AP FACT CHECK: False claims flood Trump-Biden debate

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of fabrications and fear-mongering in a belligerent debate with Joe Biden, at one point claiming that the U.S. death toll would have been 10 times higher under the Democrat because he wanted open borders in the pandemic. A look at how some of their statements from Cleveland stack up with the facts in the first of three scheduled presidential debates for the Nov. 3 election: VIRUS DEATH TOLL TRUMP, addressing Biden on U.S. deaths from COVID-19: “If you were here, it wouldn’t be 200,000 people, it would be 2 million people. ___ HEALTH CARE TRUMP: “Drug prices will be coming down 80 or 90%.” THE FACTS: That’s a promise, not a reality, and it’s a big stretch. ___ VIRUS RESPONSE TRUMP: Dr. Anthony Fauci “said very strongly, ‘masks are not good.’ Then he changed his mind, he said, ‘masks, good.’” THE FACTS: He is skirting crucial context. Trump’s own FBI director, Chris Wray, said at a congressional hearing just last week that the bureau has not historically seen “any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.” Wray did acknowledge voter fraud at the local level “from time to time,” but even there, Trump appeared to paint an overly dire portrait of the reality and he misstated the facts of one particular case that received substantial attention last week following an unusual Justice Department announcement.