This sentence appears an example of Brandolini's Law. The problematic phrases are "the White House" and "the" Democrats. I'll explain.
- It is one thing to cite a source that shows a politician making an incorrect statement. That's fair and important.
- It is quite another to claim that a group of people are knowingly spreading these incorrect facts. It is easy to claim <some group> is spreading lies without specifying (1) the members of the group involved; (2) the mechanism by which these people speak for the group; and (3) why one's definition of the group is reasonable in context. Not to mention (4) Why is this particular detail worth mentioning in isolation from the broader context?
- Perhaps most importantly, when someone writes (or speaks) (5) is that person writing (or speaking) in ways that maximize the desired interpretation? And good luck with that, given the realities of your audience's background knowledge, reading comprehension, attention span, and biases.
I'll posit an even more fundamental basis for Brandolini's Law that has nothing to do with intentional malice or deception: the imprecision of human language makes it inherently difficult to fact-check someone else's sentence, because one has to interpret the sentence before criticizing it. This leaves some room for the original author to deflect the criticism by saying "I didn't mean that" (and this might be genuine, fair, and reasonable!) ... but meanwhile no clarification was issued (seriously, WTF?, why aren't corrections better integrated in the source material?) and many people are still reading the original statement and interpreting it in some subjective way.
Sometimes I think it is amazing human societies function at all.