PolitiFact, Lauren Carroll, pathetic CYA

With a post on July 1, 2017, we noted PolitiFact's absurdity in keeping the "True" rating on Hillary Clinton's claim that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies "all concluded" that Russia intervened in the U.S. presidential election.

PolitiFact has noticed that not enough people accept 2+2=5, however, so departing PolitiFact writer Lauren Carroll returned within a week with a pathetic attempt to justify her earlier fact check.

This is unbelievable.

Carroll's setup:

Back in October 2016, we rated this statement by then-candidate Hillary Clinton as True: "We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election."

Many readers have asked us about this rating since the New York Times and Associated Press issued their corrections.

Carroll then repeats PolitiFact's original excuse that since the Director of National Intelligence speaks for all 17 agencies, it somehow follows that 17 agencies "all concluded" that Russia interfered with the U.S. election.

And the punchline (bold emphasis added):

We asked experts again this week if Clinton’s claim was correct or not.

"In the context of a national debate, her answer was a reasonable inference from the DNI statement," Cordero said, emphasizing that the statement said, "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident" in its assessment.

Aftergood said it’s fair to say the Director of National Intelligence speaks for the intelligence community, but that doesn’t always mean there is unamity across the community, and it’s possible that some organizations disagree.

But in the case of the Russia investigation, there is no evidence of disagreement among members of the intelligence community.

Put simply, either the people who work at PolitiFact are stupid, or else they think you're stupid.

PolitiFact claims it asked its cited experts whether Clinton's claim was correct.

PolitiFact then shares with its readers responses that do not tell them whether the experts think Clinton's claim was correct.

1) "In the context of a national debate, her answer was a reasonable inference from the DNI statement" 

It's one thing to make a reasonable inference. It's another thing whether the inference was true. If a person shows up at your home soaking wet, it may be a reasonable inference that it's raining outside. The inference isn't necessarily correct.

The quotation of Carrie Cordero does not answer whether Clinton's claim was correct.

How does a fact checker not know that?

 2) PolitiFact paraphrases expert Steven Aftergood: "Aftergood said it’s fair to say the Director of National Intelligence speaks for the intelligence community, but that doesn’t always mean there is unamity [sic] across the community, and it’s possible that some organizations disagree."

The paraphrase of Aftergood appears to make our point. Even if the Director of National Intelligence speaks for all 17 agencies it does not follow that all 17 agencies agreed with the finding. Put another way, even if Clinton's inference was reasonable the more recent reports show that it was wrong. The 17 agencies did not all reach the same conclusion independently, contrary to what Clinton implied.

And that's it.

Seriously, that's it.

PolitiFact trots out this absolutely pathetic CYA attempt and expects people to take it seriously?

May it never be.

The evidence from the experts does not support PolitiFact's judgment, yet PolitiFact uses that evidence to support its judgment.

Ridiculous.



Afters

Maybe they'll be able to teach Carroll some logic at UC Berkeley School of Law.



Correction July 7, 2017: Removed an extraneous "the" preceding "PolitiFact" in our first paragraph following our first quotation of PolitiFact.

PolitiFact absurdly keeps "True" rating on false statement from Hillary Clinton

Today we were alerted about a story from earlier this week detailing a New York Times correction.

Heavy.com, from June 30, 2017:

On June 29 The New York Times issued a retraction to an article published on Monday, which originally stated that all 17 intelligence organizations had agreed that Russia orchestrated the hacking. The retraction reads, in part:

The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

It should be noted that the four intelligence agencies are not retracting their statements about Russia involvement. But all 17 did not individually come to the assessment, despite what so many people insisted back in October.

The same article went on to point out that PolitiFact had rated "True" Hillary Rodham Clinton's claim that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies found Russia responsible for hacking. That despite acknowledging it had no evidence backing the idea that each agency had reached the conclusion based on its own investigation:

Politifact concluded that 17 agencies had, indeed, agreed on this because “the U.S. Intelligence Community is made up of 17 agencies.” However, the 17 agencies had not independently made the assessment, as many believed. Politifact mentioned this in the story, but still said the statement was correct.

We looked up the PolitiFact story in question. Heavy.com presents PolitiFact's reasoning accurately.

It makes for a great example of horrible fact-checking.

Clinton's statement implied each of the 17 agencies made its own finding:

"We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election."

It's very easy to avoid making that implication: "Our intelligence agencies have concluded ..." Such a phrasing fairly represents a finding backed by a figure representing all 17 agencies. But when Clinton emphasized the 17 agencies "all" reached the same conclusion it implied independent investigations.

PolitiFact ignored that false implication in its original rating and in a June 2017 update to the article in response to information from FBI Director James Clapper's testimony earlier in the year:

The January report presented its findings by saying "we assess," with "we" meaning "an assessment by all three agencies."

The October statement, on the other hand, said "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident" in its assessment. As we noted in the article, the 17 separate agencies did not independently come to this conclusion, but as the head of the intelligence community, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence speaks on behalf of the group.

We stand by our rating.

PolitiFact's rating was and is preposterous. Note how PolitiFact defines its "True" and "Mostly True" ratings:

TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing.
MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.

It doesn't pass the sniff test to assert that Clinton's claim about "17 agencies" needs no clarification or additional information. We suppose that only a left-leaning and/or unserious fact-checking organization would conclude otherwise.

What if we lived in a world where PolitiFact applied to itself the standards it applies to others?

In that impossible world where PolitiFact applied its own standards to itself, PolitiFact would doubtless crack down on PolitiFact's misleading headlines, like the following headline over a story by Lauren Carroll:

While the PolitiFact headline claims that the Trump budget cuts Medicaid, and the opening paragraph says Trump's budget "directly contradicts" President Trump's promise not to cut Medicaid, in short order Carroll's story reveals that the Medicaid budget goes up under the new Trump budget.

So it's a cut when the Medicaid budget goes up?

Such reasoning has precedent at PolitiFact. We noted in December 2016 that veteran PolitiFact fact-checker Louis Jacobson wrote that the most natural way to interpret "budget cut" was against the baseline of expected spending, not against the previous year's spending.

Jacobson's approach in December 2016 helped President Obama end up with a "Compromise" rating on his aim to cut $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in spending. By PolitiFact's reckoning, the president cut $427 billion from the budget. PolitiFact obtained that figure by subtracting actual outlays from the estimates the Congressional Budget Office published in 2012 and using the cumulative total for the four years.

