Just hours after the release of a special counsel’s report on a document-retention case, President Joe Biden called a prime-time press conference to applaud the counsel’s decision not to prosecute him and to rebut the report’s suggestion that aging has left him with “a poor memory.”
Biden said media reports were misrepresenting the special counsel’s conclusion.
“I’ve seen headlines since the report was released about my willful retention of documents,” he said Feb. 8. “This … assertion is not only misleading but just plain wrong.”
What the special counsel found is more complicated than Biden described.
Yes, Special Counsel Robert Hur decided against pursuing criminal charges. However, the report states clearly that the special counsel found evidence that Biden did willfully retain classified documents. The decision not to prosecute was based on how likely it was that Biden could win over enough jurors to be found not guilty at trial.
What the report said about Biden’s “willful retention”
The special counsel’s report is worded carefully.
Near the top of the executive summary, the report said the investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”
The executive summary specifies two categories of material at issue: classified documents about Afghanistan and handwritten notebooks that included references to sensitive intelligence sources and methods. The FBI found these materials in the garage, offices and basement den of Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.
“There is evidence that when Mr. Biden left office in 2017, he willfully retained his classified notebooks — that is, he knew he kept classified information in notebooks stored in his house and he knew he was not allowed to do so,” the report said. “There is also evidence that Mr. Biden willfully disclosed classified information in his notebooks to his ghostwriter by reading it aloud to him.”
Biden’s actions, the report said, “risked serious damage to America’s national security.”
This portion of the report suggests the special counsel team believed Biden had committed a crime. But the special counsel was tasked not just with finding facts, but with deciding whether at least one charge should be prosecuted in court.
Why the special counsel decided not to prosecute
Ultimately, Hur decided that Biden’s defenses would likely be enough to convince one or more jurors that he didn’t commit a crime, dooming the required unanimous verdict for a conviction.
This type of prosecutorial decision is akin to a risk-benefit analysis, based on prosecutors’ experience with how juries will respond at trial to certain types of evidence.
“If the quantum of evidence doesn’t meet that standard, you decline to prosecute,” said Joan Meyer, a partner at the law firm Thompson Hine LLP. “No one wants a high-profile loss in court.”
The special counsel report noted several defenses that Biden could make that would make it hard to reach a unanimous guilty verdict. These included Biden’s consistent cooperation with the special counsel’s investigation, which a jury might interpret as an innocent man’s actions, to his forgetfulness, an issue on which Biden vigorously countered at his press conference.
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” the report said.
The special counsel also factored into its prosecution decision that at least one former president, Ronald Reagan, also took home diaries that likely included classified information and was not prosecuted for it.
A potential Biden defense could also note that the special counsel cleared Biden of wrongdoing for other sets of documents at the University of Pennsylvania and other parts of Biden’s Delaware home.
In addition, the special counsel on several occasions acknowledges a “shortage of evidence” even as he lays out details about the handling of the Afghanistan documents, which comprise the most serious legal threat to Biden in the report. If the case had gone to trial, the use of this language in the report could have helped Biden.
Collectively, these potential defense arguments would make it hard for prosecutors to make a jury agree unanimously that Biden was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the standard for a criminal trial conviction.
White House spokesperson Ian Sams, in a Feb. 9 press conference, seemed to acknowledge the fine distinctions by saying the special counsel concluded that “there was no case.” This places the focus on the prosecutorial decision rather than a question of guilt or innocence.
The special counsel “reached the inevitable conclusion based on the facts and the evidence that there was no case here,” Sams said. “And this is important to think about in context of how this report is being viewed and by many of you being covered. This is the first special counsel investigation ever that hasn’t indicted anyone. Every theory was explored. But the facts and the evidence disputed though the decision was that there was no case to be made.”
How do we define “innocent” and “guilty”?
In the legal system, it’s common for people to hover between innocence and guilt, said Ric Simmons, an Ohio State University law professor.
Consider a defendant who is arrested while holding an illegal handgun. Say a court eventually ruled that the police search violated the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable government searches and seizures. If that happened, there would be a good chance the prosecution would forgo a trial for lack of evidence.
Or consider an impoverished mother who steals baby food to feed her child. Given the defendant’s backstory, “no jury would convict,” Simmons said.
“The best way to think about these cases is that the individual is factually guilty — there is sufficient evidence to prove to an objective evaluator that the defendant committed all the elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt — but that they are not and never will be legally guilty,” Simmons said.
In Biden’s case, the special counsel appears to believe Biden is factually guilty even if he isn’t confident it could prove at trial that Biden is legally guilty.
“Whether Biden did or did not willfully retain and disclose classified documents is at this point a disputed issue of fact,” Simmons said. “The special counsel says he did. Biden says he did not. One of them is wrong, and unless this is proven in court one way or the other, or Biden ultimately admits to the willfulness, we will never know for sure which of them is wrong.”
Biden stopped short of using the word “exonerate,” a word his predecessor and likely 2024 presidential race rival, Donald Trump, used to describe the report of a different special counsel, Robert Mueller, in an investigation of connections between Trump and Russia.
If Biden meant to imply that he’s been exonerated, that would go too far, Meyer said.
“The report did not exonerate Biden,” she said. “It found that he used sloppy procedures to handle classified materials and that he retained them, most importantly the handwritten notebooks of his vice presidency, to write a book.”
News broke that King Charles III had cancer. In next to no time, social media users started claiming it was all a ruse to promote a new mRNA cancer therapy in the United Kingdom.
“King Charles diagnosed with cancer, look at the timing of this. The first UK patients have received a mRNA cancer jab same poison used for Covid,” read the text in a Feb. 8 Instagram post. “Watch them announce that King Charles has received the new mRNA cancer then announce (it’s) a success.”
(Screenshot from Instagram)
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
First, mRNA — also called messenger RNA — is used as a technology in vaccines. It is not a poison. mRNA vaccines use genetic code to teach cells to create proteins similar to those present in viruses, according to an explainer from Penn Medicine, where the technology was first invented. These proteins then prompt immune systems to create antibodies against those viruses. This technology was used to develop COVID-19 vaccines and is also being used to develop vaccines for diseases like herpes, HIV and cancer.
The photo in the post appears to be a screenshot of a Feb. 5 X post. The post included images of other X posts and articles, including ones originally published by the Telegraph and the U.K. Department of Health and Social Care.
Buckingham Palace announced King Charles’ cancer diagnosis on Feb. 5. A day before, media reported that a new cancer treatment using mRNA was administered to the first U.K. patients, in a phase 1/2 clinical trial called “Mobilize.” The Telegraph article shown in the X post was about the same trial.
But the first trial participant in the U.K. received the vaccine in October 2023, months before King Charles’ cancer diagnosis was revealed. The treatment was developed by Moderna, which announced the mRNA-4359 development program in February 2022.
