Fact check: Kaine, Pence debate features hits, misses and some clear exaggerations

Sen. Tim Kaine, Virginia, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, the Republican nominee, held a debate Tuesday night at Longwood University in Farmville, Va. Here's a selection of suspicious or interesting claims, drawn from a longer online list fact-checked with my colleague Michelle Ye Hee Lee.

Kaine: "She worked a deal with the Russians to reduce their chemical weapons stockpile."

Kaine surely meant to say nuclear weapons, but it came out as chemical weapons. Even so, Kaine overstates the impact of the 2011 New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) agreement, which Hillary Clinton helped negotiate as secretary of state.

New START does place tighter limits on deployed nuclear weapons than any past treaty. But Russia was actually already meeting the treaty's limits, for the most part, when treaty implementation began, and had increased deployed nuclear weapons from 1,537 in February 2011 to 1,796 in September 2016. Also, the treaty does not restrict either country from stockpiling weapons and does not require them to destroy any existing weapons.

Russia's total nuclear warhead arsenal has been on a steady decline, from 40,000, since 1986. During the Obama presidency, Russia's nuclear warhead total has hovered around 4,500 since 2012.

Pence: Clinton and Kaine "have a plan for open borders."

Pence exaggerates Clinton's stance on border security and immigration enforcement.

Clinton has said she would expand President Barack Obama's executive actions on immigration and has advocated comprehensive immigration reform including a path to citizenship. But she also has supported enhanced border security. And her immigration plan includes "humane, targeted and effective" enforcement and focusing immigration resources on detaining and deporting those "who pose a threat to public safety."

Kaine: "You've got to be tough on Russia. Let's start by not praising Vladimir Putin as a great leader. Donald Trump and Mike Pence have said he's a great leader."

Pence: "No, we haven't."

Maybe the GOP ticket did not precisely use the word "great," but Kaine pretty much hits the target here.

Pence told CNN just a few weeks ago: "I think it's inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been." Pence said this just after Trump asserted that Putin has "been a leader far more than our president has been a leader."

Kaine: "Richard Nixon released tax returns when he was under audit."

This is correct. A key difference here is that Nixon did not release his taxes while he was a presidential candidate; he did so in 1973, a year after he was reelected.

Presidential candidates have no legal obligation to release their returns, but there has long been a tradition to do so for the sake of transparency. Trump has cited a pending Internal Revenue Service audit, even though the first president to release his taxes, Nixon, did so in the middle of an audit. Moreover, Trump has not released his tax returns from before 2009, which are no longer under audit, according to his attorney.

Kaine: "The second component of the plan is massive tax breaks for the very top, trillions of dollars of tax breaks for people just like Donald Trump. The problem with this, Elaine, is that's exactly what we did 10 years ago and it put the economy into the deepest recession - the deepest recession since the 1930s."

Kaine repeats a line by Hillary Clinton that we said was untrue. But no credible analyst would cite the Bush tax cuts as playing a key role in causing the economic crash.

Kaine puts it even more starkly than Clinton did. The Clinton campaign tried to suggest that income inequality, exacerbated by tax cuts, led to the stagnation of the middle class and spurred excess borrowing and leverage - key components of the crash along with lax regulation. But that's a stretch, given that a housing bubble was the key trigger. The causes of the Great Recession are complex and debatable, but there's no debate that it is wrong to put the Bush tax cuts at the top of the list.

Kaine: Clinton "worked a tough negotiation with nations around the world to eliminate the Iranian nuclear weapons program without firing a shot."

Kaine leans way over on his skis here.

The Iran nuclear agreement was actually negotiated by Clinton's successor, John F. Kerry, although Clinton helped tee up the talks by increasing sanctions on the Islamic republic. The deal, which has been sharply criticized by Republicans, did increase the amount of time that Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon by reducing its centrifuges for uranium enrichment and its stockpile of enriched uranium. But the deal expires in 15 years, and Iran's nuclear infrastructure remains in place.

While Iran has insisted it has no interest in building nuclear weapons, the deal does not eliminate the risk that it will obtain nuclear bombs.

Kaine: "When Donald Trump spoke in Phoenix, he looked at the audience in the eye and said . . . quote, 'They will all be gone. They will all be gone.' "

This isn't a direct quote about deporting all undocumented immigrants, but Trump did say that all "criminal illegal immigrants" (likely referring to undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes) "are going to be gone. It will be over."

Pence: "More than half of the private meetings when she [Clinton] was secretary of state were given to major donors of the Clinton Foundation."

Pence misconstrued the Associated Press report here, similar to the way Donald Trump did earlier in the campaign.

The AP analyzed State Department records and looked specifically at Clinton's meetings on the phone or in person with 154 people who were not federal employees or foreign government representatives. This narrowed down the denominator to a small subcategory of people Clinton met with as secretary of state, since the majority of her diplomatic work would involve representatives of foreign governments.

The AP found that 85 of those 154 people, or "more than half" of 154, had donated to the Clinton Foundation or "pledged commitments to its international programs." The 85 donors collectively contributed as much as $156 million, the AP reported. There were representatives from at least 16 foreign governments, which donated as much as $170 million to the charity, but those representatives were not included in the 154 number, the AP reported.

The AP focused on 85 out of 154 people who met with Clinton but were not foreign government representatives or federal employees.

The count is based on partial records released by the State Department so far and does not reflect the full scope of people with whom Clinton met as secretary of state.