Jacobson took a different tack back in 2014 when he faulted a Republican ad attacking the Affordable Care Act's adjustments to Medicare spending (which we noted in the earlier linked article):

First, while the ad implies that the law is slicing Medicare benefits, these are not cuts to current services. Rather, as Medicare spending continues to rise over the next 10 years, it will do so at a slower pace would [sic] have occurred without the law. So claims that Obama would "cut" Medicare need more explanation to be fully accurate.

We can easily rework Jacobson's paragraph to address Carroll's story:

First, while the headline implies that the proposed budget is slicing Medicaid benefits, these are not cuts to current services. Rather, as Medicaid spending continues to rise over the next 10 years, it will do so at a slower pace than would occur without the law. So claims that Trump would "cut" Medicaid need more explanation to be fully accurate.

PolitiFact is immune to the standard it applies to others.

We also note that a pledge not to cut a program's spending is not reasonably taken as a pledge not to slow the growth of spending for that program. Yet that unreasonable interpretation is the foundation of PolitiFact's "Trump-O-Meter" article.


Correction May 24, 2017: Changed the first incidence of "law" in our reworking of Jacobson's sentence to "proposed budget." It better fits the facts that way.
Update May 26, 2017: Added link to the PolitiFact story by Lauren Carroll

Thought-Checkers: Protecting against Fakethink

Everything you can imagine is real
                                 -Pablo Picasso*

Not so fast, Pablo! 

We stumbled across this silly piece by Lauren Carroll (of fact-checking flat earth claims fame) where Carroll somehow determines as objective fact the limits of Betsy DeVos' ability to imagine things: 

DeVos was asked a question, she didn't know the answer, so she offered a guess, and explicitly stated she was offering a guess.

The difference between making a statement of fact and offering your best guess seems far too complicated for either Carroll or her editors that let this editorial opportunity escape their liberal grasp.

This isn't a fact check, it's a hit piece by a journalish that was apparently more eager to smear a Trump pick than they were in acknowledging what DeVos actually said. Oddly, Carroll doesn't list any attempts to contact either DeVos or anyone in the Trump camp to get a clarification, a courtesy they've extended in the past.

PolitiFact is pushing Fake News by accusing DeVos of making a claim when she was stating a theoretical possibility that she could imagine. The real crime here is garbage ratings like this will end up in DeVos' unscientific "report card" on those bogus charts PolitiFact dishonestly pimps out to readers as objective data.

PolitiFact's disdain for all things Trump is clear and it's only going to get worse. The administration hasn't even begun yet and they're already fact-checking what someone can or cannot imagine. 

Happy thoughts!




*attributed

More unprincipled principles from PolitiFact (Updated)

When PolitiFact released its politisplainer video on its fact-checking process, "The PolitiFact Process," we responded with an annotated version of that video. We made one of our key points by contradicting Editor Angie Drobnic Holan's claim that "These ratings are not arbitrary. Each one has a specific definition." We pointed out that PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" definitions are ambiguous, making it impossible for Holan to support her denial that the ratings are arbitrary.

With hardly a week having passed, PolitiFact serves up an example proving our point.

PolitiFact's fact check titled "Hillary Clinton says none of her emails had classification headers," makes a number of its typical mistakes (such as ignoring PolitiFact's "Burden of Proof" principle), but we would draw attention to the conclusion of the piece (bold emphasis added):

Clinton’s carefully worded statement is partially accurate but leaves out important context. For that, we rate her claim Mostly True.

Is the problem obvious?

Let's review PolitiFact's definition of "Mostly True":

MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.

To us, that does not seem like a perfect match for the "Mostly True" rating Clinton received.

What about the definition of "Half True," then?

HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.

This one is closer, but still not quite a perfect match. Sure, we've got  "partially accurate," "details," and "context" mentioned, but PolitiFact's specific definition mentions "important details or taking things out of context," not the mere absence of "important context."

This 'tweener language underscores a point my co-editor Jeff D. made on Twitter earlier this week:

What is the objective difference between "needs additional information" and "leaves out important details"? pic.twitter.com/llbWqHkeFU

— PolitiFact Bias (@PolitiFactBias) September 6, 2016

Fact checks like this one help illustrate Jeff's point: There is no objective difference between "needs additional information" and "leaves out important details."

PolitiFact can take exactly the same story detail and write the conclusion with a "Mostly True" or "Half True" ending.

In this case, it looks like writer Lauren Carroll (bless her heart) may have recommended a "Half True" rating for Clinton before the story went before PolitiFact's exalted "star chamber" (bless its heart) for a final determination of its "Truth-O-Meter" rating. The group of editors may have wanted a softer rating for Clinton, doubtless in devotion to objectivity and non-partisanship, and so decided on the "Mostly True" rating. Then Carroll presumably did an incomplete revision of the concluding paragraph.

We could be wrong in our hypothesis, of course, but there's little doubt the conclusion Carroll attached jibes better with a "Half True" rating than the "Mostly True" rating Clinton gets on her PolitiFact report card (bless its heart).

In the end, we get a timely example supporting our point that Angie Drobnic Holan spoke falsely when she claimed PolitiFact's ratings are not arbitrary.

Afters:

While it should not surprise us at all if the wrong rating description stays in the story (like it did for PolitiFact fact check of Mitt Romney), it's possible PolitiFact will "fix" this problem by changing the description of the rating to match the definition of "Mostly True."

That change would not truly fix the problem nor blunt our point.

Why?

Because unless the facts of the story change no justification exists for changing the rating or its description. Changing the wording of the rating description does not alter the facts of the story.



Correction Sept. 8, 2016 6:30 p.m. EDT:
In the first paragraph of the "Afters" section, changed "Half True" to "Mostly True" to match the intent of the sentence.


 
Update Sept. 8, 2016 (6:30 p.m. EDT):

Jeff hinted to PolitiFact's Katie Sanders, the editor of the story, that something was amiss:

Hi @KatieLSanders! Can you plz clarify why you gave Clinton a Mostly True but had definition of a Half True rating? https://t.co/f7n9kbq8sf

— PolitiFact Bias (@PolitiFactBias) September 8, 2016

So far as I can tell, we received no clarification why Clinton's claim received a "Mostly True" rating with the "Half True" definition. We see no other difference in the story, and PolitiFact mentions no other changes in its editor's note.

How did the definition of "Half True" get into a fact check making the finding of "Mostly True"? That's the kind of transparency you don't normally get from PolitiFact.

"Trump Effect" reveals PolitiFact as mindless partisans

Need proof that PolitiFact is staffed and run by mindless partisans? Read on.