U.K. Health and Social Care Secretary Victoria Atkins posted on X Feb. 4, welcoming the vaccine trial “as we mark #WorldCancerDay.”
The trial seeks to test if the therapy is safe and tolerated by patients with solid tumor cancer, whether by itself or in combination with a cancer drug called pembrolizumab. Researchers are also investigating this combination’s potential in shrinking tumors. It is being conducted in several locations around the globe, including the U.S., Australia and Spain. The trial dates are from August 2022 to December 2027.
The treatment uses messenger RNA to introduce markers from tumors to the immune system, so it can recognize and defend the body against cancer cells expressing those markers.
Dr. David Pinato, a clinician scientist at Imperial College London’s department of surgery and cancer, said the research is still in the early stages and it may take years for it to be available to patients.
We reached out to members of the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust about the claim but have not heard back.
The second article shown in the X post was from a Department of Health and Social Care press release published Jan. 6, 2023, more than a year before King Charles’ cancer diagnosis was announced. The press release was about an agreement between the government and BioNTech for early access to trials on personalized mRNA therapies, such as cancer vaccines.
King Charles’ cancer diagnosis was not announced just as the first patients in the U.K. received a new mRNA cancer jab, and there’s no evidence they are linked. We rate that claim False.
In a Feb. 8 press conference responding to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s classified documents report, President Joe Biden made misleading and inaccurate statements about the documents — including how documents were stored in lockable cabinets in his home and who the material was shared with — points the report contradicts.
Here are Biden’s statements and what the special counsel reported.
“All the stuff that was in my home was in filing cabinets that were either locked or able to be locked.”
Although the report includes photos showing that some of the recovered classified materials were in filing cabinets, Biden’s claim that they “all” were is incorrect and does not match the details of the special counsel’s report.
The report said investigators found classified documents from 2009 stored in a “badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus,” such as a collapsed dog crate, a broken map and potting soil in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home. The documents, which were related to U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan, had classification markings “up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level,” one of the highest levels of classification.
The report includes photos of the cardboard box that it said contained “numerous hanging folders, file folders, and binders” and was “in a mangled state with ripped corners and two top flaps torn off.”
Image of box containing classified documents in Biden’s Delaware garage, taken Dec. 21, 2022, from page 128 of Special Counsel report
A Feb. 5 letter to Hur from the White House counsel that was appended to the released report acknowledged how the documents in the garage were stored: “The evidence shows that this tattered box contained a random assortment of documents, including plainly unimportant ones.” The letter did not rebut the presence of the classified documents but pushed back on the report’s characterization that the box contained materials of “great personal significance.”
Classified materials from the 1970s, when Biden was a senator, also were found in boxes in a garage closet of his Delaware home.
The report said notebooks Biden kept while serving as vice president were found in other parts of the home, such as in “unlocked drawers in the office and basement den.”
Some of the notebooks were in file cabinets, photographs show, but whether the cabinets were “able to be locked,” as Biden said, was not addressed. The report describes the place where the notebooks were found as “unlocked drawers.” The notebooks contained classified information — sometimes on classified subjects, such as the President’s Daily Brief — and in other instances, the notes themselves were classified.
When questioned about Biden’s locked cabinets claim in a Feb. 9 press briefing, White House Counsel spokesperson Ian Sams said, “I think the president was replying to a number of inaccurate allegations in this report.”
“I did not share classified information … with my ghostwriter, I did not. Guarantee you, did not.”
Biden repeatedly told reporters this about his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, who worked on Biden’s 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” When a reporter countered that the special counsel said he had, Biden cut him off: “Well, no, he did not say that. He did not say that.”
Hur did say that. The report said Biden shared classified information with Zwontizer from notes he’d taken related to classified subjects such as the President’s Daily Brief and National Security Council meetings. Hur said no classified material appeared in Biden’s book.
The special counsel wrote that there’s evidence Biden knew the notebooks contained classified material, as he “sometimes skipped over notebook passages to avoid reading classified information,” when reading entries aloud during meetings with Zwontizer.
Hur said Biden read to Zwontizer from classified entries “nearly verbatim” on at least three occasions, sometimes for an hour or more, but said evidence didn’t show that Biden knew the passages were classified or that he intended to share classified information.
The report said after Zwonitzer learned of the investigation, he deleted audio recordings of his conversations with Biden. However, Zwonitzer turned over to the FBI his laptop computer and external hard drive and consented to a search. FBI technicians were able to recover deleted recordings.
The report says Biden kept a handwritten memo he sent to former President Barack Obama over Thanksgiving in 2009 and mentioned it to Zwonitzer.
“In a recorded conversation with his ghostwriter in February 2017, about a month after he left office, Mr. Biden said, while referring to his 2009 Thanksgiving memo, that he had ‘just found all the classified stuff downstairs,’” the report stated. The report doesn’t say that Biden gave Zwonitzer physical custody of the material.
In his press conference, Biden didn’t address the classified material that he read to Zwontizer from his notebooks, but was adamant that the Obama memo didn’t include classified material. He said he should have instead used the word “sensitive” or “private” to describe it when talking to Zwonitzer.
“The fact of the matter is, what I didn’t want repeated, I didn’t want him to know and I didn’t read it to him, was I had written a long memorandum to President Obama why we should not be in … in Afghanistan,” Biden told reporters. “And I was — it was multiple pages. And so, what I was referring to, I said classified, I should have said it was — should be private because it was a contact between a president and a vice president as to what was going on. That’s what he’s referring to. It was not classified information in that document. That was not classified.”
During the press briefing, Sams, the White House counsel spokesperson, characterized the Obama memo as Biden’s “own personal writings” that Biden was sharing with Zwontizer for the memoir.
“I’ve seen headlines since the report was released about my willful retention of documents. This … assertion is not only misleading but just plain wrong.”
This is more complicated than Biden described.
Hur’s report says the investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”
It cites two categories of material: classified documents about Afghanistan, and handwritten notebooks that included references to sensitive intelligence sources and methods. Biden’s actions, the report said, “risked serious damage to America’s national security.”
This portion of the report suggests that the special counsel team believed Biden had committed a crime. But the special counsel was tasked not only with finding facts, but also with deciding whether at least one charge should be prosecuted in court.
In this case, the special counsel decided against prosecution, figuring that Biden could win over enough jurors to be found not guilty at trial, dooming the unanimous verdict required for a conviction.
Read the whole story about willful retention of documents.
“None of it was high classified. It didn’t have any of that red stuff on it, you know what I mean, around the corners? None of that.”
We rate Biden’s claim False.
Intelligence experts told PolitiFact that there is no legal definition for information that is highly or “high classified.” However, the special counsel report details that multiple Biden documents included classification markers for “top secret,” the highest of the three classification levels.
