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Quick Take
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund invested money with Jared Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, after he left the White House in 2021. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Fox News that the fund would keep its commitment to that investment. But social media posts are making the unfounded claim that Kushner has to return the money.
Full Story
Jared Kushner, son-in-law and former advisor to former President Donald Trump, started an investment fund, Affinity Partners, after leaving the White House following Trump’s failed bid for reelection in 2020.
Among the first funders was the Saudi Public Investment Fund — run by the Saudi Arabian government — which reportedly invested $2 billion. House Democrats had begun an investigation into the deal before losing control of the chamber in the 2022 midterm election.
Jared Kushner, who was a White House advisor, at a 2018 meeting between then-President Donald Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Photo by Kevin Dietsch-Pool via Getty Images.
Now, posts are circulating on Instagram with the unfounded claim, “looks like Jared Kushner has to ‘pay back the $2billion from Saudi Arabia In Full to The Government.’”
The posts echo a Feb. 2 thread that was posted on X and has been viewed 1.5 million times, according to the platform.
The thread cites an interview aired on Fox News in September between anchor Bret Baier and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The thread claims that, in the interview, Salman “suggested the money could be moved if Trump, who currently leads the 2024 GOP primary field, loses the 2024 Election.”
But the crown prince said no such thing.
In fact, Salman, speaking in English, told Baier that the investment is “a commitment that PIF have and when PIF have commitment with any investor around the globe, it keep it.”
The website associated with the X account that posted the claim is called Politics Video Channel. It was registered in 2017 and has, since then, regularly posted left-leaning content about American politics. The site is registered to a person in Australia, though. We emailed him to ask if there was any evidence to support his claim about the Saudi investment in Kushner’s fund, but we didn’t get a response.
So, all the copy-cat claims circulating on social media are just repeating a misrepresentation of what Salman said in a September interview.
Sources
Maloney, Carolyn B. Chairwoman, U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Letter to Jared Kushner. 2 Jun 2022.
Kirkpatrick, David D. and Kate Kelly. “Before Giving Billions to Jared Kushner, Saudi Investment Fund Had Big Doubts.” New York Times. 10 Apr 2022.
Fox News (@FoxNews). “‘GOOD NEGOTIATIONS’: Saudi crown prince says ‘every day’ is a day closer to peace with Israel.” YouTube.com. 22 Sep 2023.
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Domain information for politicsvideochannel.com. Updated 22 Dec 2023.
As election season heats up, the issue of abortion rights has moved from a simmer to a slow boil nationally as well as at the state level.
At an appearance in Waukesha County, Vice President Kamala Harris implied that abortion would be central to an election rematch between Democratic President Biden and Republican former President Donald Trump. And the issue continues to be a front burner issue in Wisconsin, as Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, weighed in on an aspect of Wisconsin’s abortion law: the allowable time frame for the procedure.
“The law in Wisconsin is 20 weeks,” Vos said Jan. 7, 2024 on WISN’s “UpFront.” “That is way outside the international bounds. Take France as an example, they are at a 14-week allowance for abortion.”`
About two weeks after the appearance, Wisconsin GOP lawmakers introduced a bill to ban abortion after 14 weeks of pregnancy except in situations where the mother’s life or health would be endangered without the procedure. The measure would reduce the time frame for legal abortions by six weeks, from 20 to 14 weeks.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “Kamala Harris puts abortion at center of presidential race during suburban Milwaukee rally.”
The proposal puts the matter in front of voters by calling for a statewide referendum during April’s election on whether the 14-week prohibition should take effect. A few days after the bill’s introduction, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers promised to veto the measure.
Related PolitiFact: Vice President Kamala Harris says “Today in America, 1 in 3 women of reproductive age live in a state with an abortion ban.”
Related PolitiFact: Mike Pence says “The fact is, today abortion law in the United States is more aligned with China and North Korea than with Western nations in Europe.”
Following major criticism of the Wisconsin bill, Republican lawmakers voted to add exceptions for pregnancies that result from sexual assaults and incest.
Other Republicans, both here and nationally, have made claims similar to the one from Vos, so we decided to dig in: Is Wisconsin’s 20-week threshold “way outside international bounds?”
Allowable time frames for procedure
When asked for data to support the statement, Vos staffer Angela Joyce directed PolitiFact Wisconsin to online information, including from the UK’s Right to Life site, on allowable time frames for legal abortion procedures in European Union countries.
The EU time limits, according to the UK Right to Life listing:
Another study of legal abortion time frames in Europe in 2020, by Jenny Yang and published by Statista on Nov. 30, 2023, found roughly the same time frame limits as did Right to Life, ranging from 10 weeks in Portugal through 24 weeks in the United Kingdom.
Note: The United Kingdom is not included in Right to Life’s EU countries listing because the UK exited the EU (Brexit) in 2020.
So, when only European Union countries are considered, Vos may generally be on target – but there is important information missing here.
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global legal advocacy organization that seeks to advance reproductive rights, such as abortion, there are broad exceptions across Europe that are in place to allow for abortions after the initial gestational limit expires.
Those exceptions include concerns over mental and physical health of the woman, fetal impairment, pregnancy resulting from sexual assault or incest and socio-economic reasons. Researchers say some of the socio-economic reasons for elective abortion include marital status or lack of a supportive partner, no family support system and financial insecurity.
“Categorizing countries by their nominal gestational limits does not provide an accurate reflection of the status of legal protection for abortion,” Katherine Mayall, director of strategic Initiatives, legal strategies, innovation and research at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in an email to PolitiFact Wisconsin. “Across Europe, there are broad exceptions to abortion that are in place after the initial gestational limit expires, meaning abortion remains accessible thereafter.”
Mayall also noted that in the United States in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade many states are moving to narrow access to abortion – the opposite of what is happening in many other countries.
“The overwhelming global trend has been towards the liberalization of abortion laws, with over 60 countries liberalizing their laws in the past 30 years,” Mayall said. “In that same time frame, only four countries have removed legal grounds for abortion – the U.S., El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Poland.”
