46 Trump Lies -- at the Debate

“The bigger problem that you have is that you’re going to extinguish 180 million people with their private health care that they’re very happy with.”

The president falsely accused Biden of wanting to enact Medicare-for-all, a plan advanced by some Democratic candidates that would have replaced the private health insurance most Americans get through their employers with a government plan modeled on Medicare, which provides health care for people over 65. During the primaries, Biden refused to embrace such a single-payer program and instead advocated offering people an option of joining a government-run health plan.

“You’ve had 308,000 military people dying because you couldn't provide them proper health care in the military.”

“A fixing of the VA [Veterans Affairs], which was a mess under him. 308,000 people died because they didn’t have proper health care.”

The president tossed out this figure twice during the debate. But it’s a bogus number that we debunked five years ago when he first used it. There were about 307,000 records of veterans who were marked as “pending” in a health-care database who had already died, according to their Social Security records. Some media outlets misreported what that meant. Given all the limitations in the database, it’s impossible to know whether those veterans had died before or after the VA began its health-care enrollment system, or whether they had applied for health care. Investigators found significant weaknesses in the data system that render the health enrollment database “virtually unreliable.”

“If you were here, it wouldn’t be 200 [thousand dead of covid-19]. It would be 2 million people because you were very late on the draw.”

Biden raised the alarm about a possible pandemic long before Trump, in his public remarks, appeared to take it seriously.

As for the 2 million figure, Trump cites a possible death figure that was a worst-case scenario produced by Imperial College London, which assumed that 81 percent of the population would become infected — 268 million people — and that 0.9% of them would die. It did so by also assuming people took no actions against the novel coronavirus — nobody avoided crowded elevators, wore face masks, washed their hands more often, or bought gloves or hand sanitizer — which the study itself acknowledged was unrealistic, saying it “is highly likely that there would be significant spontaneous change in population behavior even in the absence of government‐mandated interventions.”

Moreover, even the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 is believed to have infected no more than 28 percent of the population, making the 81 percent figure suspect. Trump routinely mentions this figure to suggest he saved that many people from death, even as the actual death toll rises far above many of his earlier predictions.

“You don’t know her [Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s] view on Roe v. Wade. You don’t know her view.”

Biden said abortion rights were on the ballot, referring to Trump’s nominee to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, Judge Amy Coney Barrett. Trump said his nominee’s views were unknown to Biden.

Barrett, a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, has never said that she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that recognized abortion rights. When Trump nominated her to be a federal appeals court judge in 2017, Barrett said Roe was settled law.

But she has said she believes life begins at conception and her stated views include plenty of legal criticism of Roe, and in addition, Barrett also has said she believes some court precedents should be overturned even if they are settled law.

“The public response to controversial cases like Roe reflects public rejection of the proposition that stare decisis can declare a permanent victor in a divisive constitutional struggle,” she wrote in a 2013 law review article.

Barrett would replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a staunch supporter of abortion rights who died in September.

“By creating through judicial fiat a framework of abortion on demand in a political environment that was already liberalizing abortion regulations state-by-state, she said, the court’s concurrent rulings in Roe and Doe v. Bolton ‘ignited a national controversy,’ ” Barrett was quoted as saying by Notre Dame Magazine in 2013. The magazine added: “Barrett believes it is ‘very unlikely’ the court will ever overturn Roe’s core protection of abortion rights, and sees the political battle shifting toward matters of public and private funding.”

Years later, she said the question had become how much leeway the Supreme Court will give states to regulate abortion.

Critics say Barrett nonetheless could chip away at abortion rights, voting for a series of smaller restrictions rather than overturning Roe in one swoop. “Donald Trump has made it clear that he would only appoint justices who would overturn Roe v Wade,” Planned Parenthood Action Fund said in a statement, alleging that Barrett has a “history of hostility toward reproductive health and rights.”

During a presidential debate in 2016, Trump vowed to appoint justices who would overturn the abortion rulings. “That will happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court,” Trump said. “I will say this: It will go back to the states, and the states will then make a determination.”

“We will protect people with preexisting condition.”

Cue the avalanche of Pinocchios.

If Trump wins a pending case before the Supreme Court, the entire Affordable Care Act would cease to exist, jeopardizing health care for millions of Americans during a deadly pandemic. The Justice Department filed a brief June 25 in support of the GOP argument that “the entire ACA ... must fall.”

Nearly 100 million Americans with preexisting conditions could be denied coverage by insurers or charged prohibitively high prices as a result. Trump has no plan to replace ACA provisions such as coverage for preexisting conditions. He recently signed a toothless executive order affirming support for such protections, but health-care experts say what’s needed is a law — for instance, the ACA, which he is trying to dismantle.

Republicans have tried to repeal and replace the health-care law for 10 years and have never agreed on how to do it. Before he asked the nation’s highest court to strike down the law, Trump consistently sought to weaken some of the ACA provisions at issue, as we found in this fact check.

“You agreed with Bernie Sanders’s far left on the manifesto, we call it. … And that gives you socialized medicine.”

Trump often claims falsely that Biden veered sharply to the left after winning the Democratic primary, offering as proof a set of recommendations drafted by a “unity task force” of Biden advisers and supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

But that document — which Biden has described consistently as recommendations he will consider, not set-in-stone policy positions — does not propose to socialize medical care.

