Media fact checking is a relatively new phenomenon, but presidential misstatements, to put it politely, have a long history. Go back as far as you like and pick whichever party you’d prefer, and you’ll have plenty of obfuscations, omissions and creative spins on the facts to cite. But the Trump administration appears to be in a class by itself in this regard, at least in recent presidential history. While never quite admitting error, the White House has had to issue a number of clarifications and elaborations, on matters both serious and trivial. Here are a few of the occasions in 2017 when White House officials had trouble keeping their stories straight.

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The Comey firing

Former FBI Director James Comey at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on June 8. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP) More

President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on May 9, while Comey’s agency was investigating the Trump campaign for possible collusion with Russia. After hiding in the White House lawn bushes, then-press secretary Sean Spicer emerged to say that Comey had been fired on the recommendation of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Per Spicer, Rosenstein had looked into the job performance of Comey on his own before sending a letter to the White House criticizing the director’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton.

“It was all him,” Spicer said of Rosenstein, according to the Washington Post, as a reporter repeated his answer back to him. “That’s correct — I mean, I can’t, I guess I shouldn’t say that, thank you for the help on that one. No one from the White House. That was a [Department of Justice] decision.”

The next day White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders altered the story, stating that Trump had actually planned on firing Comey for a while but did so after Rosenstein’s letter. A day later, Trump contradicted his own administration, telling NBC News in an interview that he was going to fire Comey regardless of what Rosenstein had said.

“Oh, I was going to fire, regardless of recommendation,” Trump told Lester Holt. “He made a recommendation, he’s highly respected — very good guy, very smart guy. And the Democrats like him, Republicans like him. He made a recommendation, but regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.”

A week later Rosenstein told a group of senators that he knew Comey was going to be fired regardless of what he put in his memo, completing the walk-back of Spicer’s initial claim.

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The largest crowd

White House press secretary Sean Spicer at a news conference on Jan. 21. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP) More

Spicer did not have the strongest start to his time as press secretary. On Trump’s first full day as president, Spicer was dispatched by his boss to insist that the crowd the previous day was “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period.” Aerial photos of the event compared with both inaugurations for Barack Obama clearly showed otherwise, and the data — both in official estimates and in public transportation use — indicated the same. Trump called the National Park Service personally in order to find proof that his crowd size was larger, but none existed. The disagreement between the White House and the NPS led to a monthslong investigation by the agency’s inspector general, which found no improprieties in the Park Service actions.

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