Sean Hannity and Fox News source false refugee statistics from parody news site, Donald Trump just rolls with it

Sean Hannity recently invited Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on to his Fox News show to discuss the refugee crisis.

During the interview, Hannity suggested Barack Obama had outlined plans to accept 250,000 Syrian refugees.

Bush responded:

We can’t take 250,000 refugees. I’ve never heard that, and that would be impossible to imagine logistically for us to screen.

The reason he’d never heard of the figure before is because, as Politifact points out, it had never been suggested.

Hannity appears, at their best guess, to have sourced the statistic from a fake story on RealNewsRightNow.com, a parody news site.

Side note: the banner of RealNewsRightNow.com at the time of writing is this:

The fake article, which suggested government policy was to assimilate Syrian refugees with Native American tribes, told that fictional State Department spokeswoman Cathy Pieper announced the intake:

Pieper said the tribal leadership of the Navajo and Standing Rock territories respectively, will hold sole responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of the refugees. 'Due in part to shared experiences, we believe Syrian refugees will find it relatively easy to assimilate themselves into the native culture,' Pieper said.

Hannity used the figure again on 20 October in an interview with Donald Trump.

Trump has since incorrectly quoted the 250,000 figure as government policy, in a town hall meeting broadcast on NBC on 26 October, in New Hampshire.

The figure quoted by Hannity is around triple the total number of refugees Obama has requested to accommodate during 2016 from all countries.

So, overall:

To watch the full exchange, see below:

(HT Politifact)

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