CNN’s Jake Tapper repeatedly fact-checked a Republican senator on air Sunday as the lawmaker insisted that Democrats and Barack Obama’s administration were at fault for a “sweetheart” deal that allowed Jeffrey Epstein to escape his 2008 conviction on child sex charges virtually unscathed.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and repeatedly claimed that a plea agreement to keep Epstein from being charged federally for child sex crimes was signed in 2009, under the Obama administration. But Epstein’s plea agreement was drafted in 2007 and signed in 2008, when he pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for sex, before Obama was even president.
