Q: Did Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson find over $500 billion in accounting errors while auditing HUD’s financial statements?
A: No. The errors were discovered and published by HUD’s independent inspector general before Carson became secretary.
On the morning of the special House election in Georgia, President Trump fired off two tweets that were critical of Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff. Trump claimed Ossoff “will raise your taxes,” but we could find no evidence of Ossoff proposing any broad-based tax increases.
Sen. Bernie Sanders wrongly claimed that voter turnout in 2016 was “the lowest … in 20 years.” In fact, turnout was higher than it was in 2012.
Sen. Bill Cassidy said William Wilberforce, a late 18th century British politician, “pushed the sale of beer” to successfully combat “drunkenness related to gin” in England. But Wilberforce wasn’t born until after the so-called gin epidemic had ended in the early 1750s, and its conclusion wasn’t due to beer.
President Donald Trump wrongly boasted that Toyota’s plan to invest over $1 billion in its largest manufacturing plant in Kentucky would “not have been made if we didn’t win the election.” A Toyota spokesman told us the car company had long been planning to make the investment.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has apologized profusely for his much-criticized comparison of Syria’s Bashar Assad to Adolf Hitler, but his clarification that he meant Hitler did not drop chemical bombs from airplanes requires some historical context.
It’s not too late to help us win another Webby Award for best political website.
Q: Did President Trump increase monthly payments to Social Security beneficiaries?
A: No. Trump had nothing to do with the automatic cost-of-living increases for 2017, which were announced by the Social Security Administration last October.
In this video, CNN’s Jake Tapper looks at President Donald Trump’s recent criticism of President Barack Obama’s response in 2013 to a chemical weapons attack in Syria.