Usually, PolitiFact is able to cherry pick enough facts to rationalize its decisions. But in selecting its lie of the year for 2017, the web site was unable to do much more than say well, everyone we like says it is a lie.
PolitiFact began its Lie of the Year by boldly stating: “A mountain of evidence points to a single fact: Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential election of 2016.”
Meddle is pretty easily defined as “to involve oneself in a matter without right or invitation; interfere officiously and unwantedly.”
Well, there is this mountain of evidence and a pretty low bar to prove. This should be easy peasy.
Except, the site’s premise was wrong. The actual quote that PolitiFact used from President Donald Trump does not use the word meddling. This is what he said:
“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.”
So what Trump said was made up was not meddling, but that Russia and Trump were in cahoots.
That is a different animal. There is no mountain of evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.
Robert Mueller and his team of Democratic Party moles in the FBI have spent most of the past year (and several million dollars) looking for evidence of collusion and have found nothing but some expensive Russian rugs,
The real collusion was between Hillary — via her lawyer and donor money — and Fusion GPS, which compiled a dossier of 35 memos of bad things Kremlin officials said about The Donald.
Among its ludicrous charges was that Trump hired prostitutes to piss in a bed that Obama had slept in.
Was that Russian meddling? Well, it depends on how you define Russian.
Here is what PolitiFact
said:
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.
Under that definition, it is not good enough to have one Russian or even several Kremlin officials meddle. The proof must be that Putin ordered them to meddle.
I see no proof that Putin ordered Kremlin officials to peddle fantasy stories to Fusion GPS.
In fact, I see no proof that there were actual Kremlin officials. For all I know Fusion GPS made up the story and attributed it to Russian officials.
But PolitiFact is convinced that Putin meddled.
PolitiFact offered this as proof:
Facebook, Google and Twitter have investigated their own networks, and their executives have concluded — in some cases after initial foot-dragging — that Russia used the online platforms in attempts to influence the election.
I offer this from
Tech Crunch:
Trump and Clinton spent $81 million on US election Facebook ads, Russian agency $46,000.
Now you can at this point call it meddling, I suppose. But the ads were mixed. The ads came from the Internet Research Agency, which works for the Russian government.
However, that’s hardly a mountain of evidence, and the PolitiFact story makes no citation other to say that the social media giants said they sold ads to Russia.
But in its story, PolitiFact does cite some strong denials:
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.”
Putin flat-out denied meddling.
PolitiFact countered with:
Trump continually asserts that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election is fake news, a hoax or a made-up story, even though there is widespread, bipartisan evidence to the contrary.
Really?
Who are the Republicans saying this?
One guy.
PolitiFact cited Nicholas Burns, who served as ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush, who testified before — and PolitiFact made a big deal of this — the Republican-controlled Congress.
But Burns also served as ambassador to Greece under Clinton, which hardly makes Burns “Mister Republican.”
You need a little more than some obscure ambassador to include Republicans in this witch hunt.
And instead of a mountain of evidence, this is a he-said, he-said situation.
PolitiFact also said this:
Putin also had particular animosity toward Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee who had served as secretary of state. Putin openly blamed Clinton for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012. A publicly available intelligence assessment said that Putin also “holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.”
However, Russian officials donated millions to her fake foundation and gave her husband $500,000 to give one speech in Moscow. In exchange, Clinton signed off on the straw purchase of one-fifth of the nation’s uranium production to a Canadian who then sold part of it to Russians.
PolitiFact also said this:
In July 2016, Wikileaks released thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. The release led to DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepping down after grassroots activists accused her of favoring Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. Both intelligence officials and cybersecurity specialists concluded the hack had all the marks of a Russian operation. In October, Wikileaks began publishing the emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
However, WikiLeaks deals with leaks, not hacked information. WikiLeaks said the emails were leaked to it from an insider. PolitiFact left out the fact that the DNC also purged itself of several staffers who could have leaked the information.
The mountain of evidence that PolitiFact claimed it has was not even a molehill.
Outside of Russians buying a few social media ads, there is no proof of meddling.
And there is not a smidgen of proof of any collusion between Trump and Putin, no proof of hacking DNC email, and no proof of Russia tampering with votes on Election Day.
But there is a lot of proof that PolitiFact is an apologist for the Democratic Party.
How so? In its Pulitzer year of 2008, PolitiFact vouched for Obama’s many promises that you could keep your doctor.
Five years later — only after he had been elected and re-elected — did PolitiFact admit it is a lie.
PolitiFact is not a fact-checker. It is a liar. And its claim that it is a nonpartisan fact0checker is the Lie of the Year.