Related PolitiFact: President Joe Biden says The Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade “made the United States an outlier among developed nations in the world” on abortion rights.
Related PolitiFact: Lindsey Graham says “We’re one of the seven nations in the world that allow abortion on demand at 20 weeks.”
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, only six European countries have highly restrictive abortion laws and do not permit abortion on request or on broad social grounds. Those countries are: Andorra, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Poland and San Marino.
“Andorra, Malta and San Marino do not allow abortion at all,” the center’s report says. “Liechtenstein allows abortion only when a woman’s life or health is at risk or the pregnancy is the result of sexual assault. Monaco and Poland allow it only when a woman’s life or health is at risk, the pregnancy is the result of sexual assault or involves a severe fetal anomaly.”
Global time frames
There is an even more important factor to consider – Vos said Wisconsin was “way outside the international bounds (emphasis ours)” and referenced France. But that’s only a partial view.
Internationally, at least 75 countries allow abortion on request, with varying time frame limits, with the most common being 12 weeks.
So let’s look beyond Europe.
In many countries, as is the case in the United States, abortion limits differ by state or territory. For example, take Australia, where the on request gestational limit in Victoria is nine weeks for medication abortion and 24 weeks for surgical abortion.
In New South Wales, Australia, the limit is nine weeks for a medical abortion and a surgical abortion is usually carried out between 7-12 weeks from the first day of a woman’s last period. However, abortions are generally available up to 20 weeks of pregnancy, according to Family Planning Australia.
A look at a selection of other countries finds wide ranging time frame limits, including 24 weeks in Columbia.
Additional international time frame limits, in weeks, sometimes have a wide range depending on circumstances of the abortion request such as fetal impairment, mental or physical health issues, sexual assault, incest, or social-economic reasons.
Below are time frame limits for a selection of countries, some obtained from a 2017 report by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs:
Argentina – 14
Chile – 12-14
Cuba – 12
China – 14-18
Botswana – 16
Guyana – 16
India – 24
Iran – 16
Japan – 22
Kuwait – 16
Mexico – 12-20
Russia – 12-22
South Korea – 24
South Africa – 12-20
Turkey 10-20
Ukraine – 12-22
Uruguay – 12-14
Our ruling
Vos said “The law in Wisconsin (on abortion time frame limit) is 20 weeks. That is way outside the international bounds.”
The number of weeks are generally on target for Europe, where most EU countries are at 12 weeks. But there are exceptions to that, with EU time frames ranging from 10 to about 22 weeks.
And when we look outside Europe, a selection of countries in Asia, Africa, Middle East and Eastern Europe, we find time frames again starting at 10 weeks and going up to 24 weeks. So, internationally Wisconsin is not so far outside the norm, as Vos claims.
In addition, even in Europe, there are many exceptions to the time frame limits which allow for abortions after the limits. And what’s more, the global trend is more toward relaxing the time limits, not tightening them – the opposite of what is happening here.
For a statement that contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, our rating is Mostly False.
When a paleontologist in Montana discovered soft tissue inside a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone, it upturned scientists’ understanding of how fossils decompose.
Nearly two decades later, a social media post mischaracterized the finding, saying it offers proof that dinosaurs are only thousands of years old.
In a Jan. 31 Instagram video, a man says, “According to the Bible, the Earth is only around 6,000 years old. Is there any evidence to support that?”
Another man responds by saying, “We find soft tissue in dinosaur bones showing that they cannot be millions of years old, including the presence of carbon-14 in dinosaur bones. Once again, consistent with an age of only a few thousand years.”
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.)
Although the discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur fossils has spurred more research into what causes such tissue to be preserved, the assertion that this discovery undermines what scientists know about how long-ago dinosaurs lived is wrong.
This video clip originated from a nearly hourlong interview published by Creation Ministries International, a nonprofit that spreads the theory of young Earth creationism, or a belief that the Earth was formed in the last 10,000 years, as told in the Bible’s creation story.
The interview features Mark Harwood, who has a doctorate in radio telescopes and who has claimed in multiple public speeches that science supports the Bible’s Book of Genesis story that Earth is a few thousand years old.
Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope — an atom with certain characteristics — of the element carbon that decays into nitrogen over time. Scientists count the number of carbon-14 atoms remaining in organic materials such as animal and plant fossils to determine their age. Carbon-14 helps archaeologists dissect the Earth’s history, but the claim is wrong that its presence in an artifact nullifies findings that show dinosaurs are millions of years old.
In 2005, paleontologist Mary Schweitzer was the first to discover soft tissues in a 68-million-year-old T. rex leg bone. It surprised scientists because soft tissue cells are known to decay more rapidly than hard tissue, such as bones and teeth. Soft tissues are believed to fully degrade within 4 million years.
Carbon-14 can date materials only back to about 50,000 years. This is because carbon-14 has a half life of 5,730 years, meaning that 5,730 years after an organism dies, half of its carbon-14 atoms turn into nitrogen atoms.
Schweitzer rejected the claim that the soft tissues found in T. rex bones mean that the fossils are only thousands of years old.
“Soft tissues in dinosaurs simply means that we don’t understand degradation at the molecular level,” she said. When dating dinosaur bones, Schweitzer told PolitiFact, paleontologists rely on several methods, including relative dating and radioactive dating.
Radioactive dating requires scientists to study radioactive elements in layers of the igneous rocks that the fossils are buried between. Geologists use instruments to determine how long it took the atoms in that material to decay and, through that process, can date the remains.
In relative dating, scientists compare fossils with other objects, such as rocks, found at a particular site.
Using these methods, scientists have found that dinosaurs roamed the Earth from about 66 million to 245 million years ago.
Since Schweitzer’s discovery, even more scientists have found soft tissues in dinosaur fossil bones. Schweitzer said there is no scientific consensus on how long it takes for soft tissue to decompose.