An expert in national security cases said Biden’s claim about “red stuff” around the corners probably referred to cover pages often put on top of classified documents to signal that classified materials are inside. It’s unclear whether the special counsel found documents with these cover sheets. But experts clarified that not every document has a cover sheet.
PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson and Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this report.
RELATED: Biden won’t be charged in classified documents case, but special counsel report questions his memory
Since President Joe Biden took office, the economy has added nearly 14.8 million jobs, 5.4 million more than the pre-pandemic peak in early 2020. All told, it’s an average monthly job growth of more than 400,000. But Biden misleadingly contrasts that with a loss of jobs under former President Donald Trump — a loss that occurred because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Employment under Trump was positive until the economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April 2020, as efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus led to business closures and layoffs. By the time Trump left office in January 2021, employment had partly rebounded, but was still 9.4 million jobs below the February 2020 peak, according to the official figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In a Feb. 3 post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Biden said, “The last guy had the worst jobs record since the Great Depression,” including a chart that showed a monthly average loss of 57,000 jobs under Trump. “Our record is a little different,” Biden boasted, with his graphic revealing a monthly average growth of 409,000 jobs under his presidency. (We actually calculate the average at 411,000.)
The chart also shows monthly job growth under Biden is significantly higher than that under other presidents, going back to Ronald Reagan. The closest president to Biden is Bill Clinton, with 239,000 average monthly job growth during his two terms in office.
It’s no surprise that Biden is touting the robust job numbers on his watch — any president would. But the comparison with Trump is missing some glaringly obvious context. The average monthly job growth under Trump was 180,000 per month before the pandemic hit. We can’t predict what would have happened if not for the pandemic, but the circumstances were highly unusual.
The comparison in Biden’s chart is “unfair,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist, president of the “center-right” American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, told us, noting the more than 20 million jobs lost in April 2020. “That’s 10 times more than we have ever lost in a single month.” That wasn’t “Trump’s fault.”
The country gained nearly 3 million jobs back in May 2020. “Trump didn’t do anything special,” said Holtz-Eakin, who was an adviser to the late Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “We started to recover. … We especially recovered in 2021 when Biden happened to take office,” a recovery that “was going to happen no matter who became president.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, whose work has often been cited by the White House, told us Biden deserved “significant credit” for the strong job performance. “I think it is fair to say that job market recovery from the pandemic under President Biden has been astounding, and significantly better than anticipated when he took office.”
Zandi pointed to the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief measure signed into law by Biden in March 2021. “Without that massive fiscal support, it would have take much longer for the economy to fully recover,” Zandi said, citing a February 2022 Moody’s report that estimated it would have taken an additional year to recover the jobs lost because of the pandemic without the ARP.
By June 2022, employment hit and slightly surpassed the pre-pandemic peak. Since then, the job growth under Biden has been an average of 282,000 per month — that’s still 100,000 more than the pre-pandemic average under Trump.
Biden’s chart, titled “Jobs Created by President,” also leaves the misleading impression that presidents are responsible for all the job creation, or loss, during their time in office. But there are many economic factors outside the control of a president (see: COVID-19).
“Presidents deserve very little credit, and presidents typically deserve very little blame” for the employment figures on their watch, Holtz-Eakin said. But the “standard practice” is to attribute such measures to the president, something presidential candidates have to accept.
One other issue with Biden’s chart: Looking at the percentage job growth, rather than the raw numbers as the chart does, would account for population growth. And by percentage of job growth, Clinton’s 20.9% growth, over two terms, is well ahead of Biden’s 10.3% so far.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin voiced numerous unsubstantiated and conspiratorial views during his sprawling conversation with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Carlson, who promoted the interview as an antidote to what he described as “corrupt” media, offered little pushback.
Over two hours and six minutes, Carlson provided Putin a platform to push baseless narratives — at times assisting with the effort.
When Carlson asked Putin who was responsible for blowing up Nord Stream, the natural gas pipeline network that runs from Russia to Europe, Putin blamed the U.S. for the 2022 incident — and Carlson appeared to concur. Unmentioned: No state has taken responsibility for the blasts, which were ruled deliberate.
At moments, it seemed Carlson was gearing up to challenge Putin, but he ended up conceding the point.
Carlson asked Putin whether Russia would release Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, 32, who has been held for close to a year on espionage charges stemming from a reporting trip in Russia. “The guy’s obviously not a spy,” Carlson said before offering, “Maybe he was breaking your law in some way, but he’s not a super spy, and everybody knows that.” Putin responded by insisting otherwise. “He’s not just a journalist,” Putin said before the line of questioning ended.
Unmentioned: The U.S. State Department, The Wall Street Journal and the Committee to Protect Journalists insist Gershkovich is being wrongly held. The Wall Street Journal responded that the attempts to portray Gershkovich as anything but a journalist were “total fiction.”
With Putin signaling to Tucker Carlson that he is open to a prisoner exchange that would free Evan Gershkovich, the @WSJ has issued this new statement: pic.twitter.com/mwqBYFHIvN
Carlson’s rhetoric has been increasingly Russia friendly in recent years, with Carlson questioning the United States’ support for Ukraine following Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion and pushing Kremlin propaganda about the war. Carlson’s remarks have been broadcast by Russian state media on multiple occasions.
Carlson didn’t fact-check Putin, so we did. Here are three conspiracy theories Putin shared:
Putin’s claim that ‘Ukraine is an artificial state’
Putin began the interview with a 30-minute near filibuster detailing the history of Russia and Ukraine by going back centuries. “Ukraine is an artificial state that was shaped at Stalin’s will,” Putin said, referring to former Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin.
We’ve heard this from Putin before. What’s now Ukraine, he argued, was part of Russian territory as far back as the ninth century. In the interview, he said the Ukrainian state was established as part of the Soviet Union in 1922, and had never existed before then. After World War II, Ukraine was given land, including from Poland, Hungary and Romania, to which it had no historical claim, he said.
Putin’s historical view is inaccurate and one-sided, historians told PolitiFact in 2022 after Putin launched the Ukraine war with a similar argument. Territory in Ukraine has been controlled by several countries or empires for hundreds of years before Russia gained hold.
“Putin’s aggression in Ukraine is justified through grievous historical distortions that conflate the Rus’ state, founded in the ninth century in Kyiv, with the Russian state, which only began to take shape in Moscow several hundreds of years later,” said Faith Hillis, a University of Chicago history professor.
Putin presents the Rus’ territory as Russia’s “primordial heritage” from more than 1,000 years ago, Hillis said.
“This distorted view of history is not Putin’s invention,” Hillis said. “It is a rehashing of a narrative crafted by conservative defenders of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century.”
