WASHINGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump made 26 false claims last week, including big lies about immigration, the Russia probe, and the New York Times.

Trump repeated some of his most frequent inaccurate statements about trade and the economy. He also made a bunch of new things up.

He claimed that there was a law forcing his administration to separate children from their parents at the border, and he suggested it was up to Democrats, not him, to change this law. (No such law exists. Separation is his own policy.)

He claimed that there was a “spy” “placed in” his campaign by the people investigating the campaign’s connections with Russia. (In fact, the FBI used an informant outside the campaign, a Republican professor, to make contact with campaign members.) He also claimed that the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, had confirmed that there was a spy in the campaign (Clapper had explicitly said this was not true).

And he claimed the New York Times had invented a “senior White House official” it quoted in a story on his North Korea policy. (The official gave a formal in-person briefing to reporters at the White House; the administration insisted that news outlets call him a “senior White House official”).

Trump is now up to 1,617 false claims for the first 493 days of his presidency, an average of 3.3 per day.

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? Click here for our detailed explanation. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not telling the truth.

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