PolitiFact’s ‘Lie of the Year’ goes to Trump’s Ukraine whistleblower claims

PolitiFact on Monday said its 2019 “Lie of the Year” is President Trump’s claim that the intelligence community whistleblower incorrectly reported his call with the Ukrainian president that is at the center of House Democrats’ impeachment efforts.

Trump has claimed more than 80 times that the anonymous whistleblower’s complaint was “fake, fraudulent, incorrect, ‘total fiction,’ ‘made up’ and ‘sooo wrong’” since its release, PolitiFact found. 

“This is a very interesting claim for Trump because it is directly undermined by his very own White House partial transcript of the call,” Katie Sanders, the managing editor of PolitiFact, said in a release video.

Both the partial transcript and the complaint show that Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and unfounded claims of 2016 Ukrainian election interference. Trump asked that Zelensky coordinate with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr on those issues.

The whistleblower alleged that Trump made the request to gain an edge in the 2020 election, a claim Trump has strenuously denied.

The House opened its impeachment inquiry in late September after the whistleblower complaint surfaced. 

Two articles of impeachment were approved in the House Judiciary Committee last week and will be voted on by the entire House on Wednesday. If they pass, the president will face a trial in the Senate.