No, Joe Scarborough didn't murder an aide At 6:54 a.m. on Tuesday, just as "Morning Joe" was wrapping up its first hour, President Trump said on Twitter that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough might be a murderer. It's an old claim, debunked by The Washington Post in 2017. Trump often smears those who challenge him. He has a long-running feud with the "Morning Joe" crew. And Scarborough has been hammering Trump daily for the administration's halting response to covid-19. But it remains astounding to see the president make a thinly veiled murder accusation devoid of evidence. The president is referring to the 2001 death of a 28-year-old aide who worked for Scarborough when he was a Republican member of Congress from Florida. The circumstances of the young woman's death have generated conspiracy theories, but authorities never suspected foul play. Her death was ruled accidental by the medical examiner and the police in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., concluded there was no reason to further investigate. Scarborough was in Washington at the time. A police investigator told The Post in 2017 that authorities had left "no stone unturned." Trump earned Four Pinocchios, but we would have given more if that wasn't the limit. For the full fact check, click here. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. McConnell misfires and retracts claim that Obama left no pandemic planEchoing Trump's coronavirus spin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in an online video chat with Trump's campaign this week that "clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this." Much goes out the window when one political party replaces another in the White House. The natural inclination is to ignore much of the work left behind by the previous folks — and to reinvent the wheel all over again. But former Obama administration officials cried foul after McConnell's comments. "We literally left them a 69-page Pandemic Playbook.... that they ignored," tweeted Ron Klain, the former "Ebola czar" in the Obama administration. The Trump administration disregarded it — a Trump national security council official told Politico it was of little value — but there's no question the blueprint existed. We gave Three Pinocchios to McConnell. To his credit, after the fact check was published, the Senate leader acknowledged his mistake in a Fox News interview. "I was wrong," McConnell said. "They did leave behind a plan. I clearly made a mistake in that regard. As to whether or not the plan was followed and who is the critic and all the rest, I don't have any observation about that because I don't know enough about the details of that ... to comment on it in any detail." All too rare. For the full fact check, click here. Sign up for The Post's Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked within the newsletter are free to access. Flub note: Last week's edition of the newsletter mistakenly included an incorrect link to our fact check of Trump's comments that there were "very fine people" at the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Please follow this link to see the article and video fact check setting the record straight. Extra!We wrote a book! "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth" will be published June 2 by Scribner. Over 386 pages, we excavate and debunk all of the president's most egregious deceptions during his first three years in office, a period during which he made more than 16,000 false or misleading claims on everything from the economy, immigration, his campaign's contacts with Russia, dealings with Ukraine that led to his impeachment, Trump's response to the covid-19 pandemic and more. "Most valuable, in this rather depressing catalog of untruths, are the fact checkers' point-by-point analyses, lie by lie, of the relative falsehoods uttered, measured by 'Pinocchios,'" Kirkus says in a "starred" review. You can pre-order a copy at online booksellers. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @mmkelly22, @SarahCahlan) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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