Affairs Administration, it\u2019s a quite a leap to suggest that an individual U.S. senator is responsible for auditing the payrolls and hiring practices of executive branch agencies. Besides, using Gardner\u2019s logic, the \u201c#1 guy on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee,\u201d Republican Johnny Isakson, of Georgia, should bear more responsibility than Tester, \u201cthe #2 guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Had Tester failed to take action once hiring practices were revealed, the hashtag \u201c#<\/span>TesterFail<\/span><\/span><\/a>\u201d might be more appropriate. In this case, given that Tester\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0take action after learning of the hiring practices, we rate the follow-up claim that \u201cunder [Tester\u2019s] watch the VA has hired doctors with licenses revoked and former felons\u201d as\u00a0MOSTLY FALSE<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

John Adams is the founding editor of\u00a0The Montana Free Press<\/a>, where this story was first published. The story on the Free Press site includes numerous links to documents connected to the case.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note: This is the first offering, from the Montana Free Press, of what will likely be many reports fact-checking the claims and statements of candidates, campaigns and third-party political groups in the run-up to\u00a0the 2018 midterm elections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":21991,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[6872,3084,6445],"class_list":["post-21990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-2018-elections","tag-jon-tester","tag-troy-downing","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21990"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21995,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21990\/revisions\/21995"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}