For the 3rd straight year PolitiFact awards its “Lie of the Year” to (surprise!) President Trump. While PolitiFact may be “politi” they aren’t concerned with facts and this award is itself a lie. They claim that Trump lied that the whistleblower mischaracterized his call with Ukraine president Zelensky, which he most certainly did. The way PolitiFact gets around this inconvenient truth is by pretending that most of the facts don’t exist, which is another way of saying they lied.
And the winner of PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year goes to…
Since the Sept. 26 release of the whistleblower complaint about his call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump has insisted more than 80 times that the whistleblower’s account is fake, fraudulent, incorrect, “total fiction,” “made up,” and “sooo wrong.”
On Oct. 5 he tweeted that the “second hand information ‘Whistleblower’ got my phone conversation almost completely wrong.”
“Everything he wrote in that report, almost, was a lie,” Trump told reporters Nov. 8.
“The whistleblower defrauded our country, because the whistleblower wrote something that was totally untrue,” he said to the approval of supporters at a rally Dec. 10 in Hershey, Pa.
The claim that the whistleblower got his phone call “almost completely wrong” is PolitiFact’s 2019 Lie of the Year.
Now here’s why PolitiFact thinks this was the worst lie all year:
Despite what Trump claims, the whistleblower got the call “almost completely” right.
We know this from the very record of the call the president released. We know this from testimony under oath from career diplomats and other officials. And the president and his allies have told reporters that Trump did what the whistleblower suggested — urged the Ukrainian president to investigate political rival Joe Biden. Their argument is that there was nothing inappropriate or unreasonable about it.
The whistleblower was not listening in but cited “multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call.” The complaint says Trump “pressured” Zelensky to:
• investigate Biden and his son, Hunter Biden;
• look into allegations that interference in the 2016 election, attributed to Russia, originated with Ukraine and a Democratic server; and,
• speak with Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr about those issues.
Gee, that’s swell but there’s one important fact that PolitiFact is leaving out: The whistleblower alleged that President Trump threatened to withhold military aid unless Ukraine investigated the Bidens and the DNC. That never happened. It’s not in the transcript of the call. None of the career diplomats testified that they heard Trump make this threat, just that they felt like, in their opinions, that’s what he was doing.
This is from the whistleblower complaint that launched the democrats’ impeachment/coup attempt:
In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.
During this same timeframe, multiple U.S. officials told me that the Ukrainian leadership was led to believe that a meeting or phone call between the President and President Zelenskyy would depend on whether Zelenskyy showed willingness to “play ball” on the issues that had been publicly aired…
In addition there are several inaccuracies in the whistleblower complaint that have been proven wrong.
The entire point of the whistleblower complaint was that President Trump tried to quid pro quo/extort/bribe the Ukraine and no evidence of that is anywhere in the phone call transcript. The whistleblower got Trump’s call almost entirely wrong.
When Trump says that the whistleblower got his call with Zelensky “almost completely wrong” that is a true statement. The whistleblower claimed Trump had pressured Ukraine with a threat to withhold military aide, but the President never did that.
PolitiFact should give themselves the Lie of the Year for this complete misrepresentation of fact, but they are part of the liberal propaganda fake news industry and they are trying to undo the results of the 2016 election.
The good news for President Trump is that along with this prestigious award, he gets a pretty awesome prize: a guaranteed reelection in 2020.
