WASHINGTON — Twitter for the first time added fact-check labels to a pair of tweets by U.S. President Donald Trump that boosted unsubstantiated claims about voting fraud on Tuesday, a move that comes as the social media network faces intense scrutiny of its handling of the president’s feed.

Twitter’s label does not directly declare the tweets false, but points anyone reading them to news reports that contradict the president’s assertions.

The action comes as the tech company faces rising pressure to crack down on the president’s Twitter account, which in recent days has posted a flurry of baseless tweets riling fears about widespread voter fraud and a series of posts stoking conspiracy theories about the death of a former staffer to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough when he served in Congress. Twitter said earlier Tuesday that it would not take down the tweets about the deceased staffer.

The two missives — in which Trump claimed earlier Tuesday without evidence that mail-in ballots in California are likely to be “substantially fraudulent” — now display a notice directing Twitter users to “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” The label links to a Twitter events page that notes that Trump’s claims “are unsubstantiated,” citing news outlets including CNN and the Washington Post, and adds, “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.”

Twitter spokesperson Katie Rosborough said in an email to POLITICO that the posts “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.” Rosborough confirmed it is the first time the company has added such a message to any Trump tweets.

The Trump campaign put out a statement calling the move evidence of “political bias.”

“We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters,” said Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale in the statement. “Partnering with the biased fake news media ‘fact checkers’ is only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility. There are many reasons the Trump campaign pulled all our advertising from Twitter months ago, and their clear political bias is one of them.“

In the case of the former Scarborough staffer, the widower of the woman called on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a letter last week to take down the president’s tweets which suggested falsely the MSNBC host was involved in her death. Twitter said in a statement that the company is “deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family.” But the company said it will not be removing the posts at this time.

Twitter has repeatedly taken heat for what critics see as a failure to enforce its policies against misinformation, targeted harassment and more against the commander-in-chief, who routinely assails the tech company over allegations it is biased against conservatives.

The company announced this month it is expanding its policy for labeling tweets to include posts related to Covid-19 that include “statements or assertions that have been confirmed to be false or misleading by subject-matter experts.” The company said last year it would begin labeling tweets by global leaders that may run afoul of its policies.

U.S. Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell is set to join U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign amid a broader shakeup that saw the promotion of two other campaign officials on Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The addition of Grenell, a trusted Trump ally who recently stepped down as acting director of national intelligence, comes as the president faces sliding poll numbers nationally and in a handful of key battleground states. A Fox News survey conducted May 17-20 found presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden defeating Trump 48 percent to 40 percent five months out from Election Day.

A person familiar with the move said Grenell will take a senior role inside the Trump campaign, where he will be involved in fundraising and strategy. It was not immediately clear what his title will be or whether he will work from the campaign’s Northern Virginia headquarters. Grenell was seen entering the White House Tuesday afternoon, shortly after the Trump campaign announced its promotion of senior political adviser Bill Stepien to serve as deputy campaign manager.

Grenell is the latest longtime Trump ally to be installed in a senior role that ensures deep involvement with the president’s reelection operation and communications strategy. Trump recently brought former White House communications director Hope Hicks back into the West Wing, and promoted his former body man John McEntee to head the Office of Presidential Personnel after he rejoined the administration last December.

“He wants to bring the band back together,” said a senior administration official familiar with Trump’s thinking.

Grenell, who is expected to step down as ambassador to Germany in a few weeks, has long been a forceful personality on Twitter — one of the president’s preferred platforms for taking on political opponents and communicating with supporters. His social media activity sometimes rankled diplomatic colleagues and career State Department officials, who worried about straining U.S. relations with Germany.

Grenell was a strong advocate of Trump’s nationalist policies, which at times didn’t play well with his German hosts. And during his short tenure as the nation’s top intelligence official, Grenell presided over a number of changes at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, including slightly reducing the size of the National Counterterrorism Center and having the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which is part of ODNI, take over election security briefings.

Grenell, who’s openly gay, also said that the Trump administration could potentially cut back on the sharing of intelligence with countries that have criminalized homosexuality and urged U.S. intelligence agencies to do a better job of preventing discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgender employees.

In 2012, Grenell briefly served as a spokesman for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign. He resigned under pressure from social conservative groups who were critical of the campaign’s employment of an openly gay man. Throughout his tenure in the Trump administration, he repeatedly denounced countries that continue to outlaw homosexuality and once met with European LGBTQ activists to discuss his push to decriminalize homosexuality abroad.

Grenell also served as a spokesman at the U.S. mission at the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration. Prior to joining the Trump administration, he worked in media and public affairs consulting.

Neither the Trump campaign nor Grenell immediately responded to requests for comment.

MILAN — Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the Italian region of Lombardy has made headlines for all the wrong reasons: overwhelmed hospitals, health care workers performing wartime-like triage, caretakers struggling to bury the dead.

The richest region in Italy, vaunted for its state-of-the-art health care system, has recorded more than 15,500 deaths within its borders since February 21 — half the number of total fatalities country-wide.

And now, as the country starts lifting lockdown restrictions, it still counts the highest number of cases per capita.

Why has the region performed so badly in comparison to others? The question of what went wrong — and continues to go wrong — in Lombardy has become a source of major political controversy and a potential stumbling block on the way to opening the entire country back up to a new normal.

Faced with mounting criticism, regional governor Attilio Fontana insists there is nothing he would have done differently.

“Those who irresponsibly celebrate nightlife are betraying the sacrifices made by millions of Italians.” — Francesco Boccia, Italy’s minister for regional affairs

“I got thrown into a hurricane that no one had prepared us for, and made choices aimed at securing our citizens’ health,” Fontana said in an interview.

“Unlike other places, we had an immediate exponential increase — after 10 days we had almost 1,000 positive cases, of which about half were hospitalized.”

