One of the most annoying habits about PolitiFact is its tendency to treat standard political rhetoric as a kind of lie. Take Congressman Jody Hice (R-Georgia), who tweeted about the Democrats on Nov. 12, “If they really wanted unity, they wouldn’t have refused to recognize Trump’s 2016 victory for 4 years.”
Anyone who watches politics knows Hice’s importance. The Democrats kept suggesting that Donald Trump won the election by colluding with a foreign power, the Russians. The cloud of criminal collusion hung over most of his presidency and then turned into an impeachment crusade based on communication with the Ukrainian government. In short, Democrats (and their media allies) seemed determined to end the Trump presidency before it even started.
Democrats also railed against Trump for losing the referendum but winning the electoral college, suggesting that the electoral college should be removed.
PolitiFact writer Hayat Norimine nods at these Republican points, but immediately returns to the clearest reading: Hillary Clinton admitted, DNC chair Donna Brazile congratulated him, Barack Obama welcomed him to the White House. She wrote Hice down as “Wrong”. She concluded:
Hice claimed the Democrats refused to recognize Trump’s 2016 victory for four years.
While there were some dissident voices questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s election, top Democrats recognized Trump’s victory and named him the president-elect less than a day after the election results became known. These leaders included Clinton, Obama, Democratic leaders in Congress, and the DNC.
Trump and his supporters have claimed that the investigation into Russian participation in the election and the 2019 impeachment represented the Democrats’ refusal to accept the 2016 election result. The conclusion that Russia interfered in the elections was supported by law enforcement, intelligence agencies and a bipartisan Senate body, not just Democrats. And the impeachment proceedings were in response to a whistleblower complaint about alleged misconduct.
Hice goes too far in his claim that the Democrats refused to recognize Trump’s victory for four years and provides no evidence to back it up.
We judge this claim to be false.
Only other liberals, PolitiFact tries to confuse allegations of Russian collusion with “Russian interference”. PolitiFact’s 2017 “Lie of the Year” pulled the same trick. In an interview, Trump said to NBC presenter Lester Holt: “This Russian thing about Trump and Russia is a made up story.” They claimed Trump denied Russian interference, not the collusion.
They summed up Trump’s big lie as “Russian interference is a fabricated story”. But Trump recognized Russian interference even before he took office.
You can nonprofit analyze the vague republican rhetoric as “wrong” and then relax the democratic rhetoric completely. For example, PolitiFact and the other “independent fact-checkers” in Georgia never stopped Stacey Abrams for a “false” ticket because she claimed she actually won her race for governor in 2018.
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