No surprises here.
President Trump has been awarded the honor of telling “The Lie of the Year” by PolitiFact, a nonprofit, political fact-checking organization operated by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. and Washington D.C.
Every year, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editors of PolitiFact review the year’s most flagrant inaccuracies in search of a significant false claim that can be elevated to the distinction.
The lie that was decided as the best (or worst) of the year occurred Sept. 20 when Trump dismissed headlines about someone who blew the whistle on a phone call he had with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The call, he tweeted, was “pitch perfect.”
According to Poynter, he continued to insist more than 80 times that the whistleblower’s account was “total fiction,” “made up,” and “sooo wrong.”
On Oct. 5 Trump tweeted that the “second hand information ‘Whistleblower’ got my phone conversation almost completely wrong.”
On Nov. 8, he told members of the press that “everything he wrote in that report, almost, was a lie.”
Well, one thing’s for sure, he is consistent.
But according to PolitiFact, the whistleblower got the call “almost completely” right.
Trump got caught in his own lie, and it was by his own doing, too.
PolitiFact attested: “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.”
Because he claimed that the whistleblower got his phone call “almost completely wrong” is why PolitiFact said it was the 2019 Lie of the Year.