- Presidents often end up on the Biggest Pinocchios
and President Biden earns three slots this year.
Things that Biden earned Pinocchios for
is, actually, something
that he had previously earned Pinocchio of the Year for,
which is claiming, falsely, that he had once been arrested.
This year, he said that he had been arrested
while getting on the porch of a Black couple
that was under protests.
- I did not walk in the shoes of generations of students
who walked these grounds.
But I walked other grounds!
Because I'm so damn old, I was there as well.
You think I'm kidding, man.
It seems like yesterday, the first time I got arrested.
Anyway.
- There's no evidence that this happened.
The other two come from the president's fuzzy math.
At one point, he said that the bill
he signed to bolster chip production in this country
would result in a million new construction jobs.
The report that he cited actually only said 6,000,
and even that might've been an exaggeration.
The other example is he claimed, in an op-ed,
that he had been told, by utility company executives,
that his plan would help fight inflation
and actually reduce utility costs $500
for the average American family.
First of all, he didn't hear that from utility executives.
The White House staff plucked it out of a report.
And then, on top of that, when you looked at the report,
it talked about $500 savings at the end of eight years,
which isn't going to help anyone with inflation now.
And then he said it was utility savings,
when, if you dug into the numbers in the report,
the utility savings was $5 at the end of eight years,
not $500.
So, there, he was off by a factor of just 100.
We awarded Biggest Pinocchios
for some of the crazy conspiracy theories about the president.
Tucker loves to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop.
It fit perfectly with his kind of pro-Russian narrative,
in terms of the war.
He peddled this totally ridiculous conspiracy theory
in which he said that Hunter Biden was responsible
for financing bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
Now, the United States government had provided
funding for biological research labs in Ukraine,
as well as other Eastern European countries.
They were not bioweapons labs.
In our article, we traced how there was a company
somewhat slightly associated with Hunter Biden,
but he had no role in it and the company had nothing to do,
except supply a couple of scientists
to these biological research labs.
Tucker kind of picked up Russian propaganda
that had been distributed and ran with it.
The Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy,
he went around saying that Merrick Garland
was deliberately targeting parents as terrorists.
- The other thing that comes with a new majority
is you're able to hold this administration accountable.
We're able to stand up to an attorney general
who goes after parents and calls them terrorists,
if they want to go to a school board meeting.
- Merrick Garland never said, at all,
that he was targeting parents as terrorists.
In fact, he told Congress
he couldn't even imagine such a thing.
But that didn't stop Kevin McCarthy
from repeating it over and over and over again.
Donald Trump earns a spot for the eighth straight year
for making the claim that a Trump supporter,
actually, Ray Epps, was actually like an FBI informant
who was egging people on
and was responsible for people breaching the US Capitol.
There's no evidence this is the case.
There's been testimony showing that Epps was trying
to calm people down, not egg them on,
and, yet, the president
took this conspiracy theory and ran with it,
in an effort to spread the narrative
that this was like an inside job,
and not something that he himself had inspired.
Mark Meadows, he earns a special Hypocrisy Award.
As a former White House chief of staff,
he was at the forefront of the election denialism.
He talked about how people were using mail-in ballots
and absentee ballots and moving around
without changing their voter registration.
We showed that Meadows was simultaneously registered
to vote in three states at once
and, in one of those states, North Carolina,
he actually lost his voter registration
because, it turned out, he had used a bogus address
to register to vote
and then used that registration to vote by absentee ballot
and he is currently under investigation
for election fraud.
It's not that I question him so much
as one of the biggest lies or biggest falsehoods,
but the hypocrisy there is astonishing,
and therefore, he wins a special mention in our list this year.