The following is a fact-check of the August 1, 2010 episode of Meet the Press:

GOV. ED RENDELL (D-PA) | Less than 5% of Americans objected to the “deal” the government arranged with BP [to set up a $20 billion escrow fund to pay for the damage of the oil spill]. – LIKELY FALSE

GOV. RENDELL:  I think we hold the House.  We lose significant seats, but we hold.  And I think we hold the Senate only because the Republicans have made a slew of mistakes, PR mistakes like opposing unemployment compensation extension, like going after the president for the BP deal.  There weren’t 5 percent of Americans who didn’t think that was a good deal.

The deal Governor Rendell is referring to here is the $20 billion escrow fund that the Obama administration convinced BP to voluntarily establish to pay for damage done by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Governor however is already in trouble with the way he makes this statement, as not including “a poll says” or “about” means it’s automatically impossible to ever declare this (definitive) statement TRUE – but in addition to that we could find no data anywhere to back up his number. The only poll we could find that even asked about the $20 billion escro fund was this mid-June CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, in which 82% said they approved of the deal, and 18% said they did not.

While according to this one survey, a significant majority of Americans certainly do approve of the BP escrow deal, Gov. Rendell is still way off with his number, which as far as we can tell did not come from any poll. However, since we only found one poll on which to base this check and therefore cannot speak with much authority as to what percentage of Americans truly do disapprove of the BP escrow deal, we will rate Gov. Rendell’s statement LIKELY FALSE.

If any of our readers know of another poll on this issue that we somehow missed, please let us know in the comments.

This fact-check took a combined 1.5 hours.