President Donald Trump's 10 biggest false claims in 2019 ? and one that finally became true

Other, smaller falsehoods still made headlines.Here are 10 baseless, misleading or confounding claims Trump made this year, and the facts — plus one oft-repeated claim that finally, in late October, became true.This claim is false, according to the unanimous assessment of the U.S. intelligence community and the former special counsel Robert Mueller, who spent two years investigating Russia's election interference effort.The Russian government, not Ukraine, interfered in the 2016 election "in sweeping and systematic fashion," the Mueller report concluded, working to boost Trump's bid while damaging his Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.Still, in both private and public remarks, as well as in the pivotal July 25 phone call with Ukraine's new president, Trump repeatedly pushed or referenced a conspiracy theory that Ukraine and the Democrats framed Russia for election meddling in an attempt to discredit his presidency.In that now-famous July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the same call in which Trump asked for investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Trump danced around the theory. Members of Trump's own administration, including former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Bossert, have said they tried to tell Trump this wasn't true.The conspiracy, which was first publicly posted on a far-right message board, 4chan, in March 2017, appears to be part of Trump's broader, yearslong effort to discredit Mueller's investigation and undercut the idea that a foreign government helped get him elected.In late 2019, Trump's unfounded fascination with Ukraine became inextricably tied to separate false claims about Biden, who is running to challenge him in the 2020 election, and featured heavily in the House's impeachment inquiry into whether Trump abused the power of his office by attempting to pressure a vulnerable ally into announcing investigations into the Bidens and Democrats that could boost his bid for re-election.During weeks of hearings over the course of the House's impeachment inquiry, members of the State Department, Defense Department and Trump's own administration testified again and again that Russia — not Ukraine, and not the former vice president — were the bad actors.Trump's former Russia expert, Fiona Hill, called the idea that Ukraine meddled in 2016 a "fictional narrative" promoted by Russian intelligence and rebuked House Republicans for using it to defend the president against impeachment. "I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia —attacked us in 2016."Trump has said he discussed political rival Biden with the president of Ukraine — a phone call at the heart of the intelligence community whistleblower's complaint that led to the launch of the formal impeachment proceedings in the House — for one reason: a desire to root out corruption.The former vice president, Trump said, wielded his influence to benefit his son Hunter’s private-sector work in Ukraine. While Obama administration officials raised concerns at the time about the appearance of a conflict of interest that Hunter Biden's work posed for the vice president, U.S. officials testified as part of the impeachment inquiry into Trump that there was no evidence Biden himself worked toward anything other than enacting U.S. policy.In September, news broke that an anonymous person within the intelligence community had filed a formal whistleblower complaint related to the president's dealings with Ukraine, including that July phone call with Zelenskiy, and that the Trump administration was withholding that complaint from Congress.By the end of the month, Congress had obtained the whistleblower's nine-page complaint, which the author wrote was lodged out of the belief that Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 election and detailed alleged actions by the president and other government officials to pressure Ukraine into opening politically advantageous investigations.This site is protected by recaptcha Privacy Policy | Terms of ServiceThe House Intelligence Committee, on Sept.