Many factors affect the decomposition rate, including how quickly the dead animal became buried, the environment in which it was buried, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, how quickly the surrounding sediments cemented and how much exposure the fossil had to bacteria or fungi.
Science around that preserved soft tissue is emerging and scientists disagree on how different factors may affect decomposition. For example, paleontologists were led to believe that low-oxygen environments might promote preservation because most fossil beds were preserved in an environment without oxygen. But a 2018 Yale University-led study found that soft tissues preserved in environments with higher oxygen levels, such as in sandstones and shallow marine limestones, resisted decomposition.
Another 2014 study that Schweitzer led hypothesized that iron particles bind to proteins in the tissue, keeping the fossils preserved longer.
A study of Montana’s Hell Creek Formation, where the T. rex bone with soft tissue was found, shows that geologists used several methods of studying the rocks in Hell Creek Formation to determine that the rocks and bones found there are approximately 68 million years old.
“They twist your words and they manipulate your data,” Schweitzer told Smithsonian magazine about young-earth creationists who have used her data to claim that dinosaurs did not live millions of years ago.
In a 2020 article published in The American Biology Teacher, a peer-reviewed professional journal for biology teachers, Fayetteville State University biologist Philip Senter said carbon-14’s presence in dinosaur bones does not reveal the bones’ age because fossils can gain more carbon-14 over time through recrystallization, bacterial activity and uranium decay.
Senter told PolitiFact that some anti-evolution authors use carbon-14 dating on dinosaur bones and arrive at false fossil ages showing them to be less than 50,000 years old.
We rate the claim that the presence of soft tissue and carbon-14 in dinosaur bones proves that dinosaurs are only a few thousand years old False.
When former Fox News anchor and current web show host Tucker Carlson announced he would be interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin, he leveled an accusation of journalistic carelessness.
“Since the day the war began in Ukraine, American media outlets have spoken to scores of people from Ukraine and they’ve done scores of interviews with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy,” Carlson said, noting that he’d requested an interview with Zelenskyy, too. “At the same time, our politicians and media outlets have been doing this — promoting a foreign leader like he’s a new consumer brand — not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin.”
Carlson’s claim that journalists have not made any effort to interview Putin prompted some journalists who have covered the war since Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, Ukrainian invasion, to describe the situation very differently.
“Interesting to hear @TuckerCarlson claim that ‘no western journalist has bothered to interview’ Putin since the invasion of Ukraine,” BBC News’ Russia editor Steve Rosenberg wrote Feb. 6 on X. “We’ve lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months. Always a ‘no’ for us.”
(Screenshots from X.)
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov disputed Carlson’s claim, too. “Mr. Carlson is wrong,” Peskov said in a Feb. 7 press briefing. “We receive many requests for interviews with the president.”
Peskov said the Kremlin regularly declines interview requests from large Western news outlets, but it granted Carlson’s request because “his position is different” from the major “Anglo-Saxon media,” The Washington Post reported.
This is not the first time Peskov has described the many requests the Kremlin receives from journalists seeking to talk to Putin. In September 2023, he said on his daily call with journalists, “We receive dozens of requests every day from international media, including American media, asking Putin for an interview.” Those requests were declined, Peskov said, according to The Washington Post, because “hardly anyone is able to soberly perceive Putin’s analysis” of the war because of what he called rampant anti-Russia sentiment.
Journalists have repeatedly contacted Putin for stories
Journalists who have repeatedly, unsuccessfully asked to interview Putin challenged Carlson’s statement.
“Does Tucker really think we journalists haven’t been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full scale invasion of Ukraine?” CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour wrote Feb. 6 on X. “It’s absurd — we’ll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now.”
PolitiFact has also attempted to get comments from Putin and the Kremlin, most notably in 2022, when we named “Putin’s lies to wage war and conceal horror in Ukraine” as our Lie of the Year. We did not hear back.
Journalists from The Atlantic, Financial Times and some Russian journalists also pushed back on Carlson’s claim.
Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic who studies disinformation and propaganda, said in an X post that, “Many journalists have interviewed Putin, who also makes frequent, widely covered speeches.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who is American, has been detained in Russia for nearly a year after being arrested during a reporting trip, accused of spying — charges The Wall Street Journal said it “vehemently denies” and that the Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned. Gershkovich is not the only journalist detained in Russia.
John Watson, a journalism professor at American University who studies journalism ethics, told PolitiFact that “it’s Journalism 101” to reach out to the leaders of both nations when reporting on something like the Russia-Ukraine war.
“Every news story has at least two sides; professional responsibility requires outreach to both,” he said. If someone declines to speak with a reporter, that journalist has failed to provide the full story, “but as a matter of ethics, the effort to get the full story is what counts.”
Jane Kirtley, professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said it’s extremely common for political figures to decline interviews or refuse to provide statements, particularly “in authoritarian or autocratic countries, where concepts of freedom of the press are very different or non-existent.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lies about Ukraine were the 2022 Lie of the Year. (AP)
In many cases, it would be “unethical to allow a news source to kill or unreasonably delay a news report by refusing to comment,” Watson said.
Kirtley also said Western journalists have attempted to interview Putin, both before the 2022 invasion and since.
“Very few have succeeded,” Kirtley said, “and when they did, I think it was mostly when Putin thought it was to his advantage.”
Our ruling
Carlson claimed that “not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview Putin” since Russia invaded Ukraine.
This was disputed by the Kremlin’s spokesperson and numerous Western journalists. Journalists across the world have “bothered” to seek interviews with Putin. The Kremlin declines.
We rate Carlson’s claim that no one made efforts to interview Putin Pants on Fire!
RELATED:Lie of the Year 2022: Putin’s lies to wage war and conceal horror in Ukraine
During an interview with Noticias Univision, Vice President Kamala Harris touted the Biden administration’s efforts to extend postpartum Medicaid care.
“When I came in as vice president, only three states extended postpartum care Medicaid coverage to 12 months. I issued a call and a challenge to all states. And now 43 states have extended postpartum care for women,” she said Jan. 29.