Richard Arnold, a Muskingum University political science professor, said Putin’s reference to an “artificial state” may have something to do with the Soviet Theory of Ethnos, which holds that ethnic groups “were objective and natural, created in part by solar rays determining the abundance of crops in certain areas of the globe, and that the groups had a consciousness.”
“Putin probably believes Ukraine is not a sufficiently ancient nation to be a ‘real’ ethnos, a ‘real’ nation,” Arnold said. “We can decide ourselves how scientifically rigorous such a concept is, which, if applied to the U.S., would suggest it is really a British nation.”
Regardless of Putin’s theory, Arnold said, there were Ukrainian intellectuals in the 19th century who adopted nationalist language when discussing their country.
Erik Herron, a West Virginia University political science professor, said the origins of Ukrainian statehood are complicated and have long been debated, but documented references to Ukraine are centuries old.
“Regardless of when a formal Ukrainian state emerged, it was not ‘shaped at Stalin’s will,’ and the foundations for it were built over centuries through the development of a unique national identity,” Herron said.
In this photo the Sputnik news agency released Feb. 9, 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking during an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Feb. 6, 2024. (Sputnik, via AP)
Putin’s claim that Russia is pursuing ‘denazification’ in Ukraine
Putin has justified his invasion of Ukraine by claiming that Russia seeks to “denazify” Ukraine. During the interview, Carlson asked whether Putin had achieved the goals he had when he invaded Ukraine.
“No,” Putin replied. “We haven’t achieved our aims yet because one of them is denazification. This means the prohibition of all kinds of neo-Nazi movements.”
There’s no evidence Ukraine is a Nazi state. This falsehood has been fact-checked by experts and news organizations, including PolitiFact. Historians who study genocides and the Holocaust decried Putin’s narrative as “factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive.”
Zelenskyy is Jewish and lost family in the Holocaust.
Neo-Nazi groups exist in Ukraine — as they do in the U.S. and Russia — but Putin overstates their power. In 2014, the white-supremicist-led Azov battalion played a key role in fighting Russian separatists, and the battalion received appreciation from some within the Ukrainian government, but experts say it represents a small portion of Ukraine’s military, PolitiFact reported in 2022.
The U.S. State Department has said Putin exploits a grain of truth to “manipulate international public opinion by drawing false parallels between Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine and the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany.”
John Herbst, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, pointed to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll that found Ukraine was among the European countries with the highest percentage of people who expressed “favorable views” of Jews.
“If Ukraine was a hotbed of Nazis, then presumably antisemitism is going to be a disproportionately large problem,” Herbst said, adding that before Zelenskyy, Ukraine had a Jewish prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman.
A woman cries in front of a house damaged during Russian shelling in the town of Vyshgorod near Kyiv, Ukraine, on Nov. 24, 2022. (AP)
The claim that the U.S. is run by a shadow government, not elected leaders
With Carlson’s prompting, Putin also argued that the U.S. isn’t being run by its elected officials.
“Twice you’ve described U.S. presidents making decisions and then being undercut by their agency heads,” Carlson summarized. “So it sounds like you’re describing a system that’s not run by the people who are elected, in your telling.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” Putin said.
PolitiFact has repeatedly fact-checked the baseless conspiracy theory that “the deep state,” “a secret cabal,” or “a shadow government” plays an outsized role in American governance.
Experts said Putin knew Carlson’s audience.
“Putin understands who listens to Tucker Carlson, and he knows that former President Trump and his allies have made references to the ‘deep state,’” Herron said. “This type of claim only fuels divisions in the U.S., and that is one of Putin’s goals.”
Scott Radnitz, professor at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, said that by “signaling his agreement with Republican beliefs and repeating their talking points,” Putin also hoped to “build on their admiration for him.”
Todd Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at Rand Corp. who has studied Russia-led propaganda campaigns, said that Putin’s task for the interview was to speak to “hardcore conservatives.” Pushing this narrative was Putin’s attempt to “accentuate any divisions” and advance lines that might “harden opposition” to the U.S. providing continued support for Ukraine.
That Congress has not provided more aid for Ukraine helps disprove the idea of a shadow government working in Ukraine’s favor, Herron said.
“The president does not have deep state operatives or a shadow government funneling resources to Ukraine in defiance of Congress,” Herron said. Elected leaders make budget decisions, “and their preferences do not match the president’s preferences. Until this changes, aid for Ukraine’s war efforts is not coming from the U.S. budget precisely because of the decisions of elected leaders.”
RELATED:Journalists haven’t ‘bothered’ to interview Putin? No, Tucker Carlson’s claim is Pants on Fire!
RELATED:Lie of the Year 2022: Putin’s lies to wage war and conceal horror in Ukraine
RELATED:Putin’s one-sided history of Ukraine’s relationship with Russia
Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de Google Translate.
Quick Take
The record-setting Canadian wildfires in 2023 were caused mainly by lightning igniting forests that were unusually hot and dry, in part due to climate change. But the recent conviction of a Quebec man led to false claims on social media that the majority of the fires were the result of arson.
Full Story
In 2023, Canada experienced its most extreme fire season to date. Beginning in the spring, the record-setting wildfires in both the eastern and western provinces burned about 46 million acres and displaced more than 150,000 people. As a result of smoke from the fires, U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and Detroit, also endured poor — and, in some cases, hazardous— air quality.
On Jan. 15, a Quebec man, Brian Paré, pleaded guilty to 13 counts of arson and one count of arson with disregard for human life. In May, with 12 active fires already burning in Quebec, Paré, a conspiracy theorist, began setting his own fires with the intention of finding out “whether the forest was really dry or not,” Quebec Prosecutor Marie-Philippe Charron told the court. Paré claimed on social media posts that the previous fires had been set by the Canadian government to convince people to believe in climate change, the Canadian Press reported.
Two of the 14 fires set by Paré forced evacuations of hundreds of nearby homes. The largest blaze, the Lake Cavan fire, burned about 2,000 acres of forest.
A view of wildfires at Lebel-sur-Quevillon in Quebec, Canada, on June 23, 2023. Photo by Frederic Chouinard/SOPFEU / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.
By comparison, more than 11 million acres burned in Quebec in 2023.
Experts say that climate change did play a role in Quebec’s unusually bad fire season. An analysis by 17 researchers for World Weather Attribution — an organization that “quantifies how climate change influences the intensity and likelihood of an extreme weather event” — found that climate change made the hot and dry conditions more likely and made the fire season in Quebec 50% more intense than it would have been otherwise.
But some social media posts, citing the guilty plea of Paré, have falsely claimed that arson was responsible for most of the fires in Quebec — not climate change.
