AP Fact Check: Trump's fact-challenged week over impeachment

WASHINGTON — Facing an impeachment inquiry, President Donald Trump is turning to a familiar playbook to defend himself: attacking his investigators , blasting the inquiry as illegal and deriding the process as all-but-rigged.

Many facts are getting lost in the process.

He repeatedly lambasted Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman who is leading the impeachment review, as guilty of treason or defamation for mocking Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Neither charge is valid.

Trump also assailed the whistleblower complaint as improperly filed and "dishonest," compared with a "word for word" transcript of the call. Actually, no exact transcript exists, and the acting director of national intelligence told Congress that he believed the whistleblower complaint was "in alignment" with a rough transcript released by the White House.

Trump had a similar playbook to dispute the Russia investigation by assailing special counsel Robert Mueller as biased and saying the inquiry was illegally hatched by Democrats. Those charges have been shown to be untrue.

Meanwhile, amid signs of a manufacturing weakness, Trump unfairly pointed a finger of blame at the Federal Reserve rather than his escalating trade war with China, and overstated his role in a World Trade Organization ruling for the United States.

-more-

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/factcheck/ap-fact-check-trumps-fact-challenged-week-over-impeachment/ar-AAIjGKX?li=BBnb7Kz