Anti-immigration stories
In January 2019, the Washington Examiner published a story with the headline, "Border rancher: 'We've found prayer rugs out here. It's unreal'." Shortly thereafter, President Donald Trump cited the story as another justification for a border wall amid the 2018-2019 federal government shutdown. The story in question cited one anonymous rancher who offered no evidence of these Muslim prayer rugs, such as photos. The story provided no elaboration on how the rancher knew the rugs in question were Muslim prayer rugs. The author of the story formerly worked as press secretary for the anti-immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform. Stories of Muslim prayer rugs at the border are urban myths that have frequently popped up since at least 2005, but with no evidence to substantiate the claims.[16][17][18][19][20][21] The Examiner never issued a clarification or retracted the story.
In April 2019, Quartz reported that White House advisor Stephen Miller had been purposely leaking information on border apprehensions and asylum seekers to the Washington Examiner so that the paper would publish stories with alarming statistics that sometimes criticized DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, which he could then show to Trump and undermine her position. Nielsen was fired in April 2019 for reportedly not being sufficiently hawkish on immigration.[22][23]
Climate change
After the Climategate controversy, the Washington Examiner published an op-ed which said of climate science, "Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many government, corporate and media elites were taken in by propaganda that was based on such shoddy and dishonest evidence."[24] The allegations regarding the basis for the supposed[25] controversy were rapidly debunked.[25] The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged throughout the investigations.[26]
In 2017, the Washington Examiner editorial board supported President Trump's unilateral withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, which the Examiner editorial board described as "a big flashy set of empty promises... The Earth’s climate is changing, as it always has. And part of the reason it is changing is due to human activity. But those two facts are excuses neither for alarmism and reflexive, but ineffective action, nor for sacrificing sovereignty to give politicians a short-term buzz of fake virtue and green guerrillas another weapon with which to ambush democratic policymaking."[27][28]
On August 31, 2019, the Examiner published an editorial, titled "The great failure of the climate models", which claimed that overwhelmingly accepted climate models were not valid scientific tools. Scientists described the Washington Examiner op-ed as highly misleading, noting that there were numerous false assertions and cherry-picked data in the op-ed.[29]