In a Jan. 15 Instagram post sharing the news of the guilty plea by Paré, one user wrote: “FakeNews Media and corrupt politicians made it clear to all that forest fires were a direct result of GlobalWarming… A small minority knows to follow the facts carefully and know that majority of fires were from man’s arson or negligence.” The post received more than 2,000 likes.
In a post on Feb. 6, another user shared the headline, “Quebec man pleads guilty to setting 14 forest fires — [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau claimed it was climate change.” The user added in the caption: “They squashed the arson story immediately, well it was true.”
But as we said, the largest fire set by Paré burned about 2,000 of the total 11 million acres burned in Quebec during the 2023 fire season. A spokesman for the Quebec Forest Fire Protection Agency told AFP Fact Check that fires with a criminal origin accounted for less than 0.02% of the fires in that province. The vast majority of the fires were caused by lightning that ignited abnormally dry forests.
“Human-caused fires can be distinguished from lightning-caused fires with pretty good certainty,” Mike Wotton, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service stationed at the University of Toronto, told us in a Feb. 8 email. “The large fires in Quebec that burned from June onward and led to smoke circulating through the Eastern seaboard for many days were very clearly the result of lightning.”
The social media posts also create a false dichotomy between arson and climate change as the “cause” of the fires. In reality, neither would be the sole cause of any wildfire. A person can intentionally or accidentally light a fire — or lightning can strike — but if the conditions aren’t right, the blaze won’t take off or spread easily. And regardless of what starts a fire, climate change can be a contributing factor in making a fire more likely or more severe.
“In the areas of the north where those fires started in Eastern Ontario and Quebec, it was an extremely warm late spring and early summer,” explained Wotton, whose research has focused on the effects of climate change on fire activity. “When lightning storms went through the north of Ontario and Quebec many new fires were ignited” in the dried forests.
“It was earlier than normal to get such an impactful lightning fire event. … But that is the challenge we are facing with warmer temperatures that we are experiencing most every year these days,” he said.
“They will not all be terrible years like this past one,” Wotton said, “but we will have to get used to a lot more threat from fire and smoke being in our lives a lot more regularly.”
Sources
Allan, Sue and Nick Taylor-Vaisey. “‘Literally off the charts’: Canada’s fire season sets records — and is far from over.” Politico. 6 Jul 2023.
Associated Press. “Wildfires in Canada have broken records for area burned, evacuations and cost, officials say.” 6 Jul 2023.
Cappucci, Matthew. “Records toppling as temperatures hit nearly 90 degrees in northern Canada.” Washington Post. 4 May 2023.
CBC. “With wildfires raging in some regions, Quebec bans open fires in most of the province.” 29 May 2023.
Choi, Annette, and Krystina Shveda. “Wildfires in Canada led to dangerous air quality in parts of the US for the first time. See the affected areas.” CNN. 17 Sep 2023.
Livingston, Ian. “Canada’s astonishing and record fire season finally slows down.” Washington Post. 18 Oct 2023.
Massie, Graeme. “Man who spread conspiracy over government starting wildfires admits starting some himself.” Independent. 17 Jan 2024.
Plante, Caroline. “‘Historic wildfires in Quebec, says SOPREU, after 4.5 million hectares of forest burned in 2023.” CTV. 14 Nov 2023.
Roley, Gwen. “Misleading claims spread on 2023 Canadian wildfires after charges filed.” AFP Fact Check. 31 Jan 2024.
Serebrin, Jacob. “Quebec man who blamed 2023 wildfires on government pleads guilty to setting 14 fires.” CBC. 15 Jan 2024.
Webber, Tammy. “Climate change doubled chance of weather conditions that led to record Quebec fires, researchers say.” Associated Press. 23 Aug 2023.
Wolfe, Elizabeth, and Joe Sutton. “Smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires blankets northern US cities with air pollution.” CNN. 25 Jul 2023.
World Weather Attribution. “Climate change more than doubled the likelihood of extreme fire weather conditions in Eastern Canada.” 22 Aug 2023.
Wotton, Mike. Research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, University of Toronto. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 8 Feb 2024.
President Joe Biden fielded questions about his handling of classified documents after a special counsel’s investigation concluded that criminal charges were not warranted although classified documents were found in his Wilmington, Delaware, home.
“When you look back at this incident is there anything you would do differently now?” a reporter asked Biden at a Feb. 8 press conference.
Biden said he would have better overseen the transfer of materials, before comparing his case with former President Donald Trump’s.
“It wasn’t out like in Mar-a-Lago, in a public place. And none of it was high classified,” Biden said. “It didn’t have any of that red stuff on it, you know what I mean, around the corners? None of that.”
Intelligence experts told PolitiFact that there is no legal definition for information that is highly or “high classified.” However, the special counsel report details that multiple Biden documents included classification markers for “top secret,” the highest of the three levels.
Documents are classified based on how much danger the information’s unauthorized disclosure would cause to national security, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The three classification levels are, from highest to lowest:
Top secret: Its unauthorized disclosure would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security.
Secret: Its unauthorized disclosure would cause “serious damage” to national security.
Confidential: Its unauthorized disclosure would cause “damage” to national security.
Besides written classification markings, some classified documents can include cover sheets with colored borders and the classification markings in bold text. These markings signal that classified materials are inside.
“But not every classified document has a cover sheet; it just depends on the circumstance and what the document is,” said Jeffrey Fields, a University of Southern California international security expert.
Government agencies reviewed Biden’s documents, and the special counsel report detailed each document’s original classification markings and the classifications after review. Some classifications were lowered; other documents that weren’t originally marked top secret were given a top secret classification.
The report lists at least 18 documents that originally had “top secret” classification markings. Thirteen of those continued having “top secret” classification after the review.
Five documents received “top secret” classification after the review.
The classification of five documents that originally had “top secret” markings were lowered after review.
(Special counsel’s report)
The special counsel noted another issue with notebooks Biden had that were filled with handwritten notes. The special counsel reviewed the notes and added some classification markings. Twelve of those handwritten notes included “top secret” information.
There is no legal definition for what counts as highly classified information. Biden did not clarify what he meant by “high classified.”
“For a layperson I would consider anything that’s labeled top secret as highly classified,” said Gary Ross, an associate professor and the director of intelligence studies at Texas A&M University.
Besides the three classification levels, there can be other markings to signal how the information should be handled based on how it was obtained, Ross said.
Some of the documents Biden possessed, for example included “TS/SCI” markings, meaning top secret/sensitive compartmented information.
To see that information, someone would need top secret security clearance and have additional approval to access “sensitive compartmented information.”
Fields said the term “high classified” is used loosely, leaving it open to interpretation.
“For me it would mean something TS/SCI but others might use it relative to something else — e.g. something SECRET compared with something CONFIDENTIAL,” Fields wrote in an email to PolitiFact.
