News Reporter: Fact Checker: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets Four Pinocchios

Friday 7 December 2018

Fact Checker: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets Four Pinocchios

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets Four Pinocchios

Where could Congress find the money to cover the hefty cost of Medicare-for-all? It's a top priority for liberals, but the price tag is a scary thing to behold.

Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) mused on Twitter about getting the money from the Defense Department. She claimed it had $21 trillion in "accounting errors" that could cover two-thirds of the cost. (An estimate by the Urban Institute pegged the cost of Sen. Bernie Sanders's Medicare-for-all proposal at $32 trillion over 10 years.)

"Medicare for All costs ~$32T," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, attaching excerpts from an article in the Nation magazine. "That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon."

This is a Four Pinocchio tweet for four reasons. One, the $21 trillion is not sitting around, unused. The accounting errors totaling $21 trillion cover inflows, outflows, assets and liabilities, as the Nation article she referenced makes clear. That means the same dollar could be accounted for multiple times. Any transaction for which the Pentagon did not have adequate documentation is reflected in the total, whether it was money going in or out.

Two, the $21 trillion estimate covers 17 years, but the $32 trillion cost estimate on Medicare-for-all covers 10 years. Three, Ocasio-Cortez said she was making a rhetorical point, but that's unconvincing since she said "66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon." Four, the offending tweet has been retweeted more than 26,000 times and will probably keep confusing people who take it at face value.

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Russia is, in fact, not a ruse

At a news conference three days after Michael Flynn resigned as national security adviser, President Trump told reporters, "Russia is a ruse." He emphasized that neither he nor "to the best of [his] knowledge" anyone around him had anything to do with Russia or Russians during the 2016 campaign. Nearly two years later, a court filing from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III suggests otherwise.

Michael Cohen, the president's former attorney, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his efforts to secure a real estate deal in Moscow for the Trump Organization from September 2015 to June 2016 — exactly at the same time his boss was campaigning for president. According to the court filing, Cohen repeatedly updated Trump and other members of the Trump Organization about his progress.

We've previously outlined the contacts between members of Trump's campaign and Russians. But Cohen was not technically part of the campaign. Since the president's business and political worlds are intertwined, as a reader service, The Fact Checker compiled a timeline of what happened, what the president knew and what he said publicly about contact between his staff and Russia.

We're always looking for fact-check suggestions.

You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter.

Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup.

— Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly