FactCheck.org's Weekly Update

In our final fact-checking video of the year with CNN’s “State of the Union,” Jake Tapper looks back at the “biggest whoppers” of 2019.

Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden claimed without evidence that “more people are coming home from Iraq with brain cancer” than “any other war,” and blamed burn pits for the purported increase. But existing statistics do not bear that out, and the evidence on the cancer risk of burn pits is inconclusive.

Hearst TV’s WCVB 5, in Boston, aired a segment on our annotation of President Donald Trump’s Dec. 17 letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the impeachment vote.

In this video, we explore several claims made by Democratic presidential candidates in the Dec. 19 debate.

Hearst TV’s WCVB 5, in Boston, aired a segment on our annotation of President Donald Trump’s Dec. 17 letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the impeachment vote.

We hope that once again we can count on your financial support in 2020 — a presidential election year that promises to be even more challenging for fact-checkers and voters.

We annotated President Donald Trump’s Dec. 17 letter to House Speaker Pelosi, providing brief summaries and links to more information for statements by the president that we have fact-checked before.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others have claimed the Democratic-controlled House has passed “more than 275 bipartisan bills” that are being blocked in the Republican-controlled Senate. But that list includes bills with as few as one Republican vote.

President Donald Trump wrongly claimed the Commission on Presidential Debates was “forced to publicly apologize for modulating” his microphone in the first 2016 general election debate.

A made-up story that claims four Democratic senators are switching their party affiliation because of the impeachment is circulating on Facebook. But the story originated on a site that describes its content as satire.

Misleading Facebook posts accuse former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg of “bribing” House Democrats by offering a donation “if they vote to impeach” President Donald Trump. In fact, Bloomberg is a major Democratic donor who has given to this committee before.

A bogus headline claims that a “second Democrat” has left the party “in 24 hours” because of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. But one of them is a state senator who left the party a month ago and his decision had nothing to do with the impeachment.

Memes spread on Facebook falsely purport to quote a passage about lying from President Donald Trump’s 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal.”

An outdated meme circulating on Facebook claims that Progressive, the insurance company, “is owned by Peter Lewis who donates millions” to the Democratic Party and left-leaning organizations. But Lewis died in 2013.

There’s no evidence for a meme that quotes President Donald Trump’s late mother as once making a disparaging remark about her son and predicting he would not do well in politics.

It was a less-crowded stage for a still-crowded field.

Our compilation of the most egregious falsehoods of the year.