'Embarrassing': Critics pounce on Washington Post fact check over Trump-Kim 'love letters'

The Washington Post drew heavy criticism Tuesday for its fact check of the first night of the Democratic National Convention.

Democrats attacked Republican nominee Donald Trump throughout the evening, but many critics argued Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler tried to draw a false equivalency between the former president's lies and some of the statements made by speakers during Monday's event.

"Wow," said journalist Judd Legum. "The Washington Post 'fact check' of night 1 of the DNC is embarrassing."

Kessler rounded up 12 claims made from the stage in Chicago that he felt lacked context, but many readers felt that he focused too narrowly on specific words Trump had used and the implied meaning of those statements, as characterized by Democrats.

"This kind of 'fact-checking' is an artifact of the collision between Trump's politics of lying and elite media's business-model-driven bothsidesism," said Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall. "The two things are obviously categorically different. But the need to jam them into one model creates nonsense like this."

Critics were particularly concerned about Kessler's fact check of Hillary Clinton, who told the crowd that Kamala Harris "would not be sending love letters to dictators."

"There is no evidence that Trump sent such letters," Kessler wrote. "Clinton is making a bit of a leap to suggest that Trump has written “love letters” to dictators. Clinton appears to be referring to a 2018 comment from Trump about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un: 'We fell in love, okay? No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.'"

"That’s certainly an unusual statement, but he’s referring to letters written by Kim," Kessler added. "We do not know what Trump wrote to Kim — or other dictators, for that matter."

However, critics pointed out that the Washington Post's own Bob Woodward accessed the 27 Trump-Kim letters for his 2020 book and CNN published full transcripts from two of them, while Foreign Policy's Robert L. Carlin also accessed the communications and reported on their contents in 2021, as did South Korean journalists the following year.

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"Trump's 'love letters' comment was about Kim's letters to Trump, and much of the discourse (including the letters CNN published from Woodward) has been about the Kim [communications to] Trump," wrote Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. "But it is simply not true that 'we do not know what Trump wrote to Kim.'"

Kessler's colleague Amy Gardner also drew heavy criticism for parsing a statement made by President Joe Biden at the convention.

'"Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again," Biden said," Gardner wrote. "But that's not true. Trump just hasn't said that he would accept. And he previously said the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.'"

Critics felt the Washington Post correspondent was splitting hairs, pointing out that Trump had been indicted for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss based on his lies about election fraud.

"It is not healthy for our democracy that a large swathe of our political media has totally, completely, [and] utterly lost the plot," said Mark Copelovitch, a political science and public affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Gardner should know better than to take Trump at his word, according to other journalists.

"Amy Gardner was on the team that won a Pulitzer for their reporting on January 6th, so there is really no excuse for this," said Ashton Pittman, news editor for the Mississippi Free Press.