Postpartum health insurance covers a critical period for recovering from childbirth, which the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services says includes addressing complications of delivery, ensuring mental health, managing infant care, and transitioning from obstetric to primary care.
Federal law previously required states to provide pregnancy-related Medicaid coverage until 60 days postpartum. Then, 2021 legislation temporarily gave states the option to extend that coverage to a full calendar year. Legislation in 2022 gave states the option to make the extension permanent.
States offer this coverage using federal funding and the state’s own funding.
Health experts told PolitiFact that Harris’ claim — on the numbers she cited and the administration’s role — was correct.
Coverage increased from three to 43 states
When contacted for comment, Harris’ office sent PolitiFact two sources to support the vice president’s claim.
The first was a Medicaid Postpartum Coverage Extension Tracker from KFF, a health policy research and analysis organization. It shows that 43 states have extended Medicaid coverage to 12 months postpartum.
Harris’ office also shared U.S. Department of Health and Human Services information showing that when the Biden administration took office in January 2021, Illinois, New Jersey and Virginia were the only states in which Medicaid subsidized 12 months of postpartum coverage.
Did the Biden administration influence the expansion?
Yes, different laws that Biden signed gave states an easier pathway and some federal funding for this expansion. States still partially fund the care, as they had before the expansion.
The 2021 American Rescue Plan that President Joe Biden signed into law enabled states to temporarily extend Medicaid coverage to 12 months postpartum. The extension began April 1, 2022, and ended in May 2023.
KFF reported that before April 2022, states that wanted to use federal money to expand postpartum care had to do so through a section 1115 waiver. The waiver lets states divert funds from what’s required by federal statutes and try new approaches for administering Medicaid. But the waivers allowed only for temporary changes, not permanent. States could also use only state money to expand postpartum programs, rather than go through the waiver process.
“What the Biden administration did was create a new, arguably easier, pathway through a state plan amendment,” said Maria W. Steenland, a Brown University assistant professor of population studies. Under these plan amendments, facilitated by the American Rescue Plan, the federal government and states agree on how to administer the Medicaid program.
Later, the 2022 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which Biden signed into law in 2023, gave states the option to permanently extend postpartum coverage period to 12 months.
States that choose to make this coverage permanent cover those costs using federal and state funds.
“The postpartum extensions are jointly funded with federal and state funds, just as all pregnancy-related coverage is under Medicaid,” said Usha Ranji, KFF associate director of women’s health policy. Ranju added that the 2021 and 2022 laws did not change the financing arrangement for pregnancy-related coverage.
Many states previously wanted postpartum care expansion
A 2020 study on the impact of extending postpartum Medicaid found that although many states were interested in extending postpartum care, some had not because doing so required getting the temporary section 1115 waiver or using state funds.
Experts said that because the postpartum care expansion is still relatively new, it’s not possible yet to measure whether it has reduced postpartum hospitalizations and improved maternal mortality rates.
Steenland co-authored a study that found a 17% reduction in hospitalizations during the first 60 days postpartum was associated with the Medicaid expansions. The study also found evidence of a smaller decrease in hospitalizations from 61 days to six months postpartum.
Our ruling
Harris said postpartum Medicaid coverage expanded from three states to 43 states because of the Biden administration.
In 2021, when the Biden administration took office, Illinois, New Jersey and Virginia were the only states that had 12 months postpartum Medicaid coverage. Now, 43 states have it.
Biden signed a 2021 law that allowed states to temporarily expand Medicaid postpartum coverage until May 2023, using a combination of federal and state funds. A law Biden signed in 2023 enabled states to make the expansion permanent.
You’ve got a fast car. But the internet has Photoshop.
Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs’ Grammy duet performance of Chapman’s 1988 hit “Fast Car” drew mountains of praise. But a viral image made it appear that conservative political commentator and podcast host Ben Shapiro was less than thrilled.
“Of course the Grammy cultural Marxists had to force us to watch some black queer female perform and steal the spotlight from Luke Comb’s popular new country music song,” read typo-laden text in the image. “The woke war on straight white male success continues.”
Besides spreading on Facebook, we saw it being widely shared on X, with one post getting almost 3 million views.
(Screenshot of Facebook post)
The Facebook 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.)
We found no evidence Shapiro ever shared this post. We reviewed his X timeline and searched archival sites. When we reached out to Shapiro’s team at the Daily Wire, publicist Jen Smith confirmed that Shapiro did not make the post.
Shapiro weighed in on the Grammys during a segment on his podcast, “The Ben Shapiro Show.” But he didn’t criticize Chapman. Moreover, he shared a link on his Facebook page to a Daily Wire article headlined, “WATCH: Tracy Chapman’s Unforgettable Grammys Performance Singing ‘Fast Car’ With Luke Combs.”
Shapiro recently collaborated with rapper Tom MacDonald on their own song, “Facts,” which reached No. 1 on iTunes after its Jan. 26 release.
But Shapiro did not accuse Chapman of stealing the spotlight from Combs.
The image that says he did is fake. We rate this claim Pants on Fire!
In a case with implications for the 2024 presidential election, the U.S. Supreme Court heard historic oral arguments Feb. 8 that former President Donald Trump should be removed from Colorado’s presidential primary ballot.
The Colorado Supreme Court in December ruled that Trump was ineligible to be on the ballot because of his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The Colorado court cited an obscure provision in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment that bars people from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.”
The high court’s ruling, which is likely to come before Colorado’s March 5 primary, will have ripple effects for other states facing similar legal challenges to Trump’s ballot access.
The last time the Supreme Court played such a pivotal role in the presidential race was in 2000, when the justices ruled 5-4 to end a Florida recount, sealing the election for George W. Bush over Al Gore.
Here, we explain the 14th Amendment, why the Supreme Court is hearing this case, and what the parties’ arguments are for and against removing Trump from the ballot.
On the first day of arguments, justices from across the ideological spectrum sounded skeptical of one state removing Trump from the ballot.
