The biggest ongoing farce in television journalism is Corey Lewandowski’s continued employment by CNN as an opinion commentator. At least CNN has begun introducing Lewandowski every segment by pointing out that he is still getting paid by the Trump campaign. What they don’t say is that Lewandowski is also (almost certainly) contractually forbidden from criticizing Trump. So unlike Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh MacEnany or any of the other edgar suits who get put on TV to defend Trump, he’s not even theoretically free to criticize Trump if he thinks Trump has done something wrong.

So Lewandowski was on CNN today defending Trump’s remarks about the Khan family, as he is contractually required to do by the Trump campaign. During the course of doing so, Lewandowski told a lie so outrageous that not even Trump repeats it anymore:

Lewandowski: He’s on the record multiple, multiple, multiple times saying he’s against the war, unlike Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war. Okay? The bottom line is this: if Donald Trump would have been President, these troops would have never gone there because there was no vested interest in the United States to be there, Captain Khan would be alive today, as would 7,000 other U.S. Soldiers [crosstalk]

The truth is actually somewhat different from what Lewandowski said. In point of fact, Trump is on the record exactly zero times prior to the Iraq war saying that he opposed the war. He’s on the record roughly a million times claiming in 2015 and 2016 that he was against the Iraq War from the beginning, and claiming that he had said so a million times before the war started. However, news organizations did Lexis and other media searches and came up with absolutely bupkis, and so they went to the Trump campaign and asked for proof of this, and the Trump campaign – which at the time was headed by Lewandowski – was able to come up with nothing.

In fact, Trump finally got burned when audio surfaced of him supporting the Iraq War on the Howard Stern show in 2002. Since then, Trump has kind of shamefacedly ignored that he ever made claims to the contrary and stopped making this claim. But the factually-challenged Lewandowski marches on.