Facts Check

In his first interview since Election Day, President Donald Trump recapped baseless, false and misleading claims he has made before of a “rigged” election. Trump spoke by phone with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Nov. 29. In the interview, Trump went so far as to suggest the Department of Justice […]

Quick Take An unfounded conspiracy theory of widespread election fraud claims that an election technology company called Smartmatic switched votes in the 2020 election. But Smartmatic provided ballot-marking machines to only one U.S. county in the election. Full Story The Trump campaign’s legal team increasingly has been leaning on conspiracy […]

Q: Did a recent study in Denmark show that face masks are useless for COVID-19? A: No. The study found that face masks did not have a large protective effect for wearers — not that masks provide no protection at all or don’t offer benefits to others.  FULL QUESTION Are masks […]

A conservative group’s deceptive TV ad suggests that Democrat Raphael Warnock supports defunding the police. He has said multiple times that he doesn’t. The ad, from the American Crossroads super PAC, features Harris County, Georgia, Sheriff Mike Jolley accusing Warnock of being against police officers. “Warnock is an anti-police extremist,” […]

I guess I picked the right year to take up fact-checking. I had been in journalism for a very long time. I had run a national magazine, overseen news operations at newspapers in many cities, covered Washington during the Watergate era, written columns about the media for a national newspaper. […]

Quick Take A popular meme on Facebook falsely purports to show a photo of Joe “Biden’s Inaugural stage” being built outside the White House. The photo shows the reviewing stand for the inaugural parade at Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993. Full Story A viral meme takes a dig at President Donald Trump […]

Provided President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College margin of victory holds — and we have seen no reason so far to believe it will not — it will be the same margin won by Donald Trump in 2016. That would leave Biden (as it did Trump) in the bottom third when […]

Quick Take A bogus social media story uses a doctored image of an indictment to falsely claim George Soros has been arrested in the U.S. “for election interference.” The actual charges are against six Russian nationals for cyberattacks. Full Story A website with a track record of spreading misinformation is […]

On Nov. 19, President Donald Trump’s legal team spouted a gusher of false and unfounded allegations of voter fraud at a 90-minute press conference. We could fact check it, but we’re not going to. We’re not going to fact check Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, for repeating a bogus claim […]

The percentage of mail-in ballots rejected in Georgia due to signature issues this year was about the same as in the 2016 and 2018 general elections. Nevertheless, a tweet from President Donald Trump wrongly compared the number of ballots rejected for signature issues in this election to the number of […]