PolitiFact thoroughly butchered the truth with a fact check of one of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's claims last week. Clinton said parents and teachers were complaining of a "Trump Effect" in our schools. The "Trump Effect" described by Clinton involved a rise in bullying and harassment targeting "students of color, Muslims, and immigrants.”

Clinton used a survey report from the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center as evidence supporting her statement. PolitiFact rated Clinton's claim "Mostly True," despite the fact that the report offered no real support for the claim. I fisked the report and PolitiFact's fact check with an article at Zebra Fact Check.

The final point in that article leads to some strong evidence of PolitiFact's liberal tilt. I charged that PolitiFact used a different standard for Clinton's claim about the "Trump Effect" than it used for a recent claim Trump made about rising crime.

PolitiFact's wildly different approaches to the two claims make a great case that PolitiFact allows liberal bias to influence its work. Given the likely role of bias in slanting the fact-check, I elected to expand on the point here at PolitiFact Bias.

Parallel Statistical Claims

Trump said crime is rising, and implicitly placed blame on the Obama administration.

Clinton said, by implication, that bullying and harassment are on the rise in our schools and placed explicit blame on Trump's campaign.

PolitiFact's eye-grabbing presentations

Supporting Evidence?

FBI crime statistics supported Trump's claim with respect to violent crime, and a number of newspaper articles directly supported that aspect of Trump's claim.

The only data supporting Clinton's claim came from a small number of anecdotes (less than 100) collected from a biased sample of teachers.

PolitiFact's interpretation of the claims

PolitiFact decided Trump was claiming the rise in crime was a trend and not simply an anomalous bump (we are unable to detect the evidence that helped PolitiFact make that determination).

PolitiFact made no suggestion that Clinton was claiming a trend.

PolitiFact's approach to the evidence

In Trump's case, PolitiFact used data from 2014 and before to judge Trump's 2016 claim that crime is rising. PolitiFact for some reason did not consider preliminary data from 2015 that supported Trump's claim with respect to violent crime.

In Clinton's case, PolitiFact ignored evidence of dropping school bullying and harassment prior to 2016 to focus on the evidence available from 2016: A handful of anecdotes. It's worth noting that one of the experts PolitiFact cited in its Clinton fact check says no real consensus exists on the reliability of bullying/harassment metrics.

PolitiFact reaches its conclusions

On Trump:

If you look at overall violent and property crimes -- the only categories that would seem inclusive enough to qualify as "crime," as Trump put it -- he is flat wrong. In fact, crime rates have been falling almost without fail for roughly a quarter-century. We rate his claim Pants on Fire.

The Trump addendum (after critics pointed out PolitiFact ignored data from 2015):

While the preliminary data shows spikes in crime rates in some cities, Trump’s statement was broad, without qualifiers, and it came amid comments that painted an overarching image of a nation in decline. Trump didn’t say that crime was rising "recently" or "in recent months" or "over the past year" or "in some places."

PolitiFact kept its "Pants on Fire" rating for Trump in spite of the supporting evidence.

On Clinton:

The term Trump Effect is a product of the survey’s authors. And the survey is unscientific because it's based on anecdotal reports. But experts in bullying told us the Southern Poverty Law Center’s survey and their sense of current trends in schools supports Clinton’s point.

PolitiFact's artistic license

The Trump and Clinton claims differ in that Trump's claim lacks specifics. As we see in the Trump addendum above,  PolitiFact takes what Trump did not say as its license to interpret the "crime is rising" claim as a broad trend instead of a observation supported by contemporary news reports--news reports PolitiFact did not bother to mention in its own reporting.

The two claims also differ in that Trump flatly stated crime was rising while Clinton implied it by attributing it to "parents and teachers." Would PolitiFact have been forced to give Trump a "Mostly True" rating if he had said "Newspapers are reporting crime is rising"?

We deeply doubt it. PolitiFact would assuredly have focused on the point Trump was implying, that crime is rising, not on the mere fact that newspapers were reporting it. Maybe Trump could have raised his rating all the way up to "False" with that rephrasing?

Yet if Trump had used that phrasing, we would have an extremely close parallel between the two claims. Both politicians would imply a statistical trend. But only Trump would have widely-accepted data to partially support his claim. Clinton would not, the alleged opinions of PolitiFact's experts notwithstanding.

The blame game?

 In Trump's case, the "Pants on Fire" ruling canceled any need to deal with Obama's responsibility for rising crime. If crime isn't rising, obviously Obama is not at all to blame for rising crime.

But what about that "Trump Effect" that parents and teachers are worried about? Is the "Trump Effect" Trump's fault if a handful of teachers say it is?

PolitiFact opted to simply drop the issue of causation in Clinton's case. Clinton was able to explicitly blame implicitly rising harassment ("Mostly True") on Trump without any consequences from PolitiFact.

Conclusion

PolitiFact's inconsistency favors the left. See the "Afters" section for even more evidence of the same.

Afters: The needs of the "many"

PolitiFact's hard-left defense of Clinton contained another notable inconsistency involving a comparison to a different fact check of Donald Trump.

PolitiFact exaggerated the survey evidence supposedly supporting Clinton by claiming "many" teachers blamed Trump for increasing bullying and harassment:

Many of these teachers, unsolicited, cited Trump’s campaign rhetoric and the accompanying discourse as the likely reason for this behavior.

The Zebra Fact Check investigation suggests PolitiFact was misled about the number of teachers saying Trump was responsible for increasing bullying or harassment. Out of almost 2,000 teachers participating in the survey, 849 answered the question about bullying or biased language and of those 123 mentioned Trump. A fraction of those placed any kind of blame on Trump for anything. We would generously estimate that 25 teachers blamed Trump for something (not necessarily bullying or harassment) in answering that question. This implies that, to PolitiFact, "many" can be less than 1.25 percent of 2,000.

Yet when Donald Trump said "many" of the celebrities supporting Hillary Clinton weren't so hot lately, PolitiFact offered no hint that it would allow the bar to be set so low:

Trump has a point that out of hundreds of celebrities endorsing Clinton, some have faded.

Whether Trump had a point or not, PolitiFact rated his claim "Mostly False."

Not bothering to actually fact check whether "many" (l.25 percent?) of Clinton's Hollywood supporters aren't so hot lately seems to be the key to the "Mostly False" rating.

We invite readers to do the fact-checking PolitiFact apparently did not do: Count how "many" teachers blamed Trump for an increase in minority-targeted bullying in their schools. But don't tell PolitiFact what you find. Make them do their own research.

