The Washington Post ended its false claims project for President Donald Trump on Wednesday and has no current “plans” to start a new database for President Joe Biden, the paper told the Daily Caller.
Throughout Trump’s four years as president, The Post’s fact checkers said that he made 30,573 false or misleading claims – this number was revealed shortly after Biden officially became the 46th president. Glenn Kessler, editor and chief fact checker for The Post’s fact checking team, tweeted that he “never would have believed this number was possible when” they “started four years ago.”
Trump’s departure also equals an end to having a false claims project for the current president, as The Post said it does “not have plans to launch a Biden database at this time.” Trump’s database began a month after he became president, The Post’s director of communications Shani George told the Caller.
“The database of Trump claims was started a month after Trump became president as a way to not overwhelm our fact-checking enterprise, where the core mission is to explain complex policy issues,” George said. “While we do not have plans to launch a Biden database at this time, we will continue to dig into the accuracy of statements by political figures of all party affiliations.”
The final count. Never would have believed this number was possible when we started four years ago. https://t.co/rZaAOI0gjd pic.twitter.com/2eCUxwtmSo
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) January 20, 2021
The move comes despite Biden having his own history of pushing false and misleading claims. The current president was forced to drop out of his first presidential race in 1987 after unearthed C-SPAN footage showed him lying about where he ranked upon graduating law school.
This revelation came after Biden was accused of plagiarizing a speech from then-U.K. Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, TIME reported. (RELATED: Journalists Celebrate The End Of Trump’s Presidency, Shower Joe Biden With Praise)
Biden has made misleading or false claims in more recent days, too. A common story he has told repeatedly about an alleged arrest in South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison in the 1970s, for example, has consistently been called into question. The New York Times, for one, pointed out that no evidence has surfaced proving his claims.
Kessler fact-checked this claim for The Post in February of 2020, calling it “ridiculous” and giving him “Four Pinocchios.”
Similarly, The Post noted in an article that “almost every detail in” a story about Biden going to Afghanistan appeared “to be incorrect.”
“In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony,” The Post’s article, published in August of 2019, notes.