“Private insurers need real competition to ensure they have incentive to provide affordable, quality coverage to every American,” it says. “To achieve that objective, we will give all Americans the choice to select a high-quality, affordable public option through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. The public option will provide at least one plan choice without deductibles, will be administered by the traditional Medicare program, not private companies, and will cover all primary care without any copayments and control costs for other treatments by negotiating prices with doctors and hospitals, just like Medicare does on behalf of older people. The lowest-income Americans not eligible for Medicaid will be automatically enrolled in the public option at no cost to them, although they may choose to opt out at any time.”

In so many words, that language from the unity task force rephrases Biden’s own health-care plan from the start of the campaign.

“If your insurance company isn’t doing right by you, you should have another, better choice,” Biden’s website says. “Whether you’re covered through your employer, buying your insurance on your own, or going without coverage altogether, the Biden Plan will give you the choice to purchase a public health insurance option like Medicare. As in Medicare, the Biden public option will reduce costs for patients by negotiating lower prices from hospitals and other health care providers. It also will better coordinate among all of a patient’s doctors to improve the efficacy and quality of their care, and cover primary care without any co-payments. And it will bring relief to small businesses struggling to afford coverage for their employees.”

Sanders proposed a much more ambitious plan, “Medicare-for-all,” or universal health care with the government acting as the single payer, that Biden does not support.

“Because he, in fact, already has cost 10 million people their health care that they had from their employers because of his recession, number one.” — Biden

A study of census data released in July by the Urban Institute found that 10.1 million people would lose their employer-sponsored health coverage from April to December. But Biden left out another finding from the same study: Many of those people would be able to get insurance through other means, such as Medicaid or the individual marketplace.

In the end, 3.5 million people would be left without coverage, the Urban Institute estimated.

A separate analysis by Avalere Health estimated that 12 million people could lose their insurance by the end of 2020. So the range of estimates is wide, and Biden misused one such figure on the high end.

“He went in and he — we were insisting that the people we had on the ground in China should be able to go to Wuhan and determine for themselves how dangerous this was. He did not even ask Xi to do that. He told us what a great job Xi was doing.” — Biden

Biden is arguing something that is in dispute. The Biden campaign says the public record is clear that Trump did not put pressure on Chinese President Xi Jinping to allow U.S. health experts into the country. The White House says that Biden is wrong and that Trump personally raised the issue in a conversation with Xi. When we looked into this in April, we concluded the administration at various levels sought access for Centers for Disease Control experts — and an administration official told The Fact Checker an offer to send staff was made at the presidential level. Whether Trump put pressure on Xi behind the scenes remains unclear, though Trump’s public comments and tweets do not indicate much pressure. “I did discuss that about sending our people in,” Trump told reporters in March. “And they didn’t really respond.”

Moreover, Biden suggests that early on he had been calling on China to admit U.S. experts. But the earliest example we can find is from the Democratic debate held on Feb. 25, a few days after a World Health Organization mission finally reached Wuhan.

“Well, masks — masks make a big difference. His own head of the CDC said if we just wore a mask between now — if they’re — everybody wore a mask and social distanced between now and January, we’d probably save up to 100,000 lives. It matters. It matters.” — Biden

“And they’ve also said the opposite. They’ve also said the opposite.”

Biden is wrong that Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, made this prediction. Redfield certainly has said that face masks “are the most important, powerful public health tool we have” against spread of the coronavirus. But it was the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that made the 100,000 prediction in early September.

But Trump is also wrong to suggest the effectiveness of masks is still in dispute.

“Look at Dr. Fauci — Dr. Fauci said the opposite — He said very strongly — masks are not good. Then he changed his mind. He said masks are good.”

Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, did say this, as did other health experts in the U.S. government, but the circumstances have changed. Fauci has explained he was motivated by early fears that N95 masks needed by hospital workers would quickly run out of stock. Once science indicated that the virus was spread by people who were asymptomatic, the guidance was updated, because even fabric masks can help halt the spread if everyone wears them.

“He didn’t think we should close it down, and he was wrong.”

Biden did not oppose shutdown orders in March. In fact, he has said Trump acted too slowly and could have saved more lives if he moved faster.

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“The difference is millionaires and billionaires like him in the middle of the covid crisis have done very well, and other billionaires have raised — have made another $300 billion because of his profligate tax proposal, and he only focuses on the market.”

“The billionaires have gotten much more wealthy, by a tune of over $300 billion to $400 billion more, just since covid.” — Biden

The gain in billionaire wealth during the pandemic is certainly a fair target. But Biden twice cited a dubious number.

For the billionaire statistic, Biden appears to be citing a report by a liberal-leaning group, Americans for Tax Fairness, that estimated that between March 18 — the rough start date of the coronavirus pandemic shutdown — and May 19, the total net worth of the 600-plus U.S. billionaires jumped by $434 billion. The report used net-worth calculations from Forbes magazine, which tracks the net worth of billionaires.

But selecting March 18 was a bit of cherry-picking. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index had reached its peak on Feb. 19, and the market had fallen quite a bit by March 18. So, many of these billionaires were underwater on May 19. MarketWatch recalculated the numbers from Feb. 19 and came up with a much different picture.

“Cumulatively, the top 50 billionaires lost $232 billion between the market’s peak and [May 19],” MarketWatch reported. “If the remaining billionaires on the Forbes list lost wealth at the same roughly 12.5% rate that the top 50 experienced, that’s another $200 billion-plus wiped out.”

Of course, the S&P 500 index has since recovered much of its losses, so it’s safe to say many billionaires have probably regained their earlier losses.

