President Joe Biden’s age has long been the subject of conservative attacks, even more so now that at age 81, he’s seeking a second term.
According to claims using edited or out-of-context videos, Biden once left in the middle of a news interview (False), “turned around and shook hands with thin air” (False), and sat in an imaginary chair at a D-Day event (he didn’t).
A new video emerged at the Group of Seven Summit in Italy that people claimed showed Biden “wandering off” during a June 13 skydiving demonstration.
Conservative media outlets and others on social media seized on a shortened video clip from the event that appeared to show Biden slowly walking away from the other world leaders before being pulled back by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for a group photo.
“WHAT IS BIDEN DOING?” RNC Research, an X account managed by former President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, asked in a June 13 post sharing the video.
The RNC video had nearly 3 million views as of June 14 and soon began to spread across social media with conservative media outlets and influencers citing RNC’s video and adding claims that Biden had wandered off.
A Daily Mail TikTok video’s caption said Biden “strangely wandered away” and had to be “guided” back to the group.
The “Jesse Watters Primetime” Instagram account shared the video and wrote, “Biden wandered off into an Italian field at the G7 summit.”
The New York Post took it a step further, altering the video’s frame to make it more narrow, cutting out a skydiver seen in the RNC video.
“President Biden appeared to wander off at the G7 summit in Italy, with officials needing to pull him back to focus,” the New York post wrote in an X post, linking to an article that credited RNC Research’s video. The claim also made the Post’s print edition front page, with a headline calling Biden the “Meander in Chief.”
But a longer video of the event, shared on YouTube by the G7 Italy account, tells a different story. At various points in the G7 video, you can see parachutists off to the right of the frame, to Biden’s left.
In the video below, parachutists to Biden’s left can be seen on the grass as another lands with a G7 Summit flag, shortly before Biden turns to speak with them.
Cable news network MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” broadcast showed video from a different angle, where you can clearly see several parachutists behind Biden’ to his left. He turns and speaks to them and gives a thumbs up sign, before Meloni came over to get his attention for the group photo.
The New York Post’s X post was tagged with a community note that said, “The video has been cropped.” We reached out to the New York Post and its editor, Keith Poole, for comment, but didn’t immediately hear back.
RNC spokesperson Anna Kelly didn’t speak to the intent of the video the group shared on X, but emailed links to posts, including an Italian news outlet’s coverage of Biden’s visit that described his voice as “weak.” Another link Kelly shared is a Trump War Room post that featured the misleading cover of the New York Post.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told the British publication The Telegraph that Biden had turned to greet the parachutists and hadn’t wandered off.
“He went to go and talk to the pilot, one of the parachute jumpers. He went to go and shake all their hands,” an archived version of The Telegraph story said. The article has since been updated to remove Sunak’s quotes.
Andrew Bates, White House senior deputy press secretary, confirmed that Biden was giving a thumbs up to skydivers and thanking veterans. He pointed out conservatives such as Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican member of Congress from Illinois, and the conservative outlet The Washington Examiner called out the misleading claims.
Our ruling
Social media posts, including from The New York Post, The Daily Mail and “Jesse Watters Primetime,” claimed that video showed Biden wandering away from other world leaders at the G7 Summit in Italy at an event in which skydivers landed carrying flags of each country in attendance.
But longer video and video from other angles clearly shows Biden was speaking to skydivers on the ground before the Italian prime minister tapped him for a group photo. The New York Post edited a video from RNC Research to cut one skydiver out of the frame. The claim is False.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Anyone who has heard a speech by former President Donald Trump in the last few years has certainly heard his unsubstantiated claim that countries around the world are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending those people to the U.S.
Trump has offered scant support for this claim, but in virtually all of his recent speeches, he has been citing a reported drop in crime in Venezuela as evidence that the economically and politically beleaguered country is sending its criminals to the U.S.
Experts in and out of Venezuela told us there is no evidence to back up Trump’s claim. Reported crime is trending down in Venezuela — though not nearly as dramatically as Trump claims — but crime experts in the country say there are numerous reasons for that and they have nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to prove a negative, and those who follow Venezuelan politics say such a tactic is not beyond Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has been in power since 2013 and is seeking another six-year term. The FBI acknowledges some Venezuelan criminals have migrated to the U.S., but there’s no indication they were purposefully released from prison to come to this country.
When Trump makes such an explosive and sweeping claim — and makes it a hallmark of his case to return to office — the onus is on him to provide evidence. He hasn’t. (His press office did not respond to our inquires about it.) And the argument that Venezuelan crime is down is not the proof Trump suggests it is.