Why PolitiFact flip-flopped on Clinton

We've dedicated two items to PolitiFact's "Half True" gift to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on her claim she never sent or received classified information via her primate email account.

First we argued that PolitiFact's defense of its "Half True" rating made no sense following FBI Director James Comey's statement on July 5.

PolitiFact, whether influenced by our post or not, apparently agreed and reversed itself the next day while erasing nearly all the evidence of its embarrassing decision from the day before.

We, namely Jeff D, responded to PolitiFact's reversal by documenting the evidence that PolitiFact had continued its habit of changing stories without posting correction notices.

We have addressed what happened. Now we will consider why it happened.

A stupid idea whose time has come

It was just plain stupid of PolitiFact to say that it could not change Clinton's "Half True" rating in view of its policy of doing its ratings according to information available at the time (bold emphasis added):

(After this fact-check published, FBI Director James Comey released details of the Feb's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. This claim will remain rated Half True, because we base our rulings on when a statement was made and on the information available at that time. But the FBI investigation clearly undercuts Clinton’s defense if she makes a similar claim again. You can read more about the findings of the FBI investigation here.)

Applying that policy as PolitiFact did as described above could justify avoiding any number of corrections. Did an article misuse a word? Sure, but we're not going to correct it because we did not know any better at the time.

Yes, it's silly. But it beyond likely that a group of PolitiFact's editors agreed, at least for a time, that it was the right thing to do for this Clinton fact check.

Why the do-over?

PolitiFact reversed itself pretty quickly. But what kind of impetus could reverse the considered wisdom of PolitiFact's elite editorial group?

We'll consider some possibilities:

• A trusted figure condemned PolitiFact's defense of its "Half True" rating

This option seems the most likely. But PolitiFact's lack of transparency about its reversal leaves us in the dark as to whether anybody inside the organization was independent enough to rock the boat.

Alternatively, the editors at PolitiFact may have felt distress that they were out of step with the Washington Post Fact Checker. The Post promptly changed its rating of Clinton's email claim from two Pinocchios to four. Despite their claims of independence, the mainstream fact checkers can't avoid seeing each others' work and doubtless feel pressure to make similar findings of fact.

• PolitiFact changed because of our criticisms?

We condemned PolitiFact's reasoning and explained what was wrong with it before PolitiFact executed its reversal. However, it's not typical for PolitiFact to agree with and act on our criticisms.

• "Lie of the Year" implications

PolitiFact horribly embarrassed itself with the 2014 "Lie of the Year." President Obama's promise that people could keep their insurance plans under his health care reform bill took the award, or at least PolitiFact tried to make it look that way, despite the fact that PolitiFact never rated the claim worse than "Half True."

Clinton's email fib easily qualifies as the early leader in the "Lie of the Year" sweepstakes. It's high-profile. It was deeply investigated by the FBI. It carries yuge implications for the 2016 election.

Did PolitiFact belatedly realize that it might have another Democratic claim rated "Half True" winning the Lie of the Year award? Two words: bad optics.

Conclusion

We don't know for sure why PolitiFact acted the way it did. We can only offer some possibilities. But one thing is certain. PolitiFact has not acted like a fact checker in this. It has acted like it loves its own reputation better than it loves the truth.

The Cover Your Butt Cover Up: PolitiFact's Stealth Edits and Incoherent Defense of Hillary Clinton

PolitiFact's recent treatment of the Hillary Clinton email scandal has been busy and bizarre. PolitiFact issued a "Half True" rating on a Clinton claim, the FBI director poked holes in PolitiFact's story, PolitiFact stood by its "Half True" rating, then hours later reversed itself and issued a new fact check calling Clinton's claim false.

Timeline:

-July 3: A fact check by PolitiFact writer Lauren Carroll rates Clinton's claim that she "never received nor sent any material that was marked classified" on her private email server Half True (original version at the Internet Archive).

-July 5: FBI Director James Comey issues a statement effectively refuting Clinton's claims and exposing her outright falsehoods regarding the email scandal.

-July 5: After Comey's statement, PolitiFact publishes an update by Carroll laying out Comey's evidence and explaining how it undermines Clinton's claims. Despite this, Carroll says there will be no changes and affirms the original "Half True" rating.

-July 6: PolitiFact and Carroll publish an entirely new fact check on the same claim, this time rating Clinton False. PolitiFact archives a version of the "Half True" fact check.

Each iteration of Carroll's reporting has problems, so we'll address them in order:

Original July 3 Half True Fact Check:

Carroll is Clintonian in her defense of Clinton, weaving a web of wordsmithing to determine it's "Half True" Clinton did not send or receive any emails marked as classified. One of the several problems with Carroll's fact check troubles us the most:

Carroll's conclusion ignores Catherine Herridge's report last month that Clinton did in fact send an email marked classified. Carroll also fails to enlighten readers by explaining whether Clinton's emails were marked classified is moot to the overall implications of the scandal.

Carroll goes on to assert that "There is no evidence Clinton knowingly sent or received classified information" (emphasis mine). What Carroll fails to tell PolitiFact readers is that in a widely reported email exchange Clinton herself explicitly instructs an aide to intentionally remove classified markings from information before sending it to her via nonsecure methods. (1)

Apparently for PolitiFact, it's not misleading to intentionally remove classified markings and then say you didn't receive anything marked classified as a defense.


July 5 Update:

After FBI Director James Comey's "wowza" revelations, Carroll writes an update covering Comey's press conference. Like Comey, PolitiFact acknowledges Clinton's deceit. Also like Comey, PolitiFact declines to do anything about it. In light of all the evidence, PolitiFact insists Clinton's claim would remain rated "Half True."

The justification for keeping the "Half True" rating was indefensible if not incoherent (red box added for emphasis):

Again, the evidence available at the time indicated Clinton was lying. But even if we assume Comey released some new bombshell evidence, PolitiFact's excuse doesn't make sense. I pointed out on Twitter that PolitiFact's explanation seems to be that since PolitiFact didn't know Hillary Clinton was lying when she lied, she's telling the truth.

 

Clinton lied, and after Comey's statement even PolitiFact was forced to acknowledge that Clinton's claim was false, but since PolitiFact didn't have the evidence that Clinton was lying on July 3, it's a "fact" that Clinton's claim was half true. Or something.

There's circumstances where it may be legitimate to base a rating on information available at the time a claim was made, but in this case PolitiFact allows Clinton to benefit from her own deceit. Bryan pointed out in a post criticizing the update just how absurd Carroll's explanation was:

Clinton...had the very best position available to know whether she sent or received emails marked as classified. She had every reason to know the truth back in 2009-2013 as she served as secretary of state...Apparently the only reason PolitiFact gave Clinton credit for a half-truth is because Clinton lied.