“Many car companies came in from Germany, went to Michigan and went to Ohio.

”False. No auto manufacturers from Germany have opened factories in Michigan or Ohio since Trump became president. Mercedes-Benz, a German company, opened a plant in South Carolina in 2018, but the project broke ground in 2015. Trump frequently conjures up imaginary auto plants in swing states.

“You did a crime bill, 1994, when you call them super predators, African Americans, super predators, and they’ve never forgotten it. They’ve never forgotten it, Joe.”

Biden sponsored the 1994 crime bill, now seen as a source of racial disparities in the criminal justice system. But Biden never used the term “super predators” to describe African Americans. (That was Hillary Clinton.)

At the debate, Trump was asked whether he thought there was systemic racism in the country. His response focused on his decision to curtail racial sensitivity training in the federal government. Trump’s administration has taken action against such training, using the argument that it involves reverse racism and discriminates against White people.

“I ended it because it’s racist,” Trump said. “If you were a certain person, you had no status in life — it was sort of a reversal.”

“If you look at New York, where it’s going up like nobody has ever seen anything. The numbers are going up 100 percent, 150 percent, 200 percent, crime.”

These numbers do not add up. In New York, crime overall is down slightly (about 1.5 percent) so far this year. Shootings are up about 93 percent, and murders have increased 38 percent. Crime is down 10 percent compared with 10 years ago in the city.

“We have to have community policing like we had before, where the officers get to know the people in the communities. That’s when crime went down. It didn’t go up; it went down.” — Biden

Whether the 1994 crime bill, which funded nearly $10 billion in grants provided by the Community Oriented Police Services (COPS) program between 1994 and 2000, helped bring down crime has long been a subject of debate among experts. The crime rate did go way down. But the COPS program was not the primary or even secondary factor in the dramatic reduction in crime during the 1990s — the precise reasons for which remain a mystery. The results vary depending on whether the research is done by a criminologist or an economist, or from within the government or outside of it. But overall the answer to whether the COPS program had impact is “maybe — but only modestly.”

“He’s talking about defunding the police.”

As Fox News reported as far back as June 8, Biden opposes the concept of eliminating police departments. We have previously given the Trump campaign Four Pinocchios for asserting the opposite in its television ads.

“No, I don‘t support defunding the police,” Biden said in a CBS News interview. “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness and, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”

Biden, in fact, has come under scrutiny from the left for his position and for proposing to spend an additional $300 million a year on the community policing program started in the Clinton administration. (That would effectively double the budget for the program.)

Biden: “And by the way, his own former spokesperson said riots and chaos and violence help his cause. That's what this is all about.”

Trump: “I don't know who said that.”

Biden: “I do.”

Trump: “Who? Who?”

Biden: “I think Kellyanne Conway.”

Trump: “I don’t think she said that.”

She did say it. Amid the protests in Kenosha, Wis., appearing on “Fox & Friends” in late August, Conway said, “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”

In a Washington Post Live interview, Conway protested that her full quote was being chopped up to convey a different message.

Conway said she also said, “It’s not Donald Trump’s watch. He’s trying to get law and order restored. But I don’t think Joe Biden will go to Wisconsin, because the last time a Democratic nominee went there was 2012,” among other things. But it doesn’t make Biden’s quotation of her inaccurate. She said Trump stands to benefit politically from chaos and violence. Some may see that as a crass admission, but various independent political analysts believe the same.

“We now got a 91 percent approval rating at the VA … highest ever recorded.”

This is based on an independent survey conducted in 2013, when President Barack Obama was in office.

“Veterans strongly endorsed VA health care, with 91 percent offering positive assessments of inpatient care and 92 percent for outpatient care,” according a news release from the Department of Veterans Affairs announcing the survey results in 2014, when Obama was still in office.

In a Military Times poll of 1,018 active-duty troops conducted this summer, nearly half had an unfavorable view of Trump. The poll also showed a slight preference for Biden among respondents.

“He [Hunter] was given tens of millions of dollars.”

Hunter Biden certainly had some lucrative contracts. But tens of millions of dollars? There is no evidence.

“What’s happening is the car is much less expensive and it’s a much safer car, and you’re talking about a tiny difference. And then what would happen, because of the cost of the car, you would have at least double and triple the number of cars purchased. We have the old slugs out there that are 10, 12 years old. If you did that, the car would be safer, it would be much cheaper by $3,500.”

Trump is arguing against higher fuel efficiency standards by making an economic and safety argument rejected by many experts and that most automakers do not want. The rule to roll back Obama-era standards being written by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposal has nothing to do with making new cars safer; in fact, internal EPA emails released in 2018 said the rule change would increase highway fatalities. He also falsely claims there would be little environmental impact. Experts say any potential savings on the sticker price of new cars probably would be offset by the increased fuel cost over the life of those vehicles, even if gas prices stay low. With less fuel-efficient cars, the rollback could also introduce hundreds of millions of metric tons of CO2 into the air and increase oil consumption by more than 1 billion barrels, according to the EPA’s own estimates.

“I’m all for electric cars. I’ve given big incentives for electric cars.”

Nope. Trump has actually proposed to eliminate two of the three key programs — which predate Trump’s tenure — that encourage the manufacture or purchase of an electric vehicle.

Biden: “Look how much we’re paying now to deal with the hurricanes, with, to deal with — by the way, he has an answer for hurricanes. He said, ‘Maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them.’ They may —”

Trump: “I never said that at all.”

