This is the second time *this week* that MAGA Republican Tiffany Smiley’s ads have been fact-checked; KING 5: Smiley ad about ‘stadium full’ of IRS agents forcing families to pay for law degrees is false

ICYMI: MAGA Republican Tiffany Smiley called out for IRS lies

(Seattle, WA) — Tiffany Smiley is once again being called out for blatant lies in her TV ads, which are blanketing the airwaves in Washington state after Mitch McConnell dumped over a million dollars to boost Smiley’s campaign in the final days of the race. PolitiFact, a nonprofit, non-partisan fact-checking website, featured Tiffany Smiley as one of the Republican candidates this cycle running ads that openly mislead voters about fentanyl and the border.

This isn’t the first time this week Smiley’s overtly dishonest ads have been exposed — King 5 News recently ran a full fact check on a different one of Smiley’s ads, which claimed a “stadium full” of IRS agents are forcing families to pay for law degrees, an insane and verifiably false statement. (Read more from KING 5: Smiley ad about ‘stadium full’ of IRS agents forcing families to pay for law degrees is false)

And earlier this month, Smiley was featured in a CBS articledebunking the oft-repeated MAGA Republican talking point that 87,000 IRS agents are coming after American families; these claims have also been thoroughly debunked by Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, CNBC, the LA Times, and many other sources.

Read more from PolitiFact: Fentanyl deaths are up, but GOP ads mislead by blaming ‘open borders,’ migrants crossing illegally

  • Ads ahead of the Nov. 8 elections charge that President Joe Biden and other Democrats have “open border” policies that are responsible for the increased inflow of fentanyl and fatal overdoses.
  • The ads wrongly suggest that immigrants are the ones mainly responsible for transporting large quantities of the drug.
  • The claim that the U.S. has “open borders” also ignores that there are about 20,000 Border Patrol agents, most stationed at the southwest border to enforce immigration laws. It also dismisses the existence of border barriers, surveillance technology and other tools to limit who, and what, comes into the United States.
  • Experts say that the vast majority of the fentanyl is not brought into the country by immigrants crossing the border in between ports of entry, but by drug traffic organizations smuggling it through legal checkpoints.
  • In the Washington U.S. Senate race, which campaign watchers say favors Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, Republican challenger Tiffany Smiley claimed in a TV ad that fentanyl is killing kids in Washington because Murray “kept our borders open and defunded our police.”
  • The attack ads suggest that the Mexico border is completely open for entry into the U.S. and give the impression that Biden has directed Border Patrol agents to stop guarding the border. That’s not so.
  • Experts said the inflow of illegal fentanyl and fatal fentanyl overdoses continues to be major problems, but they didn’t attribute it to Biden administration policies. 
###