Second Lie of the Year ‘Win’ in Three Years for Trump
PolitiFact has awarded President Donald Trump his second “Lie of the Year” award, this time for his “Pants on Fire” claim that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election.
“When the nation’s commander-in-chief refuses to acknowledge a threat to U.S. democracy, it makes it all the more difficult to address the problem. For this reason, we name Trump’s claim that the Russia interference is a hoax as our Lie of the Year for 2017,” say the editors of the non-partisan PolitiFact, the fact-checking arm of the the Tampa Bay Times.
“A mountain of evidence points to a single fact: Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential election of 2016,” says PolitiFact.
“In both classified and public reports, U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered actions to interfere with the election. Those actions included the cyber-theft of private data, the placement of propaganda against particular candidates, and an overall effort to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,” PolitiFact notes, also citing multiple other sources that all agree.
After all this, one man keeps saying it didn’t even happen. Â
“This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won,” said President Donald Trump in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in May.
On Twitter in September, Trump said, “The Russia hoax continues, now it’s ads on Facebook. What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Crooked Hillary?”
And during an overseas trip to Asia in November, Trump spoke of meeting with Putin: “Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ And I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.” In the same interview, Trump referred to the officials who led the intelligence agencies during the election as “political hacks.”
PolitiFact’s 2015 Lie of the Year award went to “The campaign misstatements of Donald Trump.”
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