Carroll's justification for keeping the rating "Half True" shows just how far PolitiFact will go to avoid giving Clinton an unfavorable rating. For PolitiFact, even acknowledging Clinton lied wasn't enough to give her a "False" rating.


July 6th False Fact Check:

The day after Comey's damaging press conference, PolitiFact scrubs its original "Half True" fact check from its website, and publishes an entirely new fact check on the exact same claim, this time rating it "False."

So what happened between PolitiFact's update and the new "False" rating? (Red box added for emphasis)

PolitiFact's justification for the new rating is at odds with its July 5 update.

Note that "the evidence FBI director James Comey presented" was cited by PolitiFact when they refused to change the Half True rating the day before! Now PolitiFact says it is the sole reason for issuing a "False" rating. Which is it?

That same evidence "was available to Clinton through her own emails" when PolitiFact rated it "Half True" in the first place.

The evidence has been available to Clinton the entire time she's been telling the lie.

We asked Lauren Carroll to explain the discrepancy on Twitter but she ignored us, as usual.

(We asked from my personal Twitter account as Carroll (like PolitiFact editors Angie Holan and Bill Adair) has blocked our PolitiFactBias account.) 

How can PolitiFact reconcile the new False fact check with Carroll's update refusing to change the "Half True" rating from the day before? 

The Cover Up:

The link to Carroll's original July 3rd Half True rating goes here. If you click through, you'll see the story has been replaced by PolitiFact's default Sorry, this page is not found Etch-a-Sketch gag PolitiFact uses when it deletes a story.


Not only is this error page partisan snark directed at Mitt Romney, it also facetiously implies a technical problem as opposed to PolitiFact intentionally deleting an article from the web.

(PolitiFact's original "Half True" rating can be found here. To PolitiFact's credit, the new "False" version of the story does link to an archived (but edited) version of the "Half True" rating.)

But what about Carroll's update from July 5, the one posted after Comey's press conference? Here's the key passage (red box added for emphasis):

Check out how that passage reads now (red box added for emphasis):

It seems that the way to reconcile PolitiFact's "False" rating with Carroll's update affirming the "Half True" rating is to simply delete it from the Web and hope nobody notices.

The change is a complete 180. The first version contradicts the second. It's also incongruous (They're changing the rating to "False," but the investigation undercuts her defense if she makes the claim again?)

There is no editor's note acknowledging the change. There is no update, no notice, no explanation indicating a change has been made.

This is a stealth edit. It deceives their readers. It's unethical journalism.

And PolitiFact does it all the time.

Think Carroll and her editors accidentally forgot to add a note indicating a change? What about the time a disingenuous liberal talking point about the Hobby Lobby decision was scrubbed out of a fact check without notice?

Is it possible the above stealth edit was the result of a misguided intern? The story was written by PolitiFact Deputy Editor Louis Jacobson, and edited by Senior Editor Angie Holan. Those are the two senior most writers at PolitiFact. Holan and Jacobson are the most influential at PolitiFact and one would think should know better. We asked Jacobson about PolitiFact's policy on stealth edits, and also brought this edit to his attention without ever getting a response.

Even minor errors are too much for PolitiFact to admit screwing up:

Sometimes the errors can be inaccurate by orders of magnitude, but no editors note, or even a change in rating is made. Bryan caught an example of this just last month and wrote about it:

A key figure in the story changed from $7.5 billion to $1.7 billion. Koster's exaggeration, by percentage, went from 20 percent to 429 percent. The new version of the story carries no correction notice, and the rating remains "Mostly True."

The reality is that PolitiFact routinely uses deceptive and opaque editing techniques to alter their stories after they've been published. So much so that we created a search tag for it: Now you see it - Now you Don't.

Much of PolitiFact's inconsistency and faulty reasoning can be attributed to their political bias or incompetence. But PolitiFact's routine use of stealth edits is inexcusable and unethical. Any reputable journalist should be embarrassed by such shenanigans, but PolitiFact has a long history of using them while also refusing to own up when they're caught red-handed.

PolitiFact embodies the disingenuousness they make their living accusing others of having. PolitiFact engages in the same type of deceptions it claims to expose.

PolitiFact is a dishonest and untrustworthy actor in the world of journalism. Their work should be recognized as the partisan hackery it is and disavowed as a reputable source.



Notes:
(1) It's possible there's a procedural argument to be made that, as the result of an executive order, Clinton had the authority to declassify information in very specific and narrow circumstances (including in the above mentioned case.) In any event, Clinton's defense that an email was not marked classified when she was the one directing it's declassification for the express purpose of sending it over nonsecure methods is grossly misleading.

PolitiFact's Hillary hilarity

PolitiFact's Pretzel of Play-Doh Principles

FBI Director James Comey's announcement on July 5, 2016 made clear that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton gave false reports of her handling of top secret and sensitive emails.

That created a problem for PolitiFact. PolitiFact had rated "Half True" Clinton's claim that she neither sent or received email marked as classified--at least not marked that way when it was sent. And PolitiFact just issued that rating on July 3, 2016 (Update July 7, 2016: PolitiFact has deleted the original story from its site, so find the archived version here).

Time for some steam-shoveled CYABS, courtesy of PolitiFact.

A scant two days later Lauren Carroll, yes the same Lauren Carroll from screen-captured byline, published an explanation of sorts, along the same lines as the editor's note that now accompanies the original story:

(After this fact-check published, FBI Director James Comey released details of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. This claim will remain rated Half True, because we base our rulings on when a statement was made and on the information available at that time. But the FBI investigation clearly undercuts Clinton’s defense if she makes a similar claim again. You can read more about the findings of the FBI investigation here.)

Since we're talking about PolitiFact, "clearly undercuts" means if PolitiFact knew three days earlier what we all know now, Clinton would have received a mere "Mostly False" rating.

Let's expose the BS for what it is.

Note that PolitiFact declares that Clinton's false claim from July 3 will keep its "Half True" rating. PolitiFact invokes one of its Play-Doh principles to justify the decision:

Timing – Our rulings are based on when a statement was made and on the information available at that time.

We imagine the justification may appear legitimate to some. It is not legitimate.