Bradley Moss, a Washington-based lawyer who works on national security cases, said Biden’s comment “was an ill-advised statement by the president and I cringe every time senior officials say things like that.”
Moss said that documents marked top secret/sensitive compartmented information are “particularly sensitive.”
As for Biden’s claim that none of his documents had the “red stuff on it … around the corners.” Fields said Biden was probably referring to the “cover pages often put on top of classified documents to indicate that inside are classified materials.”
Top secret documents have an orange border, secret documents have a red border and confidential documents have a blue border.
The special counsel did not mention finding documents with these cover sheets. But experts clarified that not every document has a cover sheet.
“If a document doesn’t have the cover sheet on it, that doesn’t mean that it’s not classified,” Ross said.
Our ruling
Biden said “none” of the classified documents found in his possession “was high classified.”
There’s no legal definition for a document that is “high classified.” However, according to the special counsel report, Biden possessed multiple documents with “top secret” markings, the highest classification level.
By definition, those top secret markings likely constituted information that was highly classified, experts told PolitiFact. That is the highest level of national security clearance.
Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on his investigation of President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.” But in a press conference, Biden made several false or misleading claims concerning other details in that report.
“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” including “marked classified documents” about Afghanistan and handwritten notebooks Biden had kept, Hur’s report says. However, for several reasons Hur outlines, “we conclude that the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The report was released on Feb. 8, and Biden held a press conference that night.
Biden said the special counsel found “‘a shortage of evidence’ that I willfully retained classified materials,” calling news reports “about my willful retention of documents … just plain wrong.” The special counsel said the investigation “uncovered evidence [that] Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials,” but not enough evidence to convince a jury.
He falsely said none of the documents found in his possession was highly classified.
Biden claimed the special counsel “did not say” that Biden had shared secret information with the ghostwriter of his book. The report did say that.
Biden wrongly claimed that “all the stuff that was in my home was in filing cabinets that were either locked or able to be locked.” Some material was in unlocked drawers and in a box in the garage, the report says.
The president condemned claims in the report about his “diminished faculties and faulty memory,” saying they had “no place in this report.” Hur said he included it as part of his argument that it would be hard to convince a jury that Biden had acted “willfully” to break the law.
Biden, however, was correct when he touted “the stark distinction and difference” the report made between his case and former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case. Hur cited “several material distinctions,” including Trump’s refusal to return documents and his alleged attempts to get others to destroy evidence. Trump, meanwhile, ignored the differences cited in the report, reposting several messages on social media claiming there was a “double standard.”
Willful Retention of Classified Documents
In 2016 and 2017, Mark Zwonitzer — the ghostwriter of two Biden books — taped interviews with Biden at Biden’s rental home in Virginia. In a 2017 interview, the former vice president told Zwonitzer that he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” the special counsel’s report said.
“From context, Mr. Biden appears to have been referring to classified documents relating to American military and foreign policy in Afghanistan,” the report said of Biden’s mention of classified documents in that 2017 interview. “When he made his statement to Zwonitzer, Mr. Biden was discussing a handwritten memo he had sent to President Obama opposing the deployment of more troops to Afghanistan in 2009.”
Those documents were later recovered by FBI agents in late 2022 and early 2023, the report said.
Biden answers questions after speaking about the special counsel report in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House on Feb. 8. Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images.
“He kept documents related to the debated troop surge, including a classified handwritten memo he sent President Obama in 2009 opposing the surge and marked classified documents supporting his position,” the report said. “In December 2022 and January 2023, FBI agents recovered these materials from Mr. Biden’s Delaware garage and office.”
During the taped interviews, Biden also read to Zwonitzer from sections of notebooks that he used during White House meetings.
“Evidence shows that he knew the notebooks contained classified information,” the report said. “Mr. Biden wrote down obviously sensitive information discussed during intelligence briefings with President Obama and meetings in the White House Situation Room about matters of national security and military and foreign policy.”
The notebooks were found in Biden’s office at his home in Delaware in January 2023, approximately one month after investigators discovered classified documents about Afghanistan in Biden’s garage, the report said. Biden told investigators that he considered the books his personal property. “I guess I wanted to hang onto it for posterity’s sake,” the report quotes Biden as saying.
For these reasons, the special counsel report said investigators “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” including classified documents related to Afghanistan.
Biden, however, pushed back on news reports that he “willfully retained” classified documents.
“I’ve seen the headlines since the report was released about my willful retention of documents,” Biden said at his press conference. “These assertions are not only misleading, they’re just plain wrong. … On page 215, the report of the special counsel found the exact opposite. Here’s what he wrote: ‘There is, in fact, a shortage of evidence’ that I willfully retained classified materials related to Afghanistan.’”
Biden has a point about the Afghanistan materials, but there’s more to the story. In other sections, such as on page 204, the report says: “The evidence falls short of establishing Mr. Biden’s willful retention of the classified Afghanistan documents beyond a reasonable doubt.” (Emphasis is ours.)
The special counsel’s report listed “several defenses” that Biden might be able to use that would make it difficult for the government to prove intent – which is required to prove the president willfully retained classified documents.
The reasons included:
Biden’s memory. The report said his “memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interviews with our office in 2023.” The report says “Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden’s cooperation with investigators. “His cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake,” the report said.
A lack of corroborating evidence. “Another viable defense is that Mr. Biden might not have retained the classified Afghanistan documents in his Virginia home at all,” the report said. Zwonitzer’s tape recording of Biden was the only evidence the special counsel had to prove willful retention. “We searched for such additional evidence and found it wanting. In particular, no witness, photo, email, text message, or any other evidence conclusively places the Afghanistan documents at the Virginia home in 2017.”
Biden’s belief that his notebooks were personal property. When interviewed by federal investigators, Biden said that “[l]ike presidents and vice presidents before me, I understand these notes to be my personal property,” citing former President Ronald Reagan, who kept diaries. That would make it difficult for prosecutors to prove that Biden “acted with intent to do something the law forbids.”
So, Hur had evidence that Biden willfully retained classified material, but the special counsel didn’t believe it was strong enough to convince a jury to convict Biden.
Biden Had ‘Top Secret’ Documents
Biden said none of the documents found in his possession was highly classified, which is false.
“None of it was high classified,” he told the press. “Didn’t have any of that red stuff on it, you know what I mean, around the corners.”
The special counsel’s report doesn’t appear to mention specific colors, but some of the documents found did have classification markings.
For example, the classified documents from 2009, including multiple memos pertaining to U.S. policy in Afghanistan, were discovered in a damaged box in the garage of Biden’s Delaware home. The report says some of the memos to Obama were written by Biden, as well as the national security adviser, who at the time was retired Gen. James Jones.
“These documents from fall 2009 have classification markings up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level,” according to the report.
