CHRIS HAYES (HOST): Election officials around the country are of course still counting ballots as we speak and in the three weeks since Election Day, Hillary Clinton's popular vote margin has quietly grown to more than 2 million votes or about 1.7 percent. Still not finished counting. And that is not small, by historical standards. Adding up to a pretty extraordinary mismatch between the popular vote and the Electoral College. One unseen in 140 years. So Donald Trump, a man who measures success and ratings and poll numbers, seems to have opted to go with another set of facts entirely. Which brings us back to his tweet yesterday. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” That as I said is simply not true. There is no evidence to back up Trump's claim. Washington Post's Phillip Bump traced its origins back to a Texas conservative named Greg Phillips who tweeted three days after the election, “completed analysis of database of 180 million voter registrations. Number of non-citizen votes exceeds 3 million. Consulting legal team.” Huh. A fervent voter fraud activist, Phillips has yet to share any of his data. Nevertheless, his tweets got picked up by InfoWars. That's the website run by conspiracy theorist and fervent Trump ally Alex Jones, a 9/11 truther who believes that was an inside job and who also believes the Sandy Hook massacre was staged. From there, it went to the top of the Drudge Report. Even Drudge, we will note, was skeptical enough to label it a claim. Claim. Not a statement, of established fact. Good for Drudge. Now think about that trajectory for a second from some random guy's Twitter feed to a pronouncement by the soon to be most powerful person in the world.

Previously: 

Trump Lies That Millions Voted Illegally, And Mainstream Outlets Uncritically Echo Him

Trump's Fake Election Claims Came From Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones, But Media Aren't Reporting That

Alex Jones Says He “Personally Talked To” Trump And Encouraged Him To Push Rigged Election Conspiracy Theory