"In your editorial 'The Election for Pennsylvania’s High Court' (Oct. 25), you state the fact that a court wrongly said mail-in ballots could be counted after Election Day. 'This didn’t matter,' you add..."

"'... because Mr. Biden won the state by 80,555, but the country is lucky the election wasn’t closer. If the election had hung on a few thousand Pennsylvanians, the next President might have been picked by the U.S. Supreme Court.' Well actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out. Here are just a few examples of how determinative the voter fraud in Pennsylvania was...." 

So begins Trump's letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal — which you can read in full with no pay wall. The letter is responding to the editorial, "The Election for Pennsylvania’s High Court/The court that roiled the 2020 campaign will get a new Justice on Nov. 2" (which is blocked by a paywall). 

Trump's letter consists almost entirely of a list of factual allegations, very specific numerical assertions (e.g., "39,911 people... were added to voter rolls while under 17 years of age").

One reaction to Trump's letter is to criticize the Wall Street Journal for publishing the letter without verifying all of the assertions. But verifying the assertions is an immense task, and the assertions are newsworthy as assertions. Given that the Journal had itself made an assertion — that the counting of the late mail-in ballots didn't matter — it needed to acknowledge that Trump (and millions of Americans) believe that it did matter and readers deserved to see why they think that.

The first criticism I read was "The 14 things you need to know about Trump’s letter in the Wall Street Journal" by Philip Bump in The Washington Post. From the headline, you might think you're going to get a point-by-point fact check, but that's not what this is. Bump's list begins with the assertion that "The Wall Street Journal should not have published it without assessing the claims and demonstrating where they were wrong, misleading or unimportant."

That's not a fact "you need to know," just an opinion about journalistic professionalism. Is there a general rule in journalism — a rule Bump's newspaper follows — that you don't publish accusations before you've independently checked them? If so, I see that rule broken every day. Maybe there's the idea that Trump's challenge to the 2020 election is a special case, because we need to be committed to the legitimacy of the current government and because there's too much discord and a decent newspaper shouldn't be roiling people up on this subject. 

But it seems to me the WSJ is merely saying here's Trump's letter, and that is rock-solid factually true. This is what our former President is saying. That's worth knowing, and it's not the WSJ keeping the issue alive. The WSJ tried to close it down in its too-neat assertion in the the Oct. 25 editorial. Once it did that, it was a matter of fairness to allow Trump to say, no, I don't think the court's decision didn't matter, and to allow him to back up his opinions with his version of the facts.

Bump's second "thing you need to know" is: "The Journal would have been better served had it explained why it chose to run the letter without contextualizing it, since that might have at least offered some clarity on the otherwise inexplicable decision, but it didn’t." 

Eh. I was able to work out the reason pretty easily. It's not the normal practice to load down letters to the editor with explanations. The letters respond to something that the newspaper published, and it's for readers to judge the value of the letter. 

Now that Trump's letter is published, it's time to do the point-by-point fact checking.