PolitiFact disagrees with IG on IG report on CrossFire Hurricane

What to do when the Inspector General and PolitiFact disagree on what an IG report says?

Well, the IG has no Pulitzer Prize, so maybe trust the fact checkers?

PolitiFact, Dec. 11, 2019:

The investigation was not politically motivated

The IG report also dismissed the notion that the investigation was politically motivated.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz, during Senate testimony on Dec. 18, 2019 (The Epoch Times):

Then [Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)] asked, “Was it your conclusion that political bias did not affect any part of the Page investigation, any part of Crossfire Hurricane?”

“We did not reach that conclusion,” Horowitz told him. He added, “We have been very careful in connection with the FISA for the reasons you mentioned to not reach that conclusion, in part, as we’ve talked about earlier: the alteration of the email, the text messages associated with the individual who did that, and then our inability to explain or understand or get good explanations so we could understand why this all happened.”

We confirmed The Epoch Times' account via C-SPAN. It edits the exchange for clarity without altering the basic meaning of the exchange. We invite readers to confirm it for themselves via an embedded clip (around 3:11)*:



Seriously, we count the PolitiFact's Pulitzer as no kind of reasonable evidence supporting its reliability. Pulitzer juries do not fact check content before awarding prizes.

It seems clear PolitiFact committed the fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam. When the IG report repeatedly said it "found no testimonial or documentary evidence that these operations resulted from political bias or other improper considerations" or similar words, PolitiFact made the fallacious leap to conclude there was no political bias.

Pulitzer Prize-winning and IFCN-verified PolitiFact.

We need better measures of trustworthiness.


*Our embedded clip ended up shorter than we expected, for which we apologize to our readers. Find the full clip here.