The "antifa" artifice peddled by Trump and Barr Days after George Floyd was killed and protests broke out in Minneapolis, President Trump claimed "antifa" forces were behind some of the headline-grabbing instances of rioting and looting that followed. He has repeated this claim nearly 20 times. Online activists and prominent right-wing Twitter personalities promoted the theory. The nation's top law enforcement officials, including Attorney General William Barr, appeared to confirm it. There's just one problem with these claims: a total lack of evidence. The Fact Checker video team spoke to witnesses and reviewed arrest records, federal charges, intelligence reports, online conversations and dozens of videos and photos of violent incidents from the early days of protests in Minneapolis to determine whether a coordinated "antifa" campaign was responsible for the violence. Not a single confirmed case has emerged in which someone who self-identifies as "antifa" led violent acts at the protests. Trump administration officials say they have evidence, but they clammed up when we asked to see it, and the intelligence reports and other records indicate the opposite. We awarded Four Pinocchios to Trump. 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. Ventilator gas Ventilators can save lives because they allow patients to breathe when they cannot do so on their own. But when the coronavirus pandemic struck, there were "no ventilators," "none" or "very few," and those few were "obsolete," Trump has claimed repeatedly. He implies the number of ventilators left behind by the Obama administration in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) was zero or close to it. So we were a bit surprised when Vice President Pence wrote in the Wall Street Journal on June 16: "The Strategic National Stockpile hadn't been refilled since the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, and it had only 10,000 ventilators on hand." Then, the Department of Health and Human Services told FactCheck.org that there were 16,660 ventilators in the stockpile available for distribution at the start of the pandemic and that the federal government had distributed 10,640 of them as of June 17. (The 16,660 number had been previously reported by CBS News in March.) Despite the fears expressed in March and April about a potential ventilator shortage, it turns out the U.S. government actually had enough ventilators, left behind by the Obama administration, to handle the initial crisis of the coronavirus pandemic. Sixteen-thousand is way more than zero, so we gave Four Pinocchios to Trump. 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. A field guide to the Trump era "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth," published by Scribner this month, tells the story of a president who has racked up more than 19,000 false or misleading claims — and what it's like to fact check him. Over 386 pages, we debunk a host of statements and tweets the president has made on the economy, immigration, foreign policy, his impeachment, the Russia probe, the coronavirus pandemic and more. The book is as comprehensive as it is reader-friendly, divided into chapters by subject. It's available in print, e-book and audiobook. This week, you can catch Glenn Kessler talking about the "Assault on Truth" with Lawfare editor Benjamin Wittes on the Lawfare Podcast and with David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, on the Mother Jones Podcast. 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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