Whether or not Trump suggested using nuclear weapons, Trump repeatedly floated the idea of using bombs of some kind to stop hurricanes. Axios reported that a National Security Council memo from 2017 describes a conversation “in which Trump asked whether the administration should bomb hurricanes to stop them from hitting the homeland.”

“He called the military ‘stupid bastards.’ ”

Trump has elevated this false claim since the Atlantic reported new accounts of Trump’s private remarks disparaging soldiers who died in service of the United States.

Biden did use those words, once, but a video of the 2016 event shows Biden was clearly joking early in his speech, given during a stop in Abu Dhabi in March 2016.

“I have incredibly good judgment. One, I married Jill. And two, I appointed [Lt. Karen] Johnson to [attend] the [U.S. Air Force] Academy. I just want you to know that,” he said. “Clap for that, you stupid bastards.” The audience smiled and began to clap and Biden added, “Man, you are a dull bunch.”

Biden ended his speech by thanking the military personnel for their service. “You are the finest generation of warriors the world has ever, ever known,” he declared.

“They were a disaster. They were a disgrace to our country. And we’ve caught them. We’ve caught them all. We’ve got it all on tape. We’ve caught them all. And, by the way, you gave the idea for the Logan Act against General Flynn. You had better take a look at that because we caught you, in a sense, and President Obama was sitting in the office. He knew it too, so don’t tell me about a free transition.”

Trump has concocted conspiracy theories about the Obama administration spying on his campaign, which he sometimes labels “Obamagate.”

It started with Trump’s false claim in 2017 that President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap on him. Then that merged with a report that an FBI informant in Europe, a professor named Stefan Halper, met with at least three people working on the Trump campaign in Europe.

A former campaign aide, Carter Page, was subject to an FBI warrant.

Lately, Trump has focused on a January 2017 meeting that Obama held in the Oval Office with then-FBI Director James B. Comey, Biden and national security adviser Susan E. Rice, among others. Rice indicated in an email that Obama was primarily concerned with whether limits should be placed on classified information that was shared with the incoming team, in particular incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn, in light of the intercepts of the calls between Flynn and the Russian ambassador.

Although presidents generally are expected not to inquire about criminal investigations, it is appropriate to have a discussion about a counterintelligence probe, as that involves national security. Somehow, without much explanation, Trump has turned this meeting into a high crime that he considers to be treason.

In the debate and other occasions, Trump has asserted that at the meeting Biden raised Logan Act prosecution of Flynn, based on cryptic notes of an FBI official who was not in the meeting. (The law, rarely enforced since it went on the books in 1799, prohibits private citizens from attempting to carry out official U.S. foreign policy.)

In testimony before the Senate the day after the debate, Comey said Biden did not suggest prosecuting Flynn under the Logan Act. “I would remember it because it would be highly inappropriate,” Comey said. “It did not happen.”

“They found some with the name Trump, just happened to have the name Trump, just the other day in a wastepaper basket.”

“They found ballots in a wastepaper basket three days ago, and they all had the name — military ballots; they were military. They all had the name Trump on them.”

Trump is spinning a conspiracy theory about voter fraud based on a faint iota of evidence, and he has been aided in his efforts by the Justice Department’s irregular disclosures and its violation of ballot secrecy in this case.

Luzerne County, Pa., officials said in a statement that a “temporary seasonal independent contractor … incorrectly discarded [nine ballots] into the office trash” during their three-day period of employment. The county’s top election official caught wind, fired the employee and launched an investigation. In other words, at the moment this could just as well be described as a success story about Pennsylvania’s election controls.

The Justice Department at first said all nine ballots were for Trump, violating ballot secrecy, before issuing an unusual correction to note that, actually, seven were for Trump. The department also seems to have tipped off Trump to developments in this case before making a public announcement about an ongoing investigation, which is rare.

“[In] a Democrat area, they sent out 1,000 ballots. Everybody got two ballots. This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen.”

The president apparently is referring to Fairfax County in Virginia, which recently has trended toward the Democrats. At least 1,400 voters received duplicate absentee ballots because of a printer error. But officials said only one ballot per voter would be counted. “Each ballot cast by a Virginia voter is recorded into a state verification system, election officials said,” The Washington Post reported. “If someone were to try to vote more than once with the same identity, the system would reject the extra ballot as invalid.”

“Take a look at what happened in New Jersey.”

Trump often points to Paterson, N.J., where a special election was held for several City Council seats May 12. As part of its coronavirus response, New Jersey held all-mail elections for the first time that day. The state attorney general later announced that a sitting councilman, a former councilman and two others (all Democrats) had been charged with voter fraud after postal inspectors found hundreds of ballots stuffed in a Paterson mailbox.

The Passaic County Board of Elections rejected 3,190 ballots, about 19 percent of the mail-in ballots cast in Paterson’s race. The question is how many were connected to the fraud allegations. Trump says all of them were corrupted, but a county elections official told the Paterson Press that 2,300 ballots were rejected as “part of the normal process,” meaning they were disqualified for common reasons such as signature mismatches or arriving after the deadline.

Doing the math, that means fewer than 5 percent of the 16,747 ballots cast in that election can be linked to the fraud allegations.

What would that look like in context? In an analysis of 31 local elections held the same day, New Jersey Spotlight found that 9.6 percent of ballots were rejected. “Most commonly, officials did not count ballots because the signature on the ballot did not match the one on file, the ballot arrived too late or the required certificate was not enclosed,” New Jersey Spotlight reported.

