‘I did that’: Trump takes credit for a prisoner release that happened before he even ran for president

U.S. President Donald Trump on the White House campus, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump spoke from prepared remarks as he discussed the persecution of Mariam Ibrahim. Ibrahim was unjustly imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014, in a case centred on her Christian faith, until she was released that same year following a global outcry.

Trump correctly said: “Believers all over the planet rallied to Mariam’s cause, prayed for her protection, and successfully pressured for her release.”

But then the president appeared to ad-lib – and claimed that he was the one who got Ibrahim freed.

“I did that. I did that. I did that with one phone call, actually,” he said. “And she had such support, it was so easy. And when I explained it to the powers that be: ‘Yes, sir, we will do it right away.’ I just wish I knew earlier. But it’s a big world with a lot of people.”

For years, Trump has told fictional stories that feature unnamed people referring to him as “sir.” This was another one.

Ibrahim was released in 2014, during the Obama administration. Trump did not become president until January 2017. He was not even a presidential candidate until June 2015. There has never been the slightest indication that a private citizen in the U.S., a businessman and celebrity at the time, was the person who convinced Sudanese authorities to let her out of prison.

A former Obama administration official who served on the National Security Council in 2014 told CNN on Friday: “I neither had at the time nor have now any knowledge of Trump’s involvement whatsoever. It’d be very surprising if he were.”

Jack Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service, first raised skepticism about Trump’s story on Thursday.

Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor who is a prominent conservative legal scholar, said in a Friday email: “As Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2014, I advocated for Mariam Ibrahim. I do not recall Donald Trump being involved in the case or assisting our Commission’s efforts. Of course, he was not President at the time. Whether he was working privately outside our view, I cannot say. It is certainly possible.”

It is possible in theory. But even if Trump did contribute in some way to the international pressure campaign to achieve Ibrahim’s release – some way Trump’s White House team and congressional allies could not identify when invited to do so by CNN on Friday – that wouldn’t make it true that he personally got Ibrahim released with a phone call.

Trump didn’t tell this story at a 2019 event. The White House wouldn’t comment Friday

The White House did not respond to CNN’s Friday request to describe any Trump involvement in Ibrahim’s release. A Friday search of the LexisNexis database of news articles brought up hundreds of articles about the case but none that mentioned any Trump involvement.

When Ibrahim met Trump at the White House in 2019, at an event with fellow survivors of religious persecution, he did not publicly display familiarity with the case or tell the story about how he had supposedly singlehandedly secured her release. A member of his administration briefly summarized Ibrahim’s story for him, and Trump then told her, “We got you out, that’s good, that’s great.”

During a public conversation in 2020, Trump’s then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a former congressman, spoke with a conservative activist about how they both look back proudly on their work to free Ibrahim – but neither of them said Trump had been involved too.

And when CNN reached out Friday to Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who was a vocal advocate for Ibrahim in 2014, to ask whether there was any truth to Trump’s story, he responded only by having an aide send along two web links to his own 2014 comments on the matter. He did not mention Trump in either link.

Attempts to contact Ibrahim for comment were unsuccessful.