WaPo Slaps Biden With a Rare Fact-Checking Round-Up, and ‘A Bottomless Pinocchio’

President Joe Biden has been raising eyebrows with several misleading statements he has made in recent weeks.

And on Monday, in an unusual move, The Washington Post published a round-up of statements the president said and fact-checked them.

Glenn Kessler, the paper’s fact-checker, wrote, “Biden is a self-described ‘gaffe machine.’ That’s no excuse, of course, for a president making false or misleading statements.”

He explained readers had asked for a fact check for “a variety of recent Biden statements, but none of them seemed big enough for a stand-alone fact check.”

“We generally do not award Pinocchios for roundups like this — but for reasons that will become clear, we need to make an exception for the first one,” he added.

The first statement from Biden involved his claim that he traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Kessler noted the Post had already debunked that claim because there is “no evidence Biden traveled that much with Xi, the president of China — and even if we added up the miles Biden flew to see Xi, it still did not total 17,000 miles.”

“But it’s noteworthy because, despite our fact check and a White House admission that Biden’s line of ‘traveling with’ Xi was not accurate, with this comment, Biden had made the claim 20 times during his presidency,” he explained.

He also recalled the Post created the category of a “bottomless Pinocchio” during former President Donald Trump’s tenure for “false or misleading statements repeated so often that they became a form of propaganda.”

“A statement would get added to the list if it had earned a Three or Four Pinocchios rating and been repeated at least 20 times. By the end of the Trump presidency, 56 claims made by Trump had qualified,” the fact-checker continued. “Now Biden has earned his own Bottomless Pinocchio.”