“Take a look at West Virginia, mailmen selling the ballots. They are being sold.”

A West Virginia postal carrier in July pleaded guilty to mail and election fraud after admitting he changed the political affiliation on five voter ballots from Democrat to Republican. The mail carrier said he did it “as a joke.” There is no evidence he or other mailmen in the state sold ballots.

“As you know, today, there was a big problem. In Philadelphia they went in to watch. They were called poll watchers — a very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out. They weren’t allowed to watch.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer labeled this as a false claim. “The Trump campaign has no poll watchers approved to work in Philadelphia at the moment. There are no actual polling places open in the city right now. And elections officials are following coronavirus safety regulations, such as those limiting the number of people indoors,” the newspaper reported. Some voters have begun to cast ballots at satellite election offices, but “poll watchers don’t have the same rights at such locations as they do at traditional polling places on Election Day, officials said.”

“Take a look at Carolyn Maloney’s race. ... They have no idea what happened.”

Results were delayed for several weeks in a New York congressional primary, with Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) eventually declared the winner. Trump falsely suggested fraud was afoot, when no such allegation has been leveled.

“Let’s be clear, the issue in my race was disenfranchisement, not voter fraud. More than 1 in 5 ballots were discarded, many multiples of the final margin,” Suraj Patel, Maloney’s opponent, wrote on Twitter. “We called our election a canary in the coal mine for November, we were right. Trump lied about what happened here.”

In the contentious first presidential debate between President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden, Trump repeatedly relied on troublesome and false assertions that have been debunked throughout his presidency. Biden, by contrast, stretched the truth on occasion. Here’s a roundup of 21 of the most noteworthy claims that initially caught our interest. We also published a follow-up report with an additional 32 claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates.

“The mayor of Moscow, his wife, gave your son three and a half-million dollars.”

Trump is referring to an allegation in a recent report released by the GOP majority of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Senate Finance Committee: “Rosemont Seneca Thornton, an investment firm co-founded by Hunter Biden, received $3.5 million in a wire transfer from Elena Baturina, who allegedly received illegal construction contracts from her husband, the former mayor of Moscow.” The report said the wire transfer was part of a “consultancy agreement” but does not allege any illegality in the transaction.

Allegedly, at the time of the transfer, Baturina was living in the United Kingdom with her husband, Yuri Luzhkov, who died in 2019. But Hunter Biden’s lawyer said the claim that his client received $3.5 million from Baturina is false.

“The Senate report falsely alleges that Hunter Biden had a financial relationship with Russian business executive Yelena Baturina and that he received $3.5 million from Baturina,” Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, said in an email. “Hunter Biden had no interest in and was not a ‘co-founder’ of Rosemont Seneca Thornton, so the claim that he was paid $3.5 million is false.”

The Senate report claimed “Luzhkov used his position as mayor to approve over 20 real estate projects that were built by a Baturina-owned construction company and ultimately generated multibillion-ruble profits for his family.”

Trump himself at one point hoped to be part of Moscow real estate projects overseen by Luzhkov when he was mayor between 1992 and 2010. Luzhkov, in an interview before his death, told Russia’s Interfax news agency that Trump planned to build an underground mall in Moscow during the mid-1990s. “Trump was in Moscow,” Luzhkov said. “He had contacts on matters related to the construction of the Okhotny Ryad underground mall on Manezh Square.” But the deal did not come to fruition.

“You said you went to Delaware State, but you forgot the name of your college. You didn’t go to Delaware State. You graduated either the lowest or almost the lowest in your class.”

Trump is repeating a falsehood promoted by his campaign, even though it’s being denied by the university.

“Watched in full context, it is clear that Biden was discussing his long association with historically Black colleges and universities, not making a claim that he had attended Delaware State University,” Carlos Holmes, a spokesman for the university, said in a statement to the Delaware News Journal. In the video, the former vice president was not implying that he attended the university, but rather referring to the support he received from the school when he announced his bid for U.S. Senate on the DSU campus in 1972, Holmes said.

Biden has admitted he was not the most hard-working student at University of Delaware. He graduated 76th out of 85 at Syracuse Law School.

“I’m the one that brought back football, by the way. I brought back Big Ten football. It was me, and I’m very happy to do it.”

Trump opposed the college football conference’s game suspensions, but that’s about it. He and other White House officials indicated federal resources were made available to the Big Ten, but one person familiar with the process told The Washington Post that the conference hasn’t been given, nor has it requested, federal assistance.

“President Trump had nothing to do with our decision and did not impact the deliberations,” an unidentified Big Ten university president told NBC. “In fact, when his name came up, it was a negative because no one wanted this to be political.”

“Seattle, they heard we were coming in the following day and they put up their hands and we got back Seattle, Minneapolis. We got it back, Joe, because we believe in law and order.”

This is a constant refrain of Trump on the campaign trail, but it’s not true.

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan (D) flatly denied to The Washington Post’s PlumLine that any conversation like this with Trump — or anyone around him — ever took place concerning protests in the city this summer and a zone demonstrators had carved out. “He never contacted me or my office to warn us,” Durkan said, adding that no one from the White House nor anyone connected to Trump had told them any such thing. “We had no conversations whatsoever with the White House about anything related to the protests, Capitol Hill or anything along these lines,” the mayor said, though conversations related to the coronavirus had taken place at various junctures. “It just never happened,” she said. “I don’t know what world he’s living in.” The mayor had signed an executive order on June 30 to formally close the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, and on July 1 police moved in to clear it.