It's reasonable to base a ruling on information available at the time when somebody makes a claim like Ann Hathaway affirming "the majority of Americans now support gay marriage." Obviously a fact checker can't judge the truth of that statement based on a poll published after the claim was made. Or on a poll where the findings were within the margin of error. Well, PolitiFact did both, but our readers get the point: How could Ann Hathaway justify her claim ahead of the poll, assuming its results were outside the margin of error? If it takes two years after her statement for the majority to occur, should we expect fact-checkers to make corrections at that late date? No. That would be silly. And it's almost as silly three days later.

The case with Clinton is far different.

Hathaway could not have a justified belief that a majority favored gay marriage back on March 15, 2011. PolitiFact could have justified calling Hathaway's claim false (it received a "Mostly True" rating).

Clinton, in contrast, had the very best position available to know whether she sent or received emails marked as classified. She had every reason to know the truth back in 2009-2013 as she served as secretary of state.

Clinton's is not the sort of case where PolitiFact's timing issue makes sense. The fact was established weeks ago that Clinton received classified emails. Apparently the only reason PolitiFact gave Clinton credit for a half-truth is because Clinton lied. The excuse occurs in Lauren Carroll's PolitiSplaining:

"I never received nor sent any material that was marked classified," Clinton said July 2, after Clinton was interviewed by the FBI as part of its investigation. "And there is a process for the review of material before it is released to the public, and there were decisions made that material should be classified. I do call that retroactively classifying."

Clinton’s statements like this left open the question of whether she sent or received classified information that was inappropriately left unlabeled — or that Clinton, as head of the department, failed to recognize and deal with information that should have been classified. Because of that obfuscation, we rated her claim Half True.

See, the evidence said Clinton's claim was false, but Clinton insisted it was true, obfuscating the facts. So PolitiFact had to give Clinton a "Half True" because of the obfuscation.

Got it?

The "Timing" principle makes up only half  of PolitiFact's pretzel of Play-Doh principles. PolitiFact has another (ill-advised, in our opinion) principle relevant to this case:

Burden of proof – People who make factual claims are accountable for their words and should be able to provide evidence to back them up. We will try to verify their statements, but we believe the burden of proof is on the person making the statement.

How does that principle work in practice? Ask Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Reid, while serving as Senate Majority Leader, accused 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney of not paying any taxes. PolitiFact found no evidence to support Reid's claim and so rated it "Pants on Fire." PolitiFact did not have access to Romney's tax returns showing that Reid was wrong. Rather, PolitiFact used the opinions of tax experts to decide the question.

Don't ask us why Reid's insistence he was right failed to net him a "Half True." Sometimes PolitiFact is so unfair.

The burden of proof principle should have applied in Clinton's case. Was there evidence supporting Clinton's claim? The only way to know was to have access to Clinton's emails. But Clinton made sure that happened only in part. PolitiFact ended up having to take Clinton at her word to give her that "Half True" rating.

In conclusion, don't buy PolitiFact's BS that it's basing the enduring "Half True" for Clinton on some type of real principle. Even if the wording of the principles doesn't change, the principles change in meaning to fit the need of the moment.

It's the type of thing that gives fact-checking, and PolitiFact, a bad name.



Updated this item July 6, 2016 with some grammar and formatting tweaks. 

Mark of the Least: PolitiFact Avoids Hillary's Most Damaging Lies

Pictures of last night ended up online, I'm screwed. OH WELL!

Yeah I think we broke the law, always say we're gonna stop...

This Friday night do it all again. 

-Katy Perry

This Tuesday, PolitiBlogger Lauren Carroll did me the favor of making my prediction come true, thus cementing my status as the world's least daring fortune teller.

Carroll's post helped PolitiFact readers sort out the truth of a mystery that CNN, Reuters, NBC, AP, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Politico had already confirmed and reported on extensively a week before PolitiFact even touched it. 

Carroll offered up this lame excuse:

We haven’t yet put the issue on the Truth-O-Meter because there were too many unknowns.

Carroll explains the IG report was the smoking gun they finally needed to put Hillary to the scientific rigors of the Truth-O-Meter.

Carroll failed in "sorting out the truth" of what she was sorting out the truth of.

Readers didn't benefit in any way by PolitiFact's delayed press time. Carroll's post didn't include any exclusive or developing details that weren't already reported on by much more popular journalism outlets the week before. Carroll only succeeded in regurgitating a widely known story, included a weak defense for ignoring it earlier, then slapped a gimmicky "Truth-O-Meter" graphic on it.

Carroll continued:

But the inspector general’s report has clarified some of those unknowns and demonstrated that Clinton’s exclusive use of personal email was, in fact, not allowed.

We've known for years Clinton's exclusive use of a personal email account violates State Department policy. Who does Carroll think she's fooling? Here's the source:

First of all, the State Department’s policy as of 2005 (Clinton joined in 2009) is that all day-to-day operations are to be conducted on the official State Department information channel. Clinton never once used this State Department email system.

The quotation comes from Carroll herself. As far back as March, 2013 it was reported that Clinton was exclusively using her personal email account for government business, contrary to State Department policy. PolitiFact is just figuring this out now? The IG report didn't confirm Clinton's email impermissibility so much as it reiterated it.

Carroll's excuse that there wasn't enough information doesn't pass the laugh test.

And what spared Clinton from the dreaded "Pants on Fire" rating? On Twitter, I asked both PolitiFact and Carroll herself what objective criteria they used to determine Clinton's claim was false, but not ridiculously false (That's the only difference between a False and Pants on Fire rating, as Bryan explains here.)

Neither responded so we're left to assume Clinton's repeated, years long, blatant lie wasn't too offensive to the political sensibilities of PolitiFact staff. It's false, they admit, but not ridiculous.

Finally, we have the issue of selection bias. It's arguable that of all the sordid details of Clinton's private email practices, her lie that it was "allowed" is arguably the least politically damaging to her. Breaking a few rules for convenience is hardly something most Americans would become outraged over, especially when so many are dealing with voluminous and complicated email work rules themselves. A partisan may even be able to paint Clinton in a sympathetic light if all she did was use the wrong email.

Rating Clinton's "allowed" lie is almost as helpful as that other time PolitiFact dipped a tepid toe into the Clinton email scandal. In that case they informed readers that Hillary Clinton was not under investigation. Instead, the FBI was investigating her email server, an inanimate object.

Why not check this Clinton whopper?

“There is no classified marked information on those emails, sent or received by me." 

No need for an IG report here. That claim was demonstrably false when she made the claim. (Nor has PolitiFact provided so much as an "In Context" article to explain it's irrelevant if Top Secret information was marked or not.)