“I think that the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States,” Justice Elena Kagan, one of the three liberal judges in the nine-seat court, asked Jason Murray, the lawyer arguing in favor of removing Trump. It “seems quite extraordinary, doesn’t it?”
Several constitutional law scholars told PolitiFact they sensed that the court would rule that Trump could stay on the ballot, perhaps with two or fewer dissents.
“I think it’s almost certain that Trump wins this,” said Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law professor. He and others added, though, that we won’t know the majority’s precise legal reasoning until the court issues its ruling.
What’s the 14th Amendment?
The amendment is best known for giving Black people the right to become United States citizens. But Section 3 of the amendment also says that no person “shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military” who had previously taken an oath to support the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” It also says Congress “may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
When Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, it followed weeks of Trump’s statements seeking to overturn his election loss, including a speech he gave in Washington, D.C., shortly before the attack.
Section 3 was intended to prevent people who served in the Confederacy from again serving in public office unless they were cleared by congressional vote.
In 1872, Congress granted amnesty to most officials covered by Section 3, and in 1898, another statute lifted the remaining prohibitions. Section 3 was rarely invoked in the 20th century.
Why did the Supreme Court court hear a case on the amendment?
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to disqualify Trump from the presidential primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The court concluded that Trump had engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
The case’s plaintiff is a Republican and former Colorado state legislator whom Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal-leaning group, recruited.
Similar cases are pending in a half-dozen states, while many others have been dismissed.
What were the arguments to keep or remove Trump from the ballot?
Trump’s lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, argued that the former president is not an “officer of the United States,” which he said refers only to appointed officials and not elected officials. Section 3 refers to people who have taken an oath and are officers of the U.S.
He also argued that for states to remove candidates from the ballot, Congress would have to pass legislation.
Mitchell said Jan. 6, 2021, was not an insurrection, which he said requires “an organized concerted effort to overthrow the government of the United States through violence.”
That drew rebuttal from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who said, “Your point is that a chaotic effort to overthrow the government is not an insurrection?”
Mitchell responded that Jan. 6, 2021, was a “riot” and not an insurrection.
“The events were shameful, criminal, violent, all of those things, but did not qualify as insurrection as that term is used in Section 3,” he said.
Murray, the lawyer arguing to remove Trump, said that Trump is an officer of the United States.
“There is no possible rationale for such an exemption,” Murray said. “Section 3 uses deliberately broad language to cover all positions of federal power requiring an oath to the Constitution.”
Murray also said Trump’s arguments ignore the constitutional role of the states in running presidential elections.
“States are allowed to safeguard their ballots,” by excluding those who are younger than 35, running for a third term or as in the case of Trump, “those who have engaged in insurrection against the Constitution in violation of their oath.”
How did the justices react to these arguments?
Many justices appeared skeptical of removing Trump from the ballot, noting implications for democracy.
If the Colorado ruling stands, Chief Justice John Roberts said, many states could remove the Democratic candidate and other states could remove the Republican candidate.
“It will come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election,” Roberts said. “That’s a pretty daunting consequence.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked, “What about the idea that we should think about democracy, think about the right of the people to elect candidates of their choice, letting the people decide that? Because your position has the effect of disenfranchising voters to a significant degree.”
Meanwhile, Jackson challenged Murray on his argument that Section 3 applies to presidents.
“Why didn’t they put the word president in the very enumerated list in section three? The thing that really is troubling to me is I totally understand your argument, but they were listing people that were barred and ‘president’ is not there. And so, I guess that just makes me worry that maybe they weren’t focusing on the president.”
One point the justices did not focus on: whether Trump, through his words or actions, bore responsibility for the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
What’s next?
Legal experts said the justices have a few options.
The likeliest would be for a majority to overturn the Colorado decision on the argument that states cannot act individually to disqualify a presidential candidate. One way to do this would be to rule that Congress has the sole authority to implement Section 3 of the 14th Amendment by passing a law, something it hasn’t done since the amendment was ratified.
Another option would be to overturn Colorado’s decision based on a different argument — such as that Trump didn’t take part in an “insurrection,” the word used in the 14th Amendment, or that the president wasn’t envisioned by the drafters as being subject to the amendment.
But Mark Graber, University of Maryland law professor, and other legal experts said that option is unlikely because the justices likely would prefer to avoid detailed efforts to frame implementation of the 14th Amendment, because that would set a far-reaching precedent.
The other options would be allowing Colorado’s disqualification to stand, or declaring Trump disqualified everywhere. But that seems unlikely based on justices’ comments in court.
Graber said he “would not be surprised” to see a decision within two weeks, and others agreed.
RELATED: Former President Donald Trump on the Truth-O-Meter
A special counsel investigating President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents concluded that no criminal charges were warranted. However, Robert Hur in his final report criticized Biden’s practices in handling sensitive documents, saying Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” as a private citizen after he served as vice president.
In a 388-page report, the special counsel also dwelled on Biden’s lapses in memory, writing that “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.”
The portrayal of Biden, who is 81 as he seeks another term, offers useful campaign material for Biden’s likely opponent, former President Donald Trump, 77, and the characterization drew strong White House criticism in a letter appended to the special counsel’s report.
But the report also preempted comparisons with Trump, stating that Trump’s own classified documents prosecution — which a separate special counsel, Jack Smith, is handling — has “several material distinctions” from Biden’s. A big one is that Biden cooperated with the investigation while Trump thwarted federal efforts to retrieve documents.
“According to the indictment, (Trump) 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,” Hur wrote in the report.
Hur found that Biden willfully retained classified documents about Afghanistan and notebooks containing Biden’s handwritten notes about security and foreign policy. The report detailed some of Biden’s haphazard storage practices, saying some of the Afghanistan documents were “found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.”
After an investigation that included more than 100 witnesses, Hur’s team wrote that, despite the investigators’ concerns about how Biden had handled certain materials, a jury would be unlikely to find Biden guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
In a statement after the report’s release, Biden said he was pleased that the investigation, which he described as “exhaustive,” yielded no charges.
