The Whoppers of 2019
Summary
As he has done since entering the political scene in 2015, Donald Trump dominates our list of whoppers of the year.
We identified a top 10 of falsehoods and factual distortions from the president, beginning with several impeachment-related topics — a conspiracy theory on the Democratic National Committee server, a bogus narrative on Joe Biden and a laundry list of claims about the whistleblower report.
Several other Trump deceptions — and falsehoods we identified from Democratic presidential candidates — offer a preview of issues that are likely to take center stage as the 2020 election cycle heats up: immigration, gun control, trade, taxes, climate change and manufacturing jobs.
Read on for descriptions of the worst falsehoods of 2019, and for more information, see links to our full stories on the spin at the end.
Analysis
Trump’s Top Whoppers
DNC Server Delusion. Refusing to give up on the debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 elections and hacked the Democratic National Committee, Trump repeated the baseless assertion that Ukraine, or a “Ukrainian company,” has a DNC server.
“A lot of it had to do they say with Ukraine. …They have the server, right? From the DNC, Democratic National Committee,” Trump said in a phone interview with the hosts of “Fox & Friends” in November. And he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a July 25 phone call: “The server, they say Ukraine has it.” But there’s absolutely no evidence of that.
Tom Bossert, a former homeland security adviser for the administration, said he explained to the president that these theories had been “completely debunked.”
The DNC hired CrowdStrike, a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm, to investigate Russia’s hacking of its computer network in 2016, and CrowdStrike said it has “never taken physical possession of any” of the 140 servers the DNC said had to be decommissioned during the process. The company did its analysis by making an exact copy of everything on the DNC’s hard drives through a process called “imaging.” “The images, not the computer’s hardware, provide the evidence,” CrowdStrike has said.
Trump’s impeachment woes were triggered when he asked Ukrainian President Zelensky in the July 25 phone call to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. But before that, Trump saidthat aired on May 19: “