Oddly enough PolitiFact editors don't see any news value in determining if Clinton put American lives at risk by failing to protect our most valuable secrets. That's why you won't see it rated on the Truth-O-Meter.

Besides, it seems that Carroll has stayed busy trying to sort out the truth of much more important things.

PolitiFact isn't holding anyone accountable. They're pushing narratives based on their own political inclinations. And politicians that lie will do it all again.





Edits: 
0638 PST 6/3/2016: Fixed various text formatting errors. Deleted duplicate final sentence in antepenultimate paragraph. -Jeff
0840 PST 6/4/2016 While fixing formatting errors the text "Oddly enough PolitiFact editors don't see any news value in determining if" was inadvertently deleted in antepenultimate paragraph. It has been restored. -Jeff  

Hot Air: "Even lefty PolitiFact calls Hillary a liar over email scam"

Great minds think alike?

Hot Air's Larry O'Connor served up a healthy dollop of scathing PolitiFact criticism earlier today, treading much of the same territory the PolitiFact Bias twitter account (Jeff's baby) has covered recently: PolitiFact is behind the curve on detecting Hillary Clinton's email falsehoods.

O'Connor's best punches shadow those our own Twitter pugilist, Jeff:

Why is PolitiFact “fact-checking” Clinton’s “It was allowed” statement from 5 days ago? It makes it sound like she just made this remark and PolitiFact is “Johnny on the spot” with the truth.

Oh please.

Jeff's been pummelling PolitiFact over its foot-dragging for weeks. Months, even.

(O)nly now does PolitiFact decide to sneak a “fact-check” out to attempt to maintain a tad bit of credibility.

Don’t fall for it.

Exactly.

Visit Hot Air and read the whole thing. And/or follow @PolitiFactBias on Twitter.




Edits 6/1/2016 1306 PST: Fixed link in first paragraph. Added links to tweets in 5th graph. -Jeff

Have Democrats ''never held up a Supreme Court nomination"? (Updated)

We said before that PolitiFact does not hold itself to the same standard it applies to others. Though perhaps PolitiFact's scarce adherence to any consistent standard makes that inevitable. Our example comes from a March 20, 2016 fact check of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Let's start with the misleading headline:

PolitiFact noted in its fact check that Democrats did, in fact, hold up the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, whom Reagan nominated in 1987. So how does it work out that Reid's statement is "mostly true" anyway?

It's tricky, in keeping with PolitiFact's tradition of convoluted and selective justification.

In context, Reid stipulated that he was talking about lame duck cases. That makes his statement literally true false (see Update below) under an expansive interpretation of "lame duck," since Bork was nominated before 1988, Reagan's final year in office.

Up through this point, one might argue PolitiFact is treating Reid unfairly by rating his true statement only "Mostly True."

But there's much more to this story, and PolitiFact leaves out important parts.

First and foremost, there is no historical parallel to the current situation with the Supreme Court. The Bork nomination is considered a prime turning point in the politization of the confirmation process, and there is no example of a lame-duck nomination since Reagan.

And the current situation during Obama's last year in office sets a new precedent because his choice would not replace a liberal justice but a conservative justice. With his choice of Bork, Reagan was trying to replace the Nixon-appointed Justice Lewis Powell.

PolitiFact's effort to help us understand the truth in politics completely omits any information about differences in the ways these nominations would affect the political balance on the Supreme Court. It's apparently unimportant context in PolitiFact's eyes.

PolitiFact almost makes it look like Democrats rolled out the red carpet for Bork compared to Obama's hapless nominee Merrick Garland:

Bork did face a hearing and a Senate vote, which he lost, but his confirmation process made the rules of the game more contentious.

What's left out? The Democrat-controlled Senate Committee that sent Bork's nomination to the Senate recommended the Senate reject the nomination. And Democrats had enough of a majority that Bork had no chance with 52 of 54 Democrats voting against him (four Republicans often associated with the acronym RINO also opposed Bork).

Why is this background important? Let's revisit the context of Reid's reply to Meet the Press host Chuck Todd. Todd played a clip from 2005 of Reid saying the Senate has no constitutional duty to vote on a Supreme Court nomination. Now Reid says the Republicans have that duty. Todd asked Reid what changed. What changed, Reid said, is that the Democrats have never opposed a lame-duck nominee--a history running right up through 1988, before Reid ever claimed the Senate has no duty to vote on a nomination.

Reid's answer to Todd was complete baloney, in context. PolitiFact's fact-check does nothing to emphasize that context to its readers. Instead, PolitiFact readers get a misleading headline sending the message that Democrats hardly at all obstruct the Supreme Court nominations of Republicans.

PolitiFact: Putting the Clintonian "is" in "nonpartisan" since 2007.

Update: "Lame Duck" Lameness

Jeff D. points out the elephant in the room.

PolitiFact:

Before we rule, we wanted to note a slight error in the second part of Reid’s statement that "since 1900 in a lame-duck session, there have been six (nominees) that have all been approved." We have found in a previous fact-check that since the early 1900s, there have been six Supreme Court nominees in election years, and all were confirmed. However, only one was clearly a "lame-duck" nominee, meaning the president making the nomination was no question on the way out (Reagan). The others were nominated by presidents running for re-election to serve another term (Herbert Hoover, William Howard Taft, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who nominated two people in 1916).

Reid's stipulation that he was talking about lame ducks makes his statement literally false, contrary to the charitable reading I gave it in the post above. Reid's statement was flat wrong, but PolitiFact arbitrarily determined that Reid's exaggeration of 500 percent (of the number of "lame duck" Supreme Court nominations) was a "slight error" that does not appear to count against Reid's eventual rating.

PolitiFact used tweezers to pull out the most truth it could from Reid's statement, leaving behind plenty of falsehood.

Nonpartisan.


Correction March 23, 2016:  Replaced "Mostly False" with "Mostly True" in referring to the rating Reid received from PolitiFact. March 31 update: Added strikethrough of "true" and added "false" to clarify the meaning.

PolitiFingers on the scale

Did you know that PolitiFact is objective and nonpartisan?

Yes, well, it was a trick question.

Yesterday PolitiFact gave us a fantastic example of placing fingers on the scale to change the outcome of a fact check

The example comes from PolitiFact's March 1 fact check of President Barack Obama. Here's the visual:

The problem?

We just don't find it anywhere close to obvious that this:

"None of the GOP candidates have a climate change plan"

is a plausible paraphrase of this:

"There is not a single candidate in the Republican primary that thinks we should do anything about climate change."

Does PolitiFact writer Lauren Carroll make an effort to justify her paraphrase of Obama? Not from what we can tell.