“I cooperated completely, threw up no roadblocks, and sought no delays,” Biden said, adding that he agreed to five hours of interviews on Oct. 8 and 9 despite dealing with an international crisis after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
Although the lack of prosecution is a victory for Biden, the picture Hur paints “is not a pretty one,” said Joan Mayer, a partner at law firm Thompson Hine LLP. “It is clear that Biden, as vice president and as a senator, employed sloppy procedures to handle classified materials, including leaving them on tables and in unlocked drawers. His staff was similarly negligent.”
What did the report say about Biden’s classified documents?
According to the report, Biden retained materials that included marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and notebooks containing Biden’s handwritten entries about national security and foreign policy issues that included sensitive intelligence sources and methods.
These included a classified, handwritten memo he sent President Barack Obama over Thanksgiving in 2009. FBI agents recovered the materials from Biden’s garage and home office in Wilmington, Delaware. The documents have classification markings up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level, the report said.
The report also offered evidence that Biden knew he possessed classified documents.
“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.
Biden also handwrote notes related to classified subjects, including the President’s Daily Brief and National Security Council meetings, and kept them in unsecured and unauthorized places at his Virginia and Delaware homes, the report said. Biden used some of the notebooks for materials for a 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” Investigators found that Biden shared some classified information with his ghostwriter as the book was written, though no classified material appeared in the book. FBI agents recovered the notebooks from the office and basement den.
After learning of the investigation, the ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, deleted audio recordings of his conversations with Biden. However, Zwonitzer turned over his laptop computer and external hard drive and consented to a search. FBI technicians were able to recover deleted recordings. Zwonitzer also kept some near verbatim transcripts.
Biden “sometimes skipped over notebook passages to avoid reading classified information,” Hur wrote, and if Zwonitzer was called to testify, Zwonitzer would state that Biden said he needed to be careful “because he was worried that there was a possibility that … some of this stuff (handwritten entries in the notebooks) could be classified.”
The report described Biden as “emphatic” about his right to his notebooks, declaring that the materials were his “property” and that he told them “every president before me has done the exact same thing,” referring to keeping handwritten classified materials after leaving office.
Biden cited the example of Ronald Reagan, who kept diaries of his presidency containing classified information, and he was not charged.
Hur considered that precedent in deciding not to charge Biden. Changing the standard “would be seen by many to violate basic principles of notice and fairness,” the report said.
This image, contained in the report from special counsel Robert Hur, shows boxes in a storage closet at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, in March 2021. (Justice Department via AP)
Why was Biden not charged?
Hur considered several factors when weighing whether to charge Biden, including the volume of classified information, the sensitivity of the information, Biden’s motivations and his actions surrounding the documents.
Although the volume of classified information “is not small” and “could support a decision to bring criminal charges, it does not require such charges,” Hur wrote.
The Afghanistan documents concerned “a conflict that is now over,” he wrote, and although the notebook entries contained “some highly sensitive information” dating as late as 2017, the Reagan precedent moved him away from prosecution.
However, Hur noted that some of the findings didn’t favor Biden. If Biden retained documents intentionally, Hur wrote, “he appears to have done so to defend his record and burnish his credentials to run for president. This factor counts against him. It is difficult to conceive of good reasons to risk the nation’s security by mishandling classified information, and bolstering one’s reputation is not one.”
What did the report say about Biden’s memory?
The special counsel repeatedly highlighted what the team considered Biden’s “limited” and “poor” memory, saying that at various points in his interview sessions, Biden didn’t remember when he was vice president and forgot when his term ended and when his term began. “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” the report added.
It also said Biden’s memory appeared hazy when describing the debate to send troops to Afghanistan, mistakenly saying he “had a real difference” of opinion with Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, although Eikenberry was an ally whom Biden had cited approvingly.
The White House aggressively rebutted the portrayal of Biden as someone with failing faculties. On Feb. 5, after the report was sent to the White House for review, the White House wrote a letter saying the report’s discussion of Biden’s memory was neither “accurate or appropriate.”
“The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events,” said the letter, which was appended to the special counsel’s report. “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.’”
How is this similar or different from the Trump documents investigation?
Trump and Biden both had documents with classification markings stored in unauthorized locations while they were private citizens.
However, legal experts see important differences, too, based on how the two presidents interacted with federal officials who were investigating classified document handling. Hur’s report makes a point of contrasting the significant differences between the two cases.
“After being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite,” the report said. “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.”
Biden, by contrast, “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.”
Mayer of Thompson Hine said “Biden’s mishandling of classified materials is not comparable to Trump. “Trump’s case is replete with deliberate, willful behavior.” Mayer added that “Trump had very recent classified information, kept in the open, that could have been stolen or given to any number of hostile countries to the detriment of the United States.”
After the report was released, Trump seized on the report’s criticism of Biden, saying in an emailed statement that Biden’s case was “100 times” severer than his and that what Biden did was “outrageously criminal.” Trump also repeated, inaccurately, that Trump was covered by the Presidential Records Act.
In a statement on Truth Social, Trump wrote, “I was cooperative with the investigators. He wrote that Biden didn’t cooperate and “willfully retained” the documents.
This retelling of the story clashes with what both special counsels have found. Trump was charged in 2023 with 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information.
Someone who willfully retains a covered document and “fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it” can be fined or imprisoned if found guilty.
Beyond the charges of “willful retention,” Trump was charged with a conspiracy to obstruct justice by hiding and concealing documents, withholding a document from a grand jury, corruptly concealing a document or record from a grand jury; and concealing a document in a federal investigation.
RELATED: Yes, Bill Clinton kept tapes in his sock drawer. Here’s why Trump’s case is different.
RELATED: The differences in Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s classified document cases
RELATED: 9 Trump claims about the Mar-a-Lago classified documents probe, fact-checked
Even before a bipartisan group of senators unveiled the text of a foreign aid and immigration overhaul bill on Feb. 4, it faced significant opposition from former President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders.
