This essay is part of a series The New Yorker will be running through the election titled “Trump and the Truth.”

Last Friday, James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., sent a letter to Congress, updating testimony he gave in July about his agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was Secretary of State. “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”

It soon emerged that the e-mails in question had been found on a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman and estranged husband of Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin. The F.B.I. has been investigating allegations that Weiner exchanged text messages and photos with a fifteen-year-old girl. At the time that Comey sent his letter to Congress, the F.B.I. had yet to review the e-mails, and thus had no way of knowing whether they contained anything that would affect the Clinton case. (In July, Comey made public that the F.B.I. had expressed to the Department of Justice “our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.”) But the timing of the letter, so close to Election Day, and the room for interpretation left by Comey’s terseness, made the matter an immediate campaign story. The news reports that came out in the days that followed, many relying on information leaked from the F.B.I., filled in and complicated the picture. Donald Trump, meanwhile, took the story and did what he’s done so often on the campaign trail: he spun it, puffed it up, and lied about the facts. Below is a fact-checked collection of statements Trump has made in the past week about the story.

_Cedar Rapids, Iowa,_October 28th

Claim: “The F.B.I. would never have reopened this case at this time if it were not a most egregious criminal offense.”

In a memo to F.B.I. employees sent last Friday, Comey explained his rationale for sending his letter to Congress. “Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed,” Comey wrote. “I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression.” Contrary to Trump’s claims, when Comey sent his letter to lawmakers, the F.B.I. director had no way of knowing whether the e-mails in question would have any significance to the investigation, as the bureau had not yet reviewed them, as reported by Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff. Comey’s letter said nothing to suggest that the e-mails represented an “egregious criminal offense.”

Greeley, Colorado_,_ October 30th

**Claim: “Now the F.B.I. has found—you’re not going to believe this one, this just happened—another six hundred and fifty thousand e-mails. I think that’s called the mother lode. I think they found them all.” **

The figure of six hundred and fifty thousand comes from this Wall Street Journal story, published Sunday. It describes the apparent total number of e-mail files that F.B.I. agents found on a device belonging to Weiner. As with the above claim, there’s no way to know whether any of these e-mails will wind up being relevant to the F.B.I.’s investigation, and to suggest that all six hundred and fifty thousand are relevant to either Abedin or Clinton is misleading, at the very least.

_Golden, Colorado,_October 29th

Claim: “But they found by looking at Anthony Weiner, a major, major, major sleaze, they found what may be some of the thirty-three thousand missing and deleted e-mails.”

This is pure speculation. The F.B.I. hasn’t described the content or origin of the e-mails in question. This week, political leaders from both parties pressed Comey to release more specific information about them.

Trump here is referring to e-mails that Clinton’s lawyers identified as private in their 2014 review of the e-mails on her private server. To meet record-keeping requirements at the State Department, Clinton had to turn over any e-mails identified as work-related that were sent or received by her personal e-mail accounts. Clinton’s lawyers gave the State Department fifty-five thousand pages of e-mails and documents that they identified as work-related. But thirty-one thousand eight hundred and thirty e-mails were identified as private and not turned over—these were later also deleted.

The F.B.I., in the course of its subsequent investigation, uncovered fourteen thousand nine hundred e-mails that had not been among those turned over to the State Department. Comey has previously testified to Congress that thousands of the uncovered e-mails could potentially have been considered work-related, but that they had likely been deleted by Clinton in the normal use of her account, and therefore would not have been among the e-mails and documents her lawyers reviewed. The F.B.I. found no evidence that any work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted to conceal their content.

Golden, Colorado, October 29th

Claim: “Is she going to keep Huma? Huma’s been a problem, do we agree? I wonder if Huma’s going to stay there, and I hope they haven’t given Huma immunity, because it seemed that everybody who walked down the sidewalk got immunity. I hope they haven’t given her immunity because she knows the real story. She knows what’s going on.”

Abedin, a longtime aide to Clinton, has not been accused of any wrongdoing. According to a statement released by her lawyer Monday night, she learned of the existence of the e-mails in question through press accounts last week. There is no public evidence that the subject of “immunity” has been discussed with Abedin. As of Monday night, the F.B.I. had not contacted Abedin in connection with the new e-mails, according to her attorney, who said that she nevertheless planned to continue to be “forthcoming and cooperative.”

_Twitter,_October 30th

**Claim: “Wow, Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton. Very dishonest media!” **

Trump offered no evidence for his claim that tech companies are actively suppressing stories related to the investigation. Since the New York _Times _reported in March, 2015, that Clinton exclusively used a personal account as Secretary of State, the matter has been nothing short of a national media obsession. A Gallup Poll from August of last year asked seven hundred and fifty respondents what words came to mind when asked what they’d recently heard about Clinton. Words or phrases related to e-mail—“email stuff, email scandal, private emails”—were offered three hundred and twenty-nine times, crowding out policy subjects (the “economy” had four mentions; “gun control” had seven). A follow-up poll resulting in more than thirty thousand interviews conducted between June and September of this year found that the e-mail scandal consistently ranked No. 1 for what respondents had recently heard about Clinton, in eight out of the ten weeks surveyed.