As for Minneapolis, state officials say Trump had nothing to do with the decision to send the National Guard into the city amid violence and protests of the killing of George Floyd in police custody. Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, had already directed hundreds of Guard members to assemble. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey officially requested troops on May 28. Then the governor — not Trump — activated the entire 15,000-member Minnesota National Guard. Trump just watched the scene unfold on television and called Walz, offering to send in the military.

“We have a higher deficit with China now than we did before.” — Biden

This is wrong. The trade deficit in goods and services with China climbed to $380 billion from 2017 to 2018, but then, because of Trump’s tariff war, fell to $308 billion in 2019, according to the Commerce Department. The trade deficit has continued to fall below 2019 levels in the first half of 2020.

“This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen. … It’s a rigged election.”

As usual, Trump offered a baseless conspiracy theory that widespread use of mail ballots during an infectious-disease pandemic would lead to massive voter fraud. There is simply no evidence for these claims. The Department of Homeland Security says Russia is spreading the same kind of disinformation to sow doubts about mail balloting and the integrity of the U.S. election.

“There is, of course, evidence of some absentee ballot fraud, just as there is for in-person fraud, although in both cases it is quite minimal — a handful out of hundreds of millions of votes cast over the last two decades,” said Richard Briffault, a professor and elections expert at Columbia Law School. Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — use mail ballots as the primary method of voting. In 2018, more than 31 million Americans voted by mail, representing one-quarter of election participants, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Despite this dramatic increase in mail voting over time, fraud rates remain infinitesimally small, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. “None of the five states that hold their elections primarily by mail has had any voter fraud scandals since making that change.”

A Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found officials identified 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.

Experts say it would be almost impossible to successfully counterfeit the ballots being prepared for November’s general election. State election officials use multiple safeguards to verify that mail ballots are authentic. Most states have bar codes printed on their mail ballots. When a completed ballot arrives, election officials scan the bar code to link it with the corresponding voter in the system. Duplicate ballots from the same voter wouldn’t be recognized by the system. In addition, voters must follow specific instructions to return a ballot received in the mail, such as signing an affidavit. Officials typically compare the signature on the ballot with the one in the registration file and may discard ballots with mismatched signatures.

Dozens of graphical details, candidate names, official seals, check boxes and bar codes would have to be copied perfectly, on dozens of different ballot designs — and that’s for each jurisdiction in the United States. On top of that, the hypothetical foreign nation would have to identify registered voters (who had not already voted by mail) and somehow forge their signatures.

“What would be the point of a counterfeit ballot if it will be counted only if it comes from a real voter?” Briffault said. “I don’t see how a counterfeit ballot gets around the voter verification process.”

“About the Green New Deal. And it’s not two billion or 20 billion, as you said, it’s 100 trillion dollars I’m talking about. They want to rip down buildings and rebuild the building instead down the street. That is not where airplanes are out of business, where two car systems are out, where they want to take out the cows. Not you know, that’s not true either.”

Biden has never supported the Green New Deal, and the rest is also false. The Green New Deal is a nonbinding resolution from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and other Democrats that calls for cutting carbon emissions to net-zero over 10 years while making steep investments in green infrastructure.

As we found last year, a fact sheet from Ocasio-Cortez’s office said the plan called for a 10-year timeline “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” Banning cows and airplanes was never in the resolution itself, and Ocasio-Cortez retracted the fact sheet and disowned the remarks within days.

In fact, the resolution calls for the government to work collaboratively with ranchers to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions “as much as is technologically feasible.” Which is all beside the point, because Biden is not a supporter and his own climate plan is more limited, calling for net-zero emissions “no later than 2050.”

“If you look at what we’ve done, I closed it, and you said, ‘He’s xenophobic. He’s a racist, and he’s xenophobic.’ ”

The president frequently claims he took bold action — that was criticized — to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus. News reports say he was reluctant to impose the ban on travel by non-U.S. citizens from China, citing his relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, but the action was urged by his top health advisers.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters on Feb. 7: “The travel restrictions that we put in place in consultation with the president were very measured and incremental. These were the uniform recommendations of the career public health officials here at HHS.”

Any criticism was scattered and relatively muted. Trump points to a comment by Biden: “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia … and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.”

But whether Biden was speaking about Trump’s travel restrictions is open to debate. He did not specifically mention the travel restrictions on China during the remarks, and his campaign has since said he supported the effort as a way to buy time.

In any case, the virus was already spreading through the United States by the time the travel restrictions were enforced, and there is little evidence they saved lives, especially because the Trump administration did not rapidly set up an effective testing regimen, as many other countries did.

“Drug prices will be coming down 80 or 90 percent.”

There is just no evidence for this pie-in-the-sky prediction. In fact, prescription drug prices are up 3 percent since Trump’s first full month in office through August, according to the consumer price index.

In 2019, we found generic prescription drug prices had fallen slightly under Trump, while branded drugs were becoming costlier, according to numerous studies.

Trump issued a brief executive order Sept. 13 telling the government to experiment with how Medicare pays drug companies. He has been promising several iterations of this idea for nearly two years, and the Department of Health and Human Services has never actually proposed rules for how such a policy would work.

“Nobody’s done it. … I’ll give you an example. Insulin, it’s going to — it was destroying families, destroying people. … I’m getting it for so cheap, it’s like water. You want to know the truth? So cheap.”

