Fifteen claims from the Harris-Pence debate Readers who tuned into the vice-presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence should know that we found plenty to fact check. We rounded up 15 claims, 13 of them from Pence. As in his speech to the Republican National Convention, the vice president repeated many of President Trump's false and misleading claims on the economy, health care, Russia and Joe Biden. His speaking style may be more traditional than Trump's, but the substance of what Pence said was indistinguishable. Pence: "When Joe Biden was vice president, we lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs." President Barack Obama took office in the midst of the Great Recession, and oversaw six straight years of economic growth leading up to the Trump presidency. Pence starts counting manufacturing jobs under Obama from January 2009, which includes 19-and-a-half days of President George W. Bush's second term. If you start counting in February, as many economists recommend when measuring presidencies, Obama over eight years actually had a modest gain in manufacturing jobs — 4,000. Harris: "They [Obama] created within the White House an office that basically was responsible for monitoring pandemics… They [Trump] got rid of it." One of Trump's former national security advisers, John Bolton, folded the National Security Council global health directorate Obama created into a new one that focused on counterproliferation and biodefense. Luciana Borio, the previous director for medical and biodefense preparedness, is a practicing medical doctor with an extensive background in medical health preparedness. She was replaced by someone with a background mostly in North Korea policy. For more on the debate, read our fact check of Pence's rabbit-hole claims about Hillary Clinton and Russia, and a history lesson from our Post colleagues at Retropolis about Abraham Lincoln and the Supreme Court that Harris got wrong. 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. What the frack? Seemingly every far-left position that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) espoused in the Democratic primary is being ascribed to Biden in Trump's TV and digital ads, and in interviews, and at rallies, and on Twitter. Never mind that Biden defeated Sanders in the primary — by running as a moderate alternative with less ambitious plans on health care, climate change and taxes — Trump tells voters, without any basis, that Biden and Sanders are one and the same. "If Joe Biden's elected, he'll end fracking. … That would be the end of my job and thousands of others," a woman featured in one of Trump's ads falsely claims. Fracking, short for "hydraulic fracturing," is a drilling technique that uses high-pressure water and chemical blasts to access natural gas and oil reserves underground. The technique has facilitated a boom in U.S. energy production over the past decade, but it has been controversial, the target of climate-change activists and many Democrats. Biden has said he would not issue new permits for fracking on federal lands but would allow existing operations to continue. That position has earned him detractors among climate activist groups. Most fracking operations are on private lands, and would be safe under Biden. During her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris supported a total ban on fracking. But Biden's position has not budged, not in the primary when Republicans claimed it had and not now. We gave Trump's ad Four Pinocchios. 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 » | | | | 
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