Before the bill had been released, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz described it as “a steaming pile of crap.” After seeing it, Cruz said, “it turned out my assessment was far too kind.”
On Feb. 7, the bill failed in the Senate after it was opposed by all but four Republicans and a few Democrats. Some of the criticism leveled by Republicans opposing the bill was based on a distortion of what it would and would not do.
Much of the controversy centered on a section of the bill that would have provided emergency authority to the administration to “summarily remove” people who cross into the U.S. illegally between ports of entry, even if they are seeking asylum. While Trump argues that presidents already have that authority, the fact is that when he tried to exercise that kind of authority, the courts blocked him.
Trump and other Republicans have also said the bill would have permitted up to 5,000 illegal entries per day, but that’s not accurate either.
We’ll explain what was in the legislation and the facts on these two talking points.
The Bill, in Brief
The $118 billion bill, called the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, sought significant changes in border policy. It included money to build more border barriers, to greatly expand detention facilities, and to hire more Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, asylum officers and immigration judges to reduce the years-long backlog in cases to determine asylum eligibility. It sought to expedite the asylum process, essentially ending — in most cases — the so-called “catch and release” policy whereby migrants are released into the U.S. pending asylum hearings. And it would have increased the standard of evidence needed to win asylum status.
The bill also would have supplied more funding to interdict fentanyl and human trafficking, and it included $60 billion in aid for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel.
“It doesn’t have everything in it I wanted, it doesn’t have everything it it my Democratic colleagues wanted,” one of the architects of the bill, Republican Sen. James Lankford, said from the Senate floor before the vote was taken. “But it definitely makes a difference.”
In the lead-up to the vote, Lankford accused his Republican colleagues of opposing the bill on political, rather than policy, grounds.
“It is interesting: Republicans, four months ago, would not give funding for Ukraine, for Israel and for our southern border because we demanded changes in policy,” Lankford said on CNN. “And now, it’s interesting, a few months later, when we’re finally getting to the end, they’re like, ‘Oh, just kidding, I actually don’t want a change in law because it’s a presidential election year.’”
The bill was also supported by several groups that typically align with Republicans, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal editorial board. The National Border Patrol Council, a union that represents about 18,000 border patrol agents, also endorsed the bill.
Does Not ‘Accept’ 5,000 Illegal Immigrants a Day
Leading up to the vote, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise on social media said the bill “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day.” Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn added her voice to the opposition, posting that she would “never vote to make illegal immigration legal.”
Those comments misrepresented the bill.
The bill stated that temporary border emergency authority would be automatically activated by the Department of Homeland Security secretary if there is an average of 5,000 or more migrant encounters a day over seven consecutive days — or if there are 8,500 or more such encounters on any single day. In December — according to the latest data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection — there was an average of more than 8,000 encounters a day of migrants who crossed the border illegally between points of entry.
Migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. from Mexico are detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection on May 05, 2023, in San Luis, Arizona. Photo by Nick Ut/Getty Images.
“It’s not that the first 5,000 [migrants encountered at the border] are released, that’s ridiculous,” Lankford said on the Senate floor. “The first 5,000 we detain, we screen and then we deport. If we get above 5,000, we just detain and deport.”
In a social media post on Feb. 5, Trump wrote, “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill, which only gives Shutdown Authority after 5000 Encounters a day.”
He’s wrong about the 5,000 encounters threshold. Although that is the threshold for mandatory activation of the emergency authority, the bill also would have extended “discretionary activation” to the Homeland Security secretary once there is an average of 4,000 or more encounters over seven consecutive days. Customs and Border Protection provides only monthly data, and looking at data during the Trump administration the number of encounters would have reached that threshold in May 2019, when encounters averaged 4,286 per day.
“The reason we’re doing that [providing emergency authority] is because we want to be able to shut down the system when it gets overloaded, so we have enough time to process those asylum claims,” Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who helped craft the bill, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Feb. 4.
“So we have placed provisions in the law that mandate the enforcement of each of these provisions of our law and require the Biden administration and any future administration to actually implement this,” Sinema, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said. “So, we’re requiring it, not permitting it.”
In other words, while President Joe Biden had said that if the bill passed he would have exercised that emergency authority immediately, it would not have been a choice at this time — it would have been mandatory.
As for claims that the bill would allow or accept 5,000 illegal crossings a day, that’s a distortion of what’s in the bill.
“That authority would be mandated when arrivals exceed an average over the previous seven days of 5,000,” Theresa Cardinal Brown, a senior adviser on immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told us via email. “This is not a number that is ‘allowed in.’ It is a threshold of ARRIVALS that triggers a new authority.”
“We already have more than 5,000 illegal crossings happening,” Brown said. “We aren’t ‘allowing it’; it is happening, and we then have to deal with it.”
“There is this idea that we control how many migrants attempt illegal crossings. We do not. The migrants (and smugglers) control that,” Brown said. “We control what happens once we encounter someone who has already crossed the border illegally.”
Presidential Authority
The other point in Trump’s post is that Biden “already [has] the right to CLOSE DOWN THE BORDER NOW.” But Trump tried to bar migrants caught crossing into the U.S. illegally from pursuing asylum and failed.
Several other Republicans made the same dubious claim. House Speaker Mike Johnson argued in a post on X that Supreme Court precedent and provisions of 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act give the president such authority. He cited Section 212(f) of the act that states a president may, via proclamation, “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate” if their entry is deemed “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
“You can see after December the increase of illegals that are coming to our border, 302,000 in December, illegal crossings into the United States,” Sen. Joni Ernst said at a Senate Republican press conference on Jan. 31. “Yet President Biden won’t shut the border down.”
At the same press conference, Republican Sen. Steve Daines quoted Biden as saying that the bill would give him “new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed,” and that he would have exercised that authority immediately if the bill passed. Daines, however, said, “And let’s be very clear, President Biden could use his executive authority now to stop it, but he refuses.”
