Jake Tapper Breaks Down Biggest Whoppers of 2019: ‘An Incredible Amount of Lies and Falsehoods’
CNN’ Jake Tapper partnered with FactCheck.org over the weekend in order to dissect the biggest falsehoods President Donald Trump pushed in the last year.
In his video on the “Biggest Whoppers” of 2019, Tapper began by reviewing Trump’s “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which continues to be a core element in the president’s ongoing impeachment. The CNN host specifically honed in on Trump’s repeated claim that former Vice President Joe Biden pressed for the firing of Viktor Shokin in order to protect his son, Hunter, from the former Ukrainian prosecutor general’s investigation of the Burisma gas company.
Tapper pointed out that there has never been any evidence of any criminal wrongdoing against the Bidens on this matter, and that the ex-veep was advancing U.S. foreign policy interests when he called for Shokin to be fired for his inaction against corruption in his country.
“In that one falsehood alone,” Tapper summarized, “it’s impossible to say the call was perfect.”
Tapper moved along by looking at Trump’s repeated advancement of the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory, which claims that Ukraine hacked the DNC during the 2016 election instead of Russia. This conspiracy theory has been condemned as propaganda advanced by Russian intelligence, and Tapper noted how the claim has been debunked by numerous officials from the president’s administration.
Tapper eventually moved away from the Ukraine scandal to focus on Sharpiegate, the controversy that occurred when Trump altered a weather map with a magic marker and refused to admit he wrongly predicted that Hurricane Dorian would devastate Alabama. “Trump told an incredible amount of lies and falsehoods this year,” Tapper summed up, but he noted that the president wasn’t “the only one,” turning his attention to Joe Biden.
Tapper locked onto Biden’s “completely false” claim that he opposed the Iraq War from the very beginning. He noted that Biden opposed how the war was handled by the Bush administration, but approved of the actions taken to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
