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Posted: 2019-12-17T03:37:44Z | Updated: 2019-12-17T03:37:44Z

A lie from President Donald Trump has been crowned Lie of the Year for a historic third time.

PolitiFact , a nonprofit U.S. political fact-checking site, announced Monday that the award for 2019 goes to Trumps claim that the anonymous whistleblower reported his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky almost completely wrong. Trumps conduct and requests on that call are now at the heart of House Democrats impeachment inquiry.

Since the Sept. 26 release of the whistleblower complaint, the president has claimed more than 80 times that the complaint is fake, fraudulent, incorrect, total fiction, made up, and sooo wrong, PolitiFact reported.

Despite the presidents repeated insistence that the report was filled with lies, the anonymous whistleblower actually got the call almost completely right, the fact-checking sites managing editor, Katie Sanders, wrote.

We know this from the very record of the call the president released. We know this from testimony under oath from career diplomats and other officials. And the president and his allies have told reporters that Trump did what the whistleblower suggested urged the Ukrainian president to investigate political rival Joe Biden .

In a video announcement featuring the sites executive director, Aaron Sharockman, and Sanders, Sharockman explained that each December they selected the most significant falsehood of the calendar year.

This is something that... makes you angry, its kind of ridiculous, it threatens democracy, its something so significant that we want to reflect on it and hopefully avoid it in the future, he said.

Lie of the Year is the only time the site will use the word lie.

The distinction with the claim that receives the award is that it proves to be of genuine consequence and undermines an accurate narrative, Sanders explained.

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