In fact, insulin prices remain relatively high for patients despite Trump’s frequent claims that he’s lowering drug prices, at about $300 a vial. As Stat News explained, most patients require multiple vials a month.

“His idea to require drug makers include their drug prices in TV ads was struck down in court, and his administration has repeatedly flip-flopped on his idea to eliminate the discounts negotiated between drug prices and middlemen,” Stat News said. “Trump has, however, cut insulin costs for a small subset of seniors. In March, his administration announced a plan to cap what seniors pay at the pharmacy counter at $35 a month. That perk is only available to a fraction of seniors enrolled in certain pricey private insurance plans.”

“As far as the fires are concerned, you need forest management in addition to everything else, the forest floors are loaded up with trees, dead trees that are years old and they’re like tinder and leaves and everything else. You drop a cigarette and the whole forest burns down. … But I also think we have to do better management of our forests. Every year I get the call. California is burning. California is burning. If that is cleaned, if that were, if you had forest management, good forest management, you wouldn’t be getting those calls. You know, in Europe, they live their forest cities. They call forest cities. They maintain their forests. They manage their fires. I was with the head of a major country. It’s a forest city. He said, sir, we have trees that are far more, they ignite much easier than California. They shouldn’t be that problem.”

Trump repeated a false claim that pileups of leaves and fallen tree trunks are a root cause of the massive wildfires besetting northern and central California, where officials say hundreds of thousands of acres have burned due to recent wildfires.

Academic researchers, firefighters, California state officials and the prime minister of Finland have all been befuddled by Trump’s claim. (Trump once claimed the Finnish leader told him that assiduous raking was the secret to unburnt forests, but then word came back from Helsinki that the prime minister never said that.)

A 2016 study of western U.S. forests published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found “human-caused climate change caused over half of the documented increases in fuel aridity since the 1970s and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984.”

“We estimate that human-caused climate change contributed to an additional 4.2 million [hectares] of forest fire area during 1984-2015, nearly doubling the forest fire area expected in its absence,” authors John T. Abatzoglou and A. Park Williams wrote. “Natural climate variability will continue to alternate between modulating and compounding anthropogenic increases in fuel aridity, but anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a driver of increased forest fire activity and should continue to do so while fuels are not limiting.”

“There aren’t 100 million people with preexisting conditions.”

Trump is wrong.

There are an estimated 102 million people with preexisting health conditions, according to a 2018 report by the consulting group Avalere. But depending on where people get their insurance — such as the half of Americans who get it from their employer — premiums would not necessarily go up for all 102 million if Trump succeeded in nullifying the Affordable Care Act. His administration is in court challenging the law and, in May, he told reporters, “We want to terminate health care under Obamacare.”

“I’ll have approximately 300 federal judges and court of appeals judges, 300, and hopefully three great Supreme Court judges, justices. That is a record the likes of which very few people. And you know, one of the reasons I’ll have so many judges, because President Obama and him left me 128 judges to fill. When you leave office, you don’t leave any judges.”

— As of this week, Trump had nominated and the Senate had confirmed 218 federal judges. President Barack Obama did not leave behind 128 vacancies; the number was 105, plus one vacant seat on the Supreme Court.

The Republican-held Senate and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) stonewalled Obama’s nominees, including Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, rather than give them a hearing, which Trump never concedes and instead falsely suggests Obama dropped the ball.

“Portland, the sheriff just came out today and he said I support President Trump.”

Within minutes of Trump’s statement, the sheriff fact-checked him.

“I had to close the greatest economy in the history of our country. And by the way, now it’s being built again.”

Before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered businesses and sent unemployment soaring, the president could certainly brag about the state of the economy in his first three years as president. But he ran into trouble when he made a play for the history books to say it was the best economy in U.S. history. By just about any important measure, the economy under Trump has not done as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton.

The gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in 2019, slipping from 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.4 percent in 2017. But in 1997, 1998 and 1999, GDP grew 4.5 percent, 4.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively. Yet even that period paled in comparison against the 1950s and 1960s. Growth between 1962 and 1966 ranged from 4.4 percent to 6.6 percent. In postwar 1950 and 1951, it was 8.7 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate reached a low of 3.5 percent under Trump, but it dipped as low as 2.5 percent in 1953. (After the virus tanked the economy, Trump jacked up his claim even more, often falsely saying it had been the greatest economy in the history of the world.)

“You didn’t do very well in swine flu. … H1N1, you were a disaster.”

It’s a mystery why Trump continues to target the Obama administration’s handling of the 2009 swine flu outbreak as a “disaster.” Obama’s handling was widely praised at the time as the right mix of action and no overreaction.
On April 26, 2009, when only 20 cases of H1N1 — and no deaths — around the country had been confirmed, the Obama administration declared H1N1 a public health emergency. The administration quickly sought funding from Congress, receiving almost $8 billion.

Six weeks later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. On Oct. 24, after more than 1,000 Americans had died of H1N1, Obama declared a national emergency. The estimated death toll in the United States during the H1N1 epidemic was 12,469 from April 2009 to April 2010, but that was much less than a forecast of 30,000 to 90,000 deaths made in August 2009 by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

“That was said sarcastically and you know that.”

Trump interjected this after Biden said Trump has said “maybe you could inject some bleach in your arm and that would take care of it.”

Trump was dead serious when he made his controversial remarks in April, but after an uproar, he started using the “sarcastic” line, usually in conjunction with the idea he was trying to goad the media: “I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen.”

