Coming off what may be a record week in the history of fact checking, Bernie goes for a blow out.

In less than a week, Sanders has garnered 10 pinocchios from the Washington Post and a ‘false’ and ‘mostly false’ from Politifact. In just 5 days.

But that wasn’t good enough for Sanders. He decided to continue the death spiral with more lies by surrogates, and a huge whopper today about being invited to the Vatican by the pope.

Sanders earlier on Friday said, “this is an invitation from the Vatican, from a pope that I have enormous respect for in term of the level of consciousness that he’s raising on the need to have morality in our economy.”

Turns out, the pope has nothing to do with the invitation. In fact, the President of the organization hosting the event hadn’t been contacted about the visit at all, and Sanders may actually have asked for the invitation:

“The president of the academy organizing this event has not been contacted with monumental discourtesy,” she said, referring to herself. Sanders “made the first move two or three days ago,” Archer said. “His use of it is clearly a pretext. There are just 20 academics and there will be nothing of policy relevance.”

The actual official who extended the invitation declined to say who made the first contact, Sanders or the Academy hosting the conference.

And the office of the Pope quickly issued a statement to set the record straight:

Father Federico Lombardi, the Pope’s spokesman, said Sanders had been invited “not by the pope but by the pontifical academy of social sciences.”

Getting desperate for a meaningful win, and wanting to make sure the donations keep pouring in, Sanders is flailing around to try and change the discussion about his losing campaign and litany of lies. Unfortunately, his solution is to make the lies bigger and more outrageous. Looks like a great way to run a presidency, doesn’t it? If you can lie about the Pope, lying about something like weapons of mass destruction would be child’s play.

Update:

Politico has more:

“How did this come about?” co-host Mika Brzezinski said of the invitation. “It was an invitation from the Vatican,” Sanders replied. But the invitation was actually made by Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the pontifical academy, an autonomous institution that receives some funding from the Holy See but is not officially part of it.

source: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-04-08/sanders-accused-of-discourtesy-in-seeking-vatican-invitation

4/7 Three Pinocchios : https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/07/sanderss-incorrect-claim-that-clinton-called-him-not-qualified-for-the-presidency/

4/6 False : http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr/06/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-has-released-few-tax-returns-compar/

4/5 Four Pinocchios : https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/05/bernie-sanderss-false-claim-that-he-has-released-his-full-federal-tax-returns/

4/4 Mostly False : http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr/04/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-says-wall-street-tax-would-pay-his-/

4/3 Three Pinocchios : https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/02/fact-checking-the-clinton-sanders-spat-over-big-oil-contributions/



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