And that's just the VERY IMPORTANT, and probably mostly overlooked, first step to determining the truth.

Yep. I write about this quite a bit.

Truth is subjective since each of us can only know what we have encountered and experienced, and we don't know everything though some of us may be confused and think we do.

Facts are objective.

pass off an outright lie as a fact.

Facts truly are only the immutable information. The details that do not change with interpretation. People that are passing OFF facts that are not such and can be interpreted another way are not dealing in facts, but they are dealing in truths.

They pass off their truth as the only truth. To them at the time it is. If we are intelligent thinking people then our concept of the ultimate truth should be in constant flux and change as we encounter new information.

A lot of people do not know the difference between facts and truth and they try to treat them as synonyms. Some thesaurus may list them as synonyms but in reality they are not.

"stat" (statistic) and to then conclude the data that it presents as a fact

Nope though it may tie into probabilities. Most of what we do in life seems to be related into risk and probabilities in one way or another.