The public health catastrophe and human tragedy that followed could not have been avoided, according to Fontana, a member of the far-right League party.

Critics disagree, saying a difficult situation was made worse by poor decision-making. In recent days, a series of political gaffes have exacerbated the lack of trust in the regional government’s abilities and increased fears that official incompetence could lead to a second wave of infections and undermine efforts to contain the virus elsewhere.

Over the weekend, the region’s health and welfare minister Giulio Gallera attracted widespread mockery after claiming in an interview that — with the virus’ reproduction rate now at 0.5 in Italy — a person would need to come into contact with two infected people at the same time to fall ill themselves. “It’s not that easy,” he said.

Gallera’s lack of understanding of the so-called R rate prompted a flurry of criticism on social media from people concerned that the official coordinating the region’s health response did not grasp the science behind the virus’ transmission.

On Sunday, Fontana added fuel to the fire when he announced there were no new COVID-19 deaths, but it later emerged his report was flawed as a result of a miscommunication between hospitals and regional authorities.

Meanwhile, images of the streets of Milan and other cities full of people flouting social distancing rules as they gathered outside bars and restaurants also drew condemnation.

“If this continues, we risk not being able to open the borders between regions,” Francesco Boccia, Italy’s minister for regional affairs, said in an interview with La Stampa.

“We must not forget that we are still in the COVID-19 pandemic, and those who irresponsibly celebrate nightlife are betraying the sacrifices made by millions of Italians.”

 * * *

There’s no easy answer for why Lombardy became a hotspot of the coronavirus in Italy. Some have pointed to factors that may have made it particularly vulnerable: It is densely populated (with more than 10 million inhabitants) and its high level of economic activity means residents — who also skew older than in the rest of the country — are exceptionally mobile.

Still, critics argue that the catastrophe that struck the region could have been avoided had it not been for errors of judgment, government incompetence and failures in the health care system.

The biggest mistake was Lombardy’s management of health care resources, said Massimo Galli, the head of the infectious diseases department of the Sacco hospital in Milan.

“All attention was focused on hospitals, which became breeding grounds for the virus, and primary care physicians were left behind without proper help to treat people at home,” he said. That meant that many people died at home without being tested, as the virus spread through families uncontroled.

Health care is a regional competency in Italy, meaning there is no unified system. In Lombardy, which has been governed for the past 25 years by either the far-right League or the center-right Forza Italia, authorities focused on building private health care institutions that deliver profitable services such as complex surgical operations and specialist treatments.

Less attention was paid to the broader public health system, which dealt with the unprofitable side of things: emergency services, general care and geriatrics.

Weakened by years of cuts and staff shortages, the public system was quickly overwhelmed by the treatment required for COVID-19 patients, which fell under “standard administration,” rather than specialized services offered at the region’s wealthy clinics.

To Stefania Carrara, whose stepfather died of COVID-19 in hospital in March, the region’s reputation for “excellence” in health care increasingly seems like a bad joke.

“We are so excellent that almost two months after Carlo’s death, I am the only one in my family that has had a serological test, and that’s thanks to my employer,” according to Carrara, who said that although everyone in her family fell ill, nobody was able to get tested for the virus.

In Bergamo, one of the cities hardest hit by the health crisis, a Facebook page for families of deceased COVID-19 patients called “Noi denunceremo” (“We will sue you”) garnered likes from some 54,000 people.

A lack of testing has been a persistent problem. In the region of Veneto, authorities were successful in slowing the spread of the virus by rolling out blanket testing, which enabled them to better trace infections.

Lombardy started at a disadvantage — with a higher population density and more initial cases than in Veneto — Galli conceded, but its lack of testing at the start of the epidemic had a substantial effect on the virus’ spread.

“The problem with the swab tests is that the government sent us 3.5 million, but it did not send the necessary chemicals to process them,” said Fontana.

The region has increased its number of laboratories able to process the tests from three to 45 since the start of the epidemic, according to Fontana. But even so, “it is not possible to process more than 15,000-16,000 a day, due to the lack of chemical supplies.”

 * * *

The dramatic course the virus took in Lombardy and the mixed messages coming from governor’s office has made people fearful of plans to reopen the region to economic activity.

“It hit us very hard here,” said Chiara Filicetti, who owns a bistro in Treviglio, a town in the province of Bergamo, one of the hardest hit parts of Lombardy. “Many of our customers have lost their parents and grandparents. We’re not in sunny skies yet.”

Milan, the region’s economic center, is eager to reopen, Giuseppe Sala, the city’s mayor said. He expects authorities to shed light on what happened in nursing homes and to issue clear guidance on swab tests and antibody tests in order to make sure the region can resume economic activity safely, he said.

People relax and have a drink by a canal in the Navigli district of Milan | Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images

The biggest mistake, according to Sala, was “an initial lack of clarity” that has to be corrected if the region is going to resume its activities along with the rest of Italy.

“It led to all of us, including myself, to underestimate the danger and created a lot of confusion, which helped fuel the pandemic.”

Fontana, in response to the criticism that followed images of people gathering in Milan, insisted he was ready to tighten the rules again if need be.

In the meantime, the rest of Italy is watching the region nervously. The southern regions, starting with Sicily and Sardinia, have pushed for a health passport for those who want to travel to the islands this summer, aimed mainly at tourists from northern Italy.

Unless numbers improve, people in Lombardy — along with residents of Piedmont and possibly Emilia-Romagna — also risk finding themselves confined to their home turf beyond June 3, when the government is set to allow travel between regions.

A postponed reopening would be yet another headache for the beleaguered local government, already straining under heavy criticism from residents increasingly worried about the future — and how they’ll rejoin the rest of Italy on its road to recovery.