MSNBC’s Craig Melvin spoke with Evangelical leader Franklin Graham this morning and asked him about the number of lies that Donald Trump tells.

Graham reflected on the legacy of his father Billy Graham and said, “I think his most important legacy, no question, is he was faithful to preaching the gospel.”

Melvin brought up a recent op-ed Graham wrote about the truth before noting that the most recent Washington Post tally of Trump’s false or misleading statements now stands at 8158. “How do you reconcile that?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t know how to reconcile that, because I don’t know,” Graham said. “You have a fact checker for the president, but I don’t know if you have a fact checker for the media at the same time.”

Melvin jumped in to say, “Pastor Graham, you and I both know that this president has said things over and over that aren’t true.”

“No, I don’t know that,” Graham responded. “I don’t sit around and try to find every fault in the president every day, looking for everything that he might have misspoken or mis-said. I don’t do that.”

Melvin again pressed him to acknowledge that Trump says “things that aren’t true.” Graham said the President misspeaks but he’s not “sitting there behind the desk trying to make up lies.”

Later in the hour, former GOP strategist Rick Tyler slammed Franklin for ignoring Trump’s lies.

“I call them lies,” Tyler explained. “In the beginning of the segment, he’s talking about objective truth and what he’s going to get people to believe about objective truth, that is Jesus is the savior of the world and died for our sins. That’s objective truth. At the same time he wants to make excuses about Donald Trump when we know Donald Trump has said things that are just demonstrably and provably false.”

“But there are things that Donald Trump has said over and over again that are just flat out wrong,” he concluded. “I don’t know whether Franklin is being willfully ignorant or is covering for the president but that undermines his message about objective truth.”

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