AP FACT CHECK: Trump selectively quotes from a legal blog

WASHINGTON – Making a legal argument in 140 characters is no easy task, and President Donald Trump may have confounded people Friday morning with his tweet about the appeals case that kept the borders open to people he wants banned. A look behind the tweet:

TRUMP: “LAWFARE: ‘Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this (the) statute.’ A disgraceful decision!”

THE FACTS: Trump accurately quoted a passage from the Lawfare blog about the decision Thursday by the federal appeals court in San Francisco. But the blog’s editor-in-chief and author of the post, Brookings Institution scholar Benjamin Wittes, actually wrote in favour of the decision while exposing what he considers its weaknesses.

He wrote that Trump’s executive order barring visitors from seven mainly Muslim countries and refugees worldwide was promulgated with “incompetent malevolence.” Continuing its suspension, as the appeals court did, avoids plunging the country into turmoil again while other courts address the merits of the case, he said.

Yet Wittes said the judges failed to address the law at the heart of Trump’s statutory case. The law says the president may, “by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” or impose “any restrictions” if he decides their presence in the country would be detrimental to the U.S.

That’s a “pretty big omission,” he wrote. Wittes also criticized the court’s “arch and clucking dismissals of presidential demands for deference in national security cases.”

Trump’s selective citation from the blog suggests that this line of argument could be central to the administration’s case that courts have not given presidential authority proper weight.

The passage quoted by Trump was featured on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and the president’s use of it prompted the author to tweet: “You’ve found the only sentence in it congenial to your views.”

EDITOR’S NOTE _ A look at the veracity of claims by political figures