Trump’s Attempt to ‘Close’ Border
In November 2018, as reports circulated about a “caravan” of migrants from Central America making their way through Mexico en route to the U.S. border, Trump issued a proclamation barring the entry of migrants unless they entered at ports of entry. The same day, the administration issued new regulations making those who entered the U.S. illegally between ports of entry ineligible for asylum.
Trump’s proclamation largely relied on Section 212(f) of the INA, the same section cited by Johnson in his social media post arguing that Biden already had the authority to “close” the southern border.
The courts, however, blocked Trump’s effort.
A federal District Court judge in California temporarily halted Trump’s effort, after concluding that barring migrants who enter outside of designated ports of entry from seeking asylum violated federal immigration law, international law and “the expressed intent of Congress.”
“Whatever the scope of the President’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden,” the judge wrote.
In a 2-1 decision in December 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals denied the Trump administration’s emergency motion for a stay of the District Court’s order. The Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, but its motion to stay the District Court ruling blocking enforcement of the policy was denied.
“The President does not have the authority to close the border under 212(f),” Denise Gilman, co-director of the Immigration Clinic and law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told us via email. “That legal provision provides for a bar on the entry of certain individuals or specific categories of persons. It does not allow for closure of the border and wholesale exclusion of all arrivals at the border.”
Provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act “make very clear that all persons arriving at the border or entering the United States, without regard to status, must be processed for asylum if they indicate a fear of return to their home countries,” Gilman said. “These provisions cannot simply be trumped by 212(f). Under current law, they must be given effect and asylum seekers must be able to present their claims.”
A little over a year after the courts blocked his proclamation, as the pandemic hit, Trump invoked Title 42, a public health law that allowed border officials to immediately return many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally, even those who sought asylum. When the federal public health emergency for COVID-19 ended, Biden lifted Title 42 in May 2023.
Brown noted that Title 42 was challenged in court, “and at least one court ruled that it could not be used to supersede immigration law.”
“It was heading toward SCOTUS when Biden ended it making the case moot,” Brown said. “But even under Title 42, we took everyone into custody to do the identification and security checks and then determine when/how we could send them out of the country. Trump had to release some migrants into the interior when Mexico wouldn’t take them back or we couldn’t send them back to their home countries. ANY border authority, no matter how strict, can be rendered moot if we simply don’t have the resources to apply that authority to the number of arrivals.”
Immigration law experts say the proposed Senate bill would have given Biden the authority to quickly deport many of those crossing illegally into the country and seeking asylum.
If the bill became law, Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us in a phone interview, Biden “could prevent people from applying for asylum and quickly remove lots of people. You would see many more people being returned.” The bill would still, however, allow some migrants who come through designated points of entry to apply for asylum.
Section 3301 of the Senate bill — the section that deals with border emergency authority — “changes IMMIGRATION LAW, to create a temporary border authority that would work very much like Title 42,” Brown said, “to allow for summary deportations of migrants and deny them the chance to apply for any way to stay in the U.S. other than very limited circumstances.” And, she said, it would “eliminate the type of litigation that Title 42 faced.”
Past Attempts to ‘Close’ Border
A Congressional Research Service report from April 2019 considered four instances when ports of entry were restricted: a full closure of the southern border on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination; the closure of nine ports of entry for several days after the abduction of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in Mexico in 1985; and restrictions imposed by President Richard Nixon as part of “Operation Intercept” in 1969 and President George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, both of which “consisted primarily of extensive inspections that brought border traffic to a standstill.” None of those executive actions, the report said, “prompt[ed] legal challenges that required federal courts to assess the Executive’s authority for the measures.”
The report also discussed an iteration of Trump’s travel ban, which restricted certain nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea from obtaining visas to travel to the U.S., and which was ultimately upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
According to William A. Stock, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Supreme Court ruling “applies only to ‘immigrants and nonimmigrants,’ people who have been issued permanent or temporary visas to the United States, and allows the President to deny entry to those individuals if they have already been issued visas, or to refuse them visas they would otherwise be entitled to, if they met the conditions of the Proclamation.”
The situation confounding Biden at the southern border is different, Stock told us via email.
“At the Southern Border, however, President Biden is confronted with migrants who have neither temporary nor permanent visas to enter the United States, and as such are neither seeking ‘entry as immigrants’ nor ‘entry as nonimmigrants,’ which is what can be suspended using the 212(f) authority,” Stock said. “Rather, such individuals are normally seeking to present claims to protection from persecution in their home countries – asylum – and the statute expressly allows any person either physically present in the US, arriving in the US at a port of entry, or arriving at the US border other than at a port of entry to submit an application for asylum.”
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A video shared across social media appears to show Russian President Vladimir Putin snubbing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he takes a seat next to him at an event.
One Instagram user shared the video with text reading, “Putin refuses to acknowledge Netanyahu! Based.” The video’s caption reads, “Putin gave Netanyahu a cold shoulder and sat right next to him.”
Several users asked in the comments when and where the video was taken. One user replied saying it was taken “4 days ago” amid the war in Gaza.
The video is from four years ago. It was taken Jan. 23, 2020, during the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem that commemorated 75 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
This video clip on its own is misleading, as photographs of the event show several instances of Putin and Netanyahu interacting.
An Associated Press photo shows the two leaders cutting a ribbon together at the event during a dedication of a monument in Jerusalem that honored victims of the Nazi-led siege of Leningrad, present-day St. Petersburg, which is Putin’s hometown.
Another Reuters photo from the same day shows the two interacting.
A third photograph from Putin’s official website shows Putin and Netanyahu shaking hands at Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem the same day.
The Associated Press reported that Putin was a guest of honor at the event and Netanyahu gave him “a fawning welcome” as he asked Putin to release an Israeli woman who was imprisoned in Russia on drug charges.
Putin even delivered a speech at the forum, where he addressed Netanyahu by name. Netanyhau was seen embracing Putin after he finished that speech in a YouTube video by i24NEWS.
We rate the claim that Putin refused to acknowledge Netanyahu False.