On its website, the National Archives explains that information marked as “TOP SECRET,” if released, would cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security.”
Also, the notebooks found at Biden’s residence, with handwritten notes Biden took during security meetings and briefings, which were later determined to contain classified information.
“Though none of the notebooks have classification markings, some of the notebooks contain information that remains classified up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level,” the report says.
Investigators reviewed 37 excerpts, or 109 pages, of handwritten materials, and eight were determined to be “Top Secret with Sensitive Compartmented Information,” including seven with “information concerning human intelligence sources.” In addition, six are “Top Secret,” 21 “Secret” and two “confidential.”
Biden’s Ghostwriter Discussions
Biden also falsely claimed that he “did not share classified information” with Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of his 2017 book, “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.” “Guarantee you, I did not,” Biden said.
When a reporter challenged his statement, pointing out what the report says on the topic, Biden said the special counsel “did not say” that Biden had shared secret information. But Biden is wrong.
Early on, the report says this: “To our knowledge, no one has identified any classified information published in Promise Me, Dad, but Mr. Biden shared information, including some classified information, from those notebooks with his ghostwriter. FBI agents recovered the notebooks from the office and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Delaware home in January 2023.”
And according to the report, “evidence shows” Biden “knew the notebooks,” although the contents were not marked as such, “contained classified information,” including details about national security from intelligence briefings and meetings he attended in the White House Situation Room.
The report also adds that “at least three times Mr. Biden read from classified entries [in his notebooks] aloud to his ghostwriter nearly verbatim,” although he “sometimes skipped over presumptively classified material and warned his ghostwriter the entries might be classified.”
On one occasion, in a February 2017 meeting with Zwonitzer at Biden’s rental home in Virginia, the report says Biden read from notes he took during a 2015 meeting in the Situation Room. The notes “summarized the actions and views of U.S. military leaders and the CIA Director relating to a foreign country and a foreign terrorist organization.”
Material Wasn’t All ‘Locked or Able to be Locked’
Biden falsely claimed that “all the stuff that was in my home was in filing cabinets that were either locked or able to be locked.”
The president made this claim after acknowledging that some material was found in boxes in his garage. “I didn’t know how half the boxes got in my garage until I found out staff gathered them up, put them together, and took them to the garage in my home,” Biden said.
As we’ve explained, the special counsel’s report says marked classified material regarding Afghanistan was found in 2022 in the garage of Biden’s Delaware home “in a badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus.” The report says that the way the materials were kept “suggests the documents might have been forgotten.”
As president, Biden is allowed to keep classified material in his home. Hur explains that it was possible Biden had previously kept the Afghanistan documents in his home in Virginia in February 2017, when Biden was a private citizen, but Hur wasn’t able to establish that for certain. It’s also possible that the documents “could have been stored, by mistake and without his knowledge, at his Delaware home since the time he was vice president, as were other classified documents recovered during our investigation,” the report says.
There were other classified materials that perhaps were “able to be locked” but were not in “filing cabinets,” as Biden said, but rather, were stored in unlocked drawers.
The special counsel’s report says the notebooks that contained classified information were in “unlocked drawers in the office and basement den” of Biden’s Delaware home. Biden had used the notebooks when he was vice president.
In a Feb. 9 White House press briefing, when asked about Biden’s comment about classified material being locked in his house, Ian Sams, spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office, called the notebooks Biden’s “personal diaries” and said “the documents that were taken were jumbled up in boxes and found inadvertently in places.”
Biden’s Memory
Biden condemned what he called “extraneous commentary” in the report about his memory. “They don’t know what they’re talking about,” Biden said. “It has no place in this report. … My memory is fine.”
The report’s numerous mentions of Biden’s recall — described at one point as “diminished faculties and faulty memory” — were included, Hur wrote, because it factored heavily into his decision about whether he could convince a jury that Biden had acted “willfully” to break the law.
Explaining his conclusion that “the evidence is not sufficient to convict” Biden, Hur wrote: “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
According to the special counsel’s report, Biden’s memory was “significantly limited” in recorded interviews with Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir, as well as in interviews with federal investigators in 2023.
The report said Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer “are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” the report states. “He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.”
“In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall,” wrote Hur, who in 2017 was nominated by Trump to be the U.S. attorney for Maryland.
That limitation of memory, Hur wrote, “will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully — that is, with intent to break the law — as the statute requires.”
In his comments about the report on Feb. 8, Biden noted, “I went forward with a five-hour in-person … interview over two days on October the 8th and 9th of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked by Hamas on the 7th and I was very occupied. It was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”
Biden also took umbrage at the report claiming he did not remember when his son died.
“How in the hell dare he raise that,” Biden said. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business. … I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away or if he passed away.”
In a Feb. 5 letter responding to the report, and included at the bottom of the special counsel’s report, Biden lawyers Richard Sauber and Bob Bauer described the report’s comments about Biden’s memory as inaccurate and inappropriate.
“The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events,” Sauber and Bauer wrote. “Such comments have no place in a Department of Justice report, particularly one that in the first paragraph announces that no criminal charges are ‘warranted’ and that ‘the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt.’ If the evidence does not establish guilt, then discussing the jury impact of President Biden’s hypothetical testimony at a trial that will never occur is entirely superfluous.”
The two lawyers also claimed there was “ample evidence” Biden “did well in answering your questions about years-old events over the course of five hours,” especially given that Biden was in the midst of handling an international crisis. They said the transcript shows Biden provided “detailed recollections across a wide range of questions” and, they said, Biden’s “inability to recall dates or details of events that happened years ago is neither surprising nor unusual.”
The lawyers described Hur’s language as “pejorative,” “highly prejudicial,” “inflammatory,” “gratuitous” and “not supported by the facts.”
“My memory is fine,” Biden said at the press conference. “My memory — take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president. None of you thought I could pass any of the things I got passed. How did that happen? You know, I guess I just forgot what was going on.”
‘Material Differences’ Between Biden and Trump
Biden said he was “especially pleased to see special counsel make clear the stark distinction and difference between this case and Mr. Trump’s case.” Meanwhile, on Truth Social, Trump reposted several messages claiming the report revealed a “double standard” or “two-tiered justice” when it comes to prosecuting the former president for retaining classified documents, and arguing that the case against Trump should be dropped.
We’ve written before about Trump’s misleading claims about a double standard regarding his classified documents case compared with other presidents, including Biden. In his special counsel report, Hur pointed to “several material distinctions” between the cases involving Trump and Biden.
“With one exception, there is no record of the Department of Justice prosecuting a former president or vice president for mishandling classified documents from his own administration,” Hur wrote. “The exception is former President Trump. It is not our role to assess the criminal charges pending against Mr. Trump, but several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear. Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts.
“Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite,” Hur wrote. “According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview, and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.”
