Washington Post Fact Checker Calls Out Biden for Repeating the Same False Claims: ‘Impervious’ to Fact Checking
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The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler said Friday that President Joe Biden is a “recidivist” when it comes to botching key facts.
“It’s still relatively early in the Biden presidency, so patterns are hard to discern,” Kessler wrote in a Friday column. “But there are three claims President Biden has made that appear impervious to fact-checking, given that he’s already said them at least three times.”
Kessler said the top item on the list was Biden’s claim that the number of Americans who had died as a result of Covid-19 — more than 500,000 — exceeded the number of people killed in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. America’s in-service deaths during those wars added up to more than 580,000. Combat deaths added up to more than 390,000, so Biden could make a case that he was referencing that number — and Kessler said one White House official attempted to do when asked to comment. However, the explanation is hard to make sense of due to the fact that Biden recently started including the almost 3,000 Americans who died on Sept. 11, 2001 in his estimates, even as he excludes deaths that took place during the War on Terror.
The second item pertains to tax legislation signed by President Donald Trump in 2017. Biden has repeatedly said 83 percent of funding under that tax bill would go to “the top 1 percent” of Americans. In fact, as numbers corroborated by the Tax Policy Center show, more than 80 percent of taxpayers received a tax cut in 2018, while the top 1 percent received 20.5 percent. The legislation takes place in phases over a decade, which means the numbers Biden prefers to cite would be accurate — if he specified that they applied to 2027.
Biden’s third and most egregious factual flub, according to The Post’s assessment, is a claim that a voting law in Georgia will end voting hours at 5 p.m. The law replaced an ambiguous phrase in Georgia’s statues, “normal business hours,” with a specified time of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Polling places still have the leeway to set their own hours to a range of 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. The law also established a new day of early voting on a Saturday, and two days of early voting on Sundays. But White House press secretary Jen Psaki amplified the president’s claim as recently as Thursday, saying, “It standardizes the ending of voting every day at 5, right?”
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution also ran with the false claim in a Tuesday story, forcing the paper to issue a correction.
“Some readers have noticed, sending us puzzled emails about why the president keeps making these statements,” Kessler wrote. “In fact, the president said all three of these claims at various points on March 31, which is why it caught our attention.”
