Trump blows past 22,000 false or misleading claims The numbers tell a grim story. As President Trump entered the final stretch of the election season, he began making more than 50 false or misleading claims a day. As of Aug. 27, the tally in our database that tracks every errant Trump claim stood at 22,247 claims in 1,316 days, counting from his inauguration through his acceptance speech at this year's Republican National Convention. We added thousands of new claims to the database this week, our last update before the Nov. 3 election. We've been able to update the database only to that point as of now — so already we are eight weeks behind. In the first 27 days of August, the president made 1,506 false or misleading claims, or 56 a day. Some days were extraordinary: 189 claims (a new Trump record he will likely not boast about) on Aug. 11; 147 claims on Aug. 17; 113 claims on Aug. 20. The previous monthly record was 1,205 in October 2018. At his current pace, the president surely will exceed 25,000 claims before Election Day. In fact, he probably crossed that threshold this week. But who knows when we will be able to confirm that. 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. Fact-checking the last debate The second and final debate between Trump and former vice president Joe Biden was not the same barrage of interruptions and crosstalk as the first. But some things don't change. Trump yet again broke the fact-check meter at the second presidential debate, while Democratic nominee Biden made relatively few gaffes. We rounded up 25 of the most noteworthy claims that initially caught our interest, virtually all of them by Trump. Biden: "Thirty-eight thousand prisoners were released from federal prison [during the Obama administration]. We have there were over a thousand people who were given clemency." Biden's numbers are wrong. Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that from 2009 to January 2017, the federal prison population declined by more than 19,000, marking the first significant decline since the Carter administration, not 38,000, as Biden claimed. He was probably mixing up the number of people released from prison with the more than 36,000 prisoners who petitioned Obama for pardons or commutations. Of those, Obama issued a record 1,900, according to Justice Department data. Trump: "The [Chinese] bank account you're referring to, which is — everybody knows about it — it's listed, the bank account was in 2013. That's what it was. It was open and it was closed in 2015, I believe." Trump never disclosed that he had a Chinese bank account. The New York Times revealed its existence in a report published this week. "The Chinese account is controlled by Trump International Hotels Management L.L.C., which the tax records show paid $188,561 in taxes in China while pursuing licensing deals there from 2013 to 2015," the Times reported. Trump said he believed the account was closed in 2015. That's not what his lawyer said. "No deals, transactions or other business activities ever materialized and, since 2015, the office has remained inactive," Trump lawyer Alan Garten told the Times. "Though the bank account remains open, it has never been used for any other purpose." We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @mmkelly22) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. You can order our book, "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth," in paperback, e-book and audiobook via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent booksellers or directly from the publisher. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. |  ● By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly ● Read more » | | | | By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly ● Read more » | | | | 
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