On the eve of a House vote on two articles of impeachment, President Donald Trump sent a six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claiming the impeachment “represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power.”
We annotated the Dec. 17 letter, providing brief summaries and links to more information for statements that we have fact-checked before.
The president made several false and misleading statements about the impeachment process — for instance, claiming the whistleblower started a “hoax with a false report of the phone call that bears no relationship to the actual phone call that was made.” The whistleblower’s report on the call was accurate, and, in the words of Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire “in alignment with what was released” by the White House in a rough transcript of the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump also distorted the facts on several other topics, including immigration and his Electoral College victory. See our annotation for more.