President Donald Trump once again brought up Sweden during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday morning, less than a week after he first appeared to reference an attack in the country that never actually happened.
“I took a lot of heat on Sweden,” the President said. “A day later I said has anybody reported what’s going on? And it turned out that they didn’t, not too many of them. … The [Swedish] people understand I’m right.”
In his original remarks, Trump said an incident had occurred last Friday night in Sweden. He later clarified that he was talking about a Fox News segment that ran that night about immigration in Sweden which alleged there had been a surge in violence in the country. There is no data to suggest that refugees are responsible for more crime in Sweden than other groups and Sweden’s crime prevention council found that there was no significant increase in crimes between 2015 and 2016. And despite Trump’s insistence that the Swedish people “understand I’m right,” officials in the country have forcefully pushed back against his comments.
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Write to Tessa Berenson Rogers at tessa.Rogers@time.com