Founder of PolitiFact Bill Adair joined C-SPAN Washington Journal on Thursday to discuss his new book, “Beyond the Big Lie,” and was pressed on which political party in the U.S. actually lies more.

Host Pedro Echevarria played a clip of Adair in 2012 on the show, where the caller asked him: “Is it true that I recently read in Nation magazine that PolitiFact and your closest competitor generally traded the veracity of Republican statements against Democrats and that almost seven out of ten “Pants on Fire” or “Three Pinocchios” were given to Republicans, as were Democrats. Democrats lied almost as much, but there were far fewer lies. Isn’t that true?”

“You know, I can honestly say that I don’t keep any statistics,” Adair replied to the interlocutor at the time.

“You said the same thing in 2012. So fill in the rest,” Echevarria insisted.

“Well, I lied. We recorded the results, not by party, but we recorded them and continue to do so, as PolitiFact does, on an individual basis. So you could easily look through prominent Republicans and compare them to prominent Democrats and see that Brian was right,” Adair replied, adding:

But I lied and lied because I wanted to show that we were impartial. And that’s really important in Washington journalism, to show that it doesn’t take sides. The challenge with fact-checking is that it’s a pretty harsh form of journalism that calls for calls. And this is important. This is what political fact-checking is all about.

But as we do this, we see this unique pattern, and we’ll talk about that in a moment. However, I, like other fact-checkers, did not answer this question when asked this question during speeches and television appearances because I was trying to demonstrate my impartiality that we were truly impartial in what we did. And that continues to be PolitiFact’s core principle, that it treats both sides equally. Considers each statement individually. But this pattern is unmistakable.

And now that I’m no longer at PolitiFact and a professor at Duke, I can talk about it freely. And I think as a nation we need to talk about this because the fact that there are so many lies coming from Republicans really impacts our discourse.

Watch the clip above and the full episode here via C-SPAN.

Have a tip for us? [email protected]