But that is simply an after-the-fact invention. “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute,” Trump had said as he looked directly at an uncomfortable Deborah Birx, a medical doctor and the coronavirus response coordinator. “And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

“They said it would take a miracle to bring back manufacturing. I brought back 700,000 jobs. They brought back nothing. They gave up on manufacturing.”

False. At its high point, about 480,000 manufacturing jobs had been added during the Trump administration — not 700,000. The net figure now, amid the coronavirus pandemic, is a loss of 252,000 manufacturing jobs under Trump. Obama took office in the middle of a global recession. The manufacturing sector grew for the last six years of the Obama administration, after steep losses in the first two. In the end, the number of manufacturing jobs was a wash under Obama.

In claiming “they said it would take a miracle,” Trump is also misquoting Obama. At a June 2016 town hall, Obama said more manufacturing jobs had been created during his term than at any time since the 1990s, adding some manufacturing jobs could be recovered and some have disappeared because of automation and other economic trends.

Obama noted Trump was not very specific about how he would boost manufacturing jobs except to say he was “going to negotiate a better deal.” Obama said: “Well, how exactly are you going to do that? What exactly are you going to do? There’s no answer to it. … What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer.”

“The fact of the matter is violent crime went down 17 percent, 15 percent in our administration. It’s gone up on his watch.” — Biden

Biden did not nail his usual talking point, so this turns out to be false. In discussing his record, he often mentions violent crime. But when he discusses Trump, he talks about murders. This selective presentation puts Biden in the best possible light and Trump in the worst.

As its source for the violent-crime data, the Biden campaign pointed to a 2017 report by our colleagues at FactCheck.org on statistics about the Obama administration. Citing the FBI, FactCheck.org said: “The number of violent crimes per 100,000 population was nearly 16 percent lower in 2016 than in 2008, and the property crime rate dropped nearly 24 percent. But the murder rate didn’t drop at all — it was 5.4 per 100,000 both in 2008 and in 2016.”

So if Biden compared his record on murders, he wouldn’t have much to brag about. There was no improvement under Obama.

As for the stats so far in 2020, the campaign cited calculations by crime analyst Jeff Asher, who compared the non-population-adjusted data for the 25 biggest cities for the first seven months of the year with the first seven months of 2019. The number of murders went up 26 percent, but the number of violent crimes is essentially flat.

In other words, Biden’s jab at Trump is wrong. There has been little change in violent crime under Trump.

“Hunter [Biden] got thrown out of the military. He was thrown out, dishonorably discharged for cocaine use.”

Hunter Biden was discharged from the Navy Reserve after failing a drug test but he was not dishonorably discharged.

“Ukraine … With a billion dollars if you don’t get rid of the … He’s on tape.”

With the crosstalk with Biden, who started interjecting “not true,” viewers might have missed Trump’s jab. It’s a familiar but false one.

Biden’s role in Ukraine, and his son’s involvement there, make for a complex story. Trump has seized on kernels of truth to build an appearance of scandal that resonated with his supporters and raised questions in some voters’ minds. Trump argued Biden had demanded a quid pro quo from the Ukrainians, the same charge Democrats lobbed at Trump. But at its core, Trump’s tale was a fiction: There had been no prosecution or investigation of Biden’s son Hunter, and Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine were fully coordinated with the State Department and America’s European allies.

Here’s what really happened: During Obama’s second term, Biden was in charge of the Ukraine portfolio, keeping in close touch with the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko. Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and jawbone Poroshenko into making reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as part of Ukraine’s escape from Russia’s orbit. But the Americans saw an obstacle to reform in Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor whom the United States viewed as ineffective and beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs.

The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv proposed that Biden, during his 2015 visit there, use a pending delivery of $1 billion in loan guarantees as leverage to force reform. Biden addressed the Ukrainian parliament, decrying the “cancer of corruption” in the country and criticizing the prosecutor’s office. During that visit, Biden privately told Poroshenko the loan guarantees would be withheld unless Shokin was replaced. After repeated calls and meetings between the two men over several months, Shokin was removed and the loan guarantees were provided.

Trump had it completely backward. Biden was thwarting corruption, not abetting it.

But Biden had exaggerated what happened. At a January 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event, he bragged about firing the Ukrainian prosecutor, telescoping the timeline from months of diplomacy into hours. “I’m leaving in six hours,” Biden claimed he had said. “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”

As the 2020 presidential campaign heated up, Trump’s allies circulated a video of Biden’s boast, making it appear as if Biden were a shakedown artist.

Meanwhile, in 2014, Hunter Biden had joined the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company that was owned by a Ukrainian oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky. Hunter Biden showed questionable judgment in taking such a position while his father had a high-profile role in U.S.-Ukraine relations, and the possible conflict of interest was well-documented in news reports at the time. Biden had offered U.S. aid to Ukraine to increase its gas production, which could benefit the country’s energy industry.

But contrary to Trump’s theory, there was no probe of Burisma; rather, Ukrainian prosecutors led by Shokin in 2014 opened an investigation of Zlochevsky for illicit enrichment and money laundering. But then Ukrainian prosecutors let the investigations go dormant, angering the U.S. State Department. The American ambassador said in 2015 that mismanagement of the case was an example of Ukraine’s failure to hold corrupt officials to account.

Years after Biden forced the ouster of Shokin, the former prosecutor cried foul, falsely claiming he was removed because he had had Burisma in his sights — a story he peddled to Trump’s allies.

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Trump Lies 46 times -- at the 1st Trump-Biden Debate