In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Thursday, Trump adviser, Kellyanne Conway found herself stretching the truth whilst trying to defend president Trump and his policies.

The interviewer asked:

Chris Matthews: “Does the president have a right to insist that people who work for the federal government agree with him?”

Kellyanne Conway: “He’s the president and he’s enacting policy on behalf of the nation, and in this case, he is calling for extreme vetting from seven countries that president Obama first identified. All he did was take his lead. He didn’t even add to the list. It’s te seven countries that were previously identified by president Obama as being high risk, as being states that either harbour, train, and/or export terrorism. These are nations very narrowly prescribed and also temporary. I bet there was very little coverage. I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a 6-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country were radicalised and they were the masterminds behind the bowling green massacre.”

Fact number one is there was no ‘Bowling Green massacre’. But there were Bowling Green terrorists.

In 2009, when America’s vetting for refugees wasn’t as extensive as it is now, a man named Waad Ramadan Alwan, and his cousin Mohanad Shareef Hammadi applied to America as refugees and were resettled in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Unknown to America, one of the two men (Waad Ramadan Alwan) was actually an al Qaeda-Iraq terrorist, responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq, while the other was his recruit.  Their fingerprints had been checked before entry into America’s border and they were clean, but later on that year, the FBI received an intelligence tip that spurred them into action.

The FBI secretly taped Alwan bragging to the informant that he’d built a dozen or more bombs in Iraq and used a sniper rifle to kill American soldiers in the Bayji area north of Baghdad. Something forensic investigators found to be true after finding several of several of Alwan’s fingerprints on IED’s dating back to 2005.  Alwan had also been caught on an FBI surveillance tape talking about using a bomb to assassinate an Army captain they’d known in Bayji, who was now back home. In other words, they were planning an attack on an American, so the FBI arrested them in 2011. The two men are now serving their jail term; Alwan, 40 years, and Hammadi a life term.

When the media called out Conway for the lie she told, she apologised and defended herself:

On @hardball @NBCNews @MSNBC I meant to say "Bowling Green terrorists" as reported here:
https://t.co/nB5SwIEoYI

— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) February 3, 2017

NBC reporter texted me at 632am re:a diff story; never asked what I meant on @Hardball b4 slamming me on @TODAYshow Not cool,not journalism

— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) February 3, 2017

1/2: Honest mistakes abound. Last night, prominent editor of liberal site apologized for almost running a story re: tweet from fake account

— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) February 3, 2017

2/2: yet won't name him, attack him, get the base 2 descend upon him. Same with MLKJr bust fake story. It's called class, grace, deep breath

— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) February 3, 2017

Fact number two is there was no ban by president Obama on the Iraqi refugee program in 2011.

This ABC 2013 Exclusive report states that “As a result of the Kentucky case, the State Department stopped processing Iraq refugees for six months in 2011, federal officials told ABC News – even for many who had heroically helped U.S. forces as interpreters and intelligence assets. But as VOX explains it, when the Bowling Green terrorists were discovered and arrested, the vetting process was shown to be quite flawed because the fingerprint database program for Iraqi militants was not integrated with the state department’s  refugee admissions process, meaning that some terrorists could slip in like Alwan did.

Therefore, Obama’s administration initiated a review of all refugees that had been received into the country to undertake revetting.  This slowed down refugee entry into the United States for six months, but even at that state department data shows that “9,388 Iraqi refugees were admitted to the US during the 2011 budget year. The data also shows that Iraqi refugees were admitted every month during the 2011 calendar year. In addition, more than 7,800 Iraqis were allowed into the US on non-immigrant visas, including tourists, during the 2011 budget year.”

This is why Trump’s travel ban is not on the same footing with Obama’s stringent revetting with respect to Iraqi refugees in 2011.

If the past two weeks of Trump’s administration are anything to go by, we’ll be seeing more of these equivocations from Trump’s team.