On Aug. 29, the Washington Post scored a huge “scoop.”

It published a headline that read, “ U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question.”

The report claimed that the Bush-era practice of scrutinizing birth certificates issued by midwives near or around the southern border for fraud had taken on new life under President Trump.

The report claimed there was "a growing number of people" who were denied U.S. passports even though they had legitimate U.S. birth certificates. The Post detected, contrary to claims by the State Department, "a dramatic shift in both passport issuance and immigration enforcement."

The story reported that the Trump administration is “accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Latinos along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.”

The story was a sensation. Pundits, politicians, and members of the news press responded in righteous fury and anger. Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., even warned that immigration officials would " not be safe" because of their complicity in "illegal" deportation orders.

The story is garbage.

The central point of the Post's story was that Trump has increasingly denied U.S. citizens U.S. passports over concerns about birth certificate fraud. That premise is the exact opposite of the truth.

That number has actually declined under Trump compared to Obama.

“The number of denials steadily dropped, from a peak of 1,465 in 2015 to 971 last year. As of last month, the State Department appeared to be on pace to end 2018 with still fewer denials than last year. The total rejections in these cases since Trump took office number fewer than 1,600 ― not thousands," reported the Huffington Post’s Roque Planas, who did a great job debunking the Post’s viral story.

If you think this makes the Post piece look bad is bad, it gets much worse.

“The Post withheld key data, mischaracterized information and lobbed an allegation of fraud at a deceased doctor without speaking to his family members,” Planas added.

The Post, which began amending its story heavily after HuffPo started asking questions, has attached an extraordinarily lengthy editor’s note, which reads:



After this story was published on Aug. 29, the State Department issued a statement challenging the accuracy of the article and provided previously unreleased data on passport denials. That information has been added, as was indicated in a Sept. 1 editor’s note. On Sept. 13, the story was updated to include comments from the daughter of Jorge Treviño, who had contacted The Post immediately after the story was published. Additional changes have been made to clarify that an affidavit about Treviño was submitted as part of an Obama-era case and to correct a reference to his profession — he was a general practitioner, not a gynecologist. As was noted in an Aug. 31 correction, the State Department began denying passports during the George W. Bush administration, not the Obama administration.



The problems with the Post report go well beyond mere sloppiness or laziness. This looks like a political hit job. The facts were so dead wrong, and the behavior of withholding data was so egregious, that it's hard not to see this as intentional dishonesty. The Post didn’t add an editor’s note because new information came to light. It added the note because it got caught. This hit job is almost as lazy and dishonest as the New York Times’ smear last week against U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

Pro-media cheerleaders will no doubt clap one another on the back and say that this lengthy note is a great example of how media holds itself accountable. They would do better to focus on figuring out how these garbage reports make it to publication in the first place.