Carroll's conclusion features a representative gloss:

Bush, who was in the race when Obama made his comment, and Kasich both have said they believe human-caused climate change is real and have said pursuing these alternative energy sources could mitigate the problem. But neither has outlined a specific plan.

For some Republican voters, this stance might be a plus. But it doesn’t change the veracity of Obama’s statement.

So advocating increased private-sector reliance on renewable energy sources to mitigate climate change means that Bush and Kasich think we should do nothing about climate change?

Seriously?

One can make Obama's statement somewhat true by (charitably) assuming that by "we" he means the federal government. If we make enough unfounded assumptions, we can find some truth in Obama's statement. But by the time we've made those assumptions we're not really engaged in fact-checking.

Yet that's what PolitiFact did, effectively putting its PolitiFingers on the scale. It's not logical to conclude that lacking a plan for the federal government to act means that there is no desire to address a problem.

This was yet another sham fact check from the fraudsters at PolitiFact.



Afters

Here's Ben Carson explaining that it's important to sustain the environment. After that, he condemns Obama's climate change plan for putting a high price tag on accomplishing almost nothing:




Jeff Adds: This editorial from Carroll seems like a rating searching for a quote. PolitiFact openly admits they select claims to rate partly based on what they find interesting.

In this case, it's easy to imagine Carroll wanting to highlight (in her view) the GOP's lax attitude toward the climate change issue and went fishing for a quote to use as a vehicle for her to express that view. That scenario would plausibly explain how she made the leap from Obama's explicit claim to the different (and invented) claim she rated.

This example highlights the selective nature of PolitiFact's body of work. Contrary to the myth that they're dispassionate researchers uncovering the truth of all claims, they're partisan actors promoting or ignoring narratives as they see fit.

Two Clinton fibs, two "Half True" ratings from PolitiFact

PolitiFact is too good to us.

Seriously. We don't have any formal agreement with PolitiFact binding them to produce horrible fact-checking in order to make sure we have stuff to write. They just do it anyway.

Case in point, co-editor Jeff D sent me an email about this item earlier today.

During the Democratic presidential debate on Feb. 4, 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said she waited until President Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement was finalized before passing judgment on it.

Try to wrap your head around PolitiFact's reasoning:

Did Clinton really withhold her support until the terms of the proposal had been finalized?

[...]

Speaking in Australia in 2012, Clinton hailed the deal as "setting the gold standard."

"This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field," Clinton said. "And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world's total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment."

First, Clinton condemned the deal after it was finalized. It doesn't even make sense to ask whether Clinton withheld her support for the deal until after it was finalized. She never supported it after it was finalized. PolitiFact's headline makes the same error:

The statement supposedly from Clinton in PolitiFact's headline is flatly false. Clinton endorsed the deal before negotiations were finalized. The "Half True" doesn't belong within 10 miles of PolitiFact's headline.

If Clinton said she did not pass judgment on the deal before it was finalized that is likewise false.

The only way Clinton can escape with a shred of truth on this one is if she was saying she did not condemn the deal until after it was finalized. The problem? That statement does nothing to address the concern in the question posed by debate moderator Chuck Todd (transcript via The New York Times, bold emphasis added):

TODD: Secretary Clinton, let me turn to the issue of trade. In the ’90s you supported NAFTA. But you opposed it when you ran for the president in 2008. As secretary of state, you supported TPP, and then — which, of course, is that trade agreement with a lot of Asian countries, but you now oppose it as you make your second bid for president.

If elected, should Democrats expect that once you’re in office you will then become supportive of these trade agreements again?

CLINTON: You know, Chuck, I’ve only had responsibility for voting for trade agreements as a senator. And I voted a multinational trade agreement when I was senator, the CAFTA agreement, because I did not believe it was in the best interests of the workers of America, of our incomes, and I opposed it.

I did hope that the TPP, negotiated by this administration, would put to rest a lot of the concerns that many people have expressed about trade agreements. And I said that I was holding out that hope that it would be the kind of trade agreement that I was looking for.

I waited until it had actually been negotiated because I did want to give the benefit of the doubt to the administration. Once I saw what the outcome was, I opposed it.

It looks to us (see particularly the second paragraph of Clinton's response) like Clinton tried to downplay the support she offered the deal when she was Secretary of State. She seems to say that she didn't really support the deal back then. Apparently she was just being being a good soldier for President Obama, leaving her free to oppose the deal after she left the administration.

So ... no flip-flop because she was just doing Obama's bidding? And endorsing the deal before it was finalized is simply giving the administration--of which she was a part!--the benefit of the doubt?

Clinton's answer doesn't make much sense to us. She offers a thin excuse for her flip-flop.

PolitiFact's fact check doesn't make sense, either. The claim from PolitiFact's headline is false but receives a "Half True" rating. And it doesn't correctly capture what Clinton was saying in the first place.

What Clinton actually said might have been half true. She did not condemn the deal until after it was finalized. Though that claim carries a healthy dollop of misdirection downplaying her apparently insincere early endorsement of the TPP.

And did Clinton condemn the deal privately within the administration? Did President Obama hear from Clinton what it would take for her to support the deal? Ask the question, debate moderators.

The Second Fib

 Wait, didn't we say something about a second fib rated "Half True"?

Yes. Yes, we did.

The fact check we discuss above--containing the first fib--was from C. Eugene Emery, Jr., recently added to the staff at PolitiFact National after leading fact-check efforts for PolitiFact's Rhode Island franchise.

It looks like Emery relied on an earlier PolitiFact fact check for his analysis. That article contains the second fib, and probably helped nudge Emery toward his interpretation of Clinton's 2016 debate comments.

In that Oct. 13, 2015 fact check, it looks like Clinton did say she had reserved judgment on the TPP while Secretary of State. But with the contradictory evidence available and included in its story, PolitiFact gifted Clinton with a "Half True" rating on her claim that while serving as Secretary of State she merely "hoped" the TPP was the type of deal she could support.

 Try to figure out which half was true from PolitiFact's conclusion:

Clinton said when she was secretary of state, she was reserving judgment but "hoped (the Trans-Pacific Partnership) would be the gold standard."

She’s twisting her 2012 remarks a bit. Clinton said, "This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements," which is a more confident claim than if she had said she "hoped" it would meet that standard. This is in contrast to more recent comments where Clinton said she had concerns about the deal and that she ultimately opposes it.

The statement is distorting her previous comments. We rate it Half True.

Hooray for objective standards in fact-checking?