In a timeline of the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s handling of highly classified documents, we detailed the numerous steps the National Archives and Records Administration and the Department of Justice took in an effort to retrieve government records from Trump after he left office.
The National Archives first asked Trump for missing presidential records on May 6, 2021, and continued asking for months, before getting 15 boxes of records on Jan. 18, 2022, according to the Department of Justice’s affidavit. When NARA then discovered classified documents among those records, it notified the DOJ.
On May 11, 2022, Trump’s office received a grand jury subpoena seeking additional classified documents. In response, Trump’s lawyers the following month handed over an envelope with 38 classified documents.
But that still wasn’t all of the classified documents Trump had in his possession. And the indictment describes how Trump had directed his aide, Walt Nauta, “to move boxes of documents to conceal them from Trump’s attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury.”
In August 2022, the FBI obtained a court-approved search warrant and retrieved “over one hundred unique documents with classification markings” including many that were highly classified or top secret, according to a court filing.
Trump was initially charged with 37 felony counts, including 31 counts of “willful retention of national defense information,” and additional counts of “conspiracy to obstruct justice,” “withholding a document or record,” “corruptly concealing a document or record,” and “concealing a document in a federal investigation.” He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
A superseding indictment filed in July 2023 added some new charges against Trump. Specifically, the indictment says Trump, along with two employees, tried to get another Trump employee to “delete security camera footage at The Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.” The revised indictment added charges against Trump of attempting to destroy evidence in an official proceeding and corruptly attempting to do so.
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In a two-hour interview from Moscow, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Russian President Vladimir Putin talked about the war with Ukraine, relations with the United States and artificial intelligence.
Some social media users highlighted a quote from Putin saying the U.S.-Mexico border issue amused him. But that didn’t happen.
A Feb. 6 Instagram post shared a screenshot of an X post that claimed to show the text of an exchange between Carlson and Putin.
“Tucker: Are you following what’s happening on the US southern border?”
“Putin: Actually yes. It’s part of my daily briefing. We Russians find it ironically amusing your Congress will spend billions protecting foreign borders but neglect its own. It’s quiet laughable but deadly,” the post said, misspelling “quite.”
(Screengrab from Instagram)
The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
This exchange between Carlson and Putin was fabricated. The X post shared in the Instagram post was dated Feb. 4 — four days before Carlson released the Putin interview.
Carlson said in a video shared Feb. 6 on X that he was in Moscow to interview Putin and “we’ll be doing that soon.” The Associated Press reported Feb. 7 that the Kremlin confirmed the interview had taken place. The interview was then posted Feb. 8 on Carlson’s website and X.
iSource News, the X account that originally shared the fabricated exchange, has deleted that post. On Feb. 5, the account said it deleted the post because of “copyright claims.”
We rate the claim that Putin said in an interview with Carlson that he finds the U.S.-Mexico border issue “ironically amusing” Pants on Fire!
Una propuesta de ley migratoria del Senado que buscaba restringir el asilo en los Estados Unidos, ha causado desinformación en las redes sociales.
“Ultima Hora: Estados Unidos CIERRA la frontera y anuncia NO MÁS ASILO PARA NADIE!”, dice una publicación en TikTok del 5 de febrero.
El video añadió: “El Senado de EE. UU. ha dado luz verde a un acuerdo que cierra inmediatamente las fronteras del país y LIMITARÁ TODAS LAS PETICIONES DE ASILO y apelaciones”.
Aunque este paquete tenía previsto cambiar las leyes de imigración por primera vez en décadas, los senadores no aprobaron la medida (tampoco lo habían hecho a la fecha de la publicación en Facebook). Y aún si hubiera sido aprobado en el Senado y enviado a la Cámara de Representantes, la publicación en TikTok sigue equivocada sobre lo que la propuesta de ley ofrece.
¿De qué se trata el paquete bipartidista fronterizo?
El 4 de febrero fue revelado un acuerdo bipartidista llamado Ley de Asignaciones Suplementarias de Seguridad Nacional de Emergencia de 2024. Esta propuesta buscaba imponer leyes de inmigración para lidiar con la inmigración ilegal en la frontera de México-Estados Unidos (también contiene ayuda internacional a ciertos países, incluyendo Ucrania).
El proyecto de ley es el resultado de negociaciones entre los senadores James Lankford, un republicano de Oklahoma, Chris Murphy, un demócrata de Connecticut, y Kyrsten Sinema, una independiente de Arizona.
La propuesta no decía que se cerraría la frontera inmediatamente o que no habría más asilos para los migrantes. Está proponía cambios a las leyes de imigración que le permitirían a la rama ejecutiva detener rápidamente a las personas que vienen por la frontera estadounidense y prevenirlos de aplicar a asilos debajo de ciertas condiciones.
No hay una autoridad que se pueda aprobar por el Congreso que permita el completo y total cierre de la frontera, le dijo a PolitiFact, Theresa Cardinal Brown, una consejera jefe de políticas de la frontera e imigracion del Bipartisan Policy Center, el 5 de febrero.
La propuesta bipartidista de seguridad fronteriza no fue aprobada por el Senado, y no llegará a la Cámara de Representantes, ya que necesitaba al menos 60 votos. Varios representantes republicanos de la Cámara se oponían a la medida, diciendo que “incentivaría” más la imigración ilegal.
El proyecto buscaba:
Crear una nueva autoridad de remoción y mover los procesos de asilo fuera de las cortes: Las peticiones de asilo y apelaciones buscaban ser adjudicadas en seis meses o menos por los oficiales del Servicio de Ciudadanía e Inmigracion de Estados Unidos (USCIS, por sus siglas en inglés).
Elevar el estándar de las entrevistas para solicitar asilo y agilizar sus entrevistas iniciales: Este quería garantizar que sólo migrantes con declaraciones legítimas de asilo pudieran permanecer en el país. También quería consolidar las evaluaciones de asilo en una sola entrevista de determinación de protección, para evaluar el miedo de persecución o turtura en 90 días o menos.
Crear una autoridad de emergencia en la frontera: Iba a proveer una nueva autoridad de expulsión temporaria que se usaría cuando los encuentros en la frontera excedieran la capacidad de las autoridades migratorias. Esto significa que la autoridad buscaba pausar las solicitudes de asilo entre los puertos de entrada y solo procesar a 1,400 solicitaciones cada día en la frontera cuando se activara esta autoridad. Esto no aplicaba a niños no acompañados o a personas con emergencias médicas o en riesgo inminente.
Calificamos la publicación que dice que “El Senado de EE. UU. ha dado luz verde a un acuerdo que cierra inmediatamente las fronteras del país y limitará todas las peticiones de asilo y apelaciones” como Falso.
Lea más reportes de PolitiFact en Español aquí.
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