Trump’s Claim
In recent speeches, Trump has sometimes said that crime is down “a staggering 67%” in Venezuela, while at other times he has put the drop in crime at “72% in a year.”
But in each case, as he did in a video posted to social media on June 4, he cited the statistics to support his claim, “They’re taking their drug dealers and their people in jail, lots of people in jail, they’re taking their murderers, their killers, they’re taking them all and they’re sending them into the United States.”
“Venezuela was crime ridden,” Trump said in remarks on May 31 after his conviction in the hush money case. “Caracas, their cities, crime ridden two years ago, three years ago. They just reported a 72% drop in crime in the last year because all of their criminals, most of them, and the rest are coming in now, the ones that didn’t come in. In Venezuela, their prisons have been emptied into the United States. Their criminals and drug dealers have been taken out of the cities and brought into the United States, and that’s true with many other countries.”
In this report, we’ll focus on Venezuela because that’s the country most often cited by Trump.
Carlos Nieto of the Venezuelan nongovernmental organizationA Window to Freedom is, of course, well aware of Trump’s relentless insistence that Venezuelan officials have been systematically emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending those people to the U.S.
Nieto, whose group has been monitoring the prison situation in Venezuela for more than 25 years, told us he has observed no evidence that supports Trump’s claim. He added that there definitely is no official state policy to that effect.
Some criminals have emigrated from Venezuela, he told us in Spanish, and some have made their way to the U.S. But, he said, “there is nothing that can be affirmed that establishes that there is an agreement, or that the Venezuelan government is helping criminals leave Venezuela to go to the United States.”
But neither can he rule out that it could be happening “under the hood.”
“I do not doubt that it could be happening, nor do I doubt that it can be done,” Nieto said. “I mean, these people, I’m talking about Maduro and his clique, are capable of that and many more things.”
But that’s pure speculation. And again, Nieto and other experts say they have seen no evidence of it.
Venezuelan Crime Stats
Reliable crime statistics in Venezuela are notoriously difficult to obtain. The government hasn’t provided dependable crime reports in many years, Mike LaSusa, deputy director of content at InSight Crime, a think tank focused on crime and security in the Americas, told us via email.
Although Venezuelan security officials in May reported a 25% drop in crime this year compared with the same period in 2023, “the absence of official reports makes it impossible to verify the data,” LaSusa said in a May 28 report.
In the absence of reliable government reporting, media and nongovernmental organizations have become the most trusted sources for documenting and tracking crime, LaSusa said.
One such NGO, the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, in December reported a 25% decrease in violent deaths between 2022 and 2023. (Violent deaths include homicides, deaths by police intervention and suspected violent deaths under investigation.) That drop was widely reported in U.S. media. If Trump is citing the murder tally as a proxy for overall crime, he is vastly overstating the one-year drop.
But the number of violent deaths has been declining for years in Venezuela, according to the group’s tallies, and is nearly 70% lower than it was in 2018, according to Roberto Briceño-León, the founder and director of the OVV (the acronym for Venezuelan Observatory of Violence in Spanish). That corresponds with Trump’s figure, but, of course, that is a much longer time frame that predates the Biden administration.
LaSusa said the OVV’s murder rate estimates track with InSight’s observation about “a reduction in the intensity of criminal violence in certain areas of the country.” But, he said, InSight has not seen a reduction in crime of 67% in a year, as Trump claimed.
“Additionally, the reductions that we have observed seem to respond largely to changes in criminal dynamics, rather than the effectiveness of the government’s security policies,” LaSusa said. “Basically, criminal groups seem to be seeking new opportunities outside of Venezuela due to the lack of opportunities in the country.”
What’s Driving the Crime Drop?
In its Annual Report on Violence 2023, OVV documented 6,973 violent deaths in 2023, about 14% of which resulted from police enforcement. That’s down from 9,447 and 9,367 in 2021 and 2022, respectively. That’s a decline of 26% in the reported number of violent deaths between 2021 and 2023.
While the violent death rate may have dropped, a national survey conducted by OVV in mid-2023 found that about 78% of residents believed crime had stayed the same or gotten worse.
Briceño-León shared with us via email in Spanish some of the causes OVV identified for the drop in murders — none of which includes a government program to ship convicts to the U.S.
“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying the prisons or mental hospitals to send them out of the country, whether to the USA or any other country,” Briceño-León said.
Rather, he said, the drop in crime is due to worsening economic and living conditions in the country, which has led to a massive out-migration of nearly 8 million people since 2014.
“Crime is reduced in Venezuela due to a reduction in crime opportunities: bank robberies disappear because there is no money to steal; kidnappings are reduced because there is no cash to pay ransoms; robberies on public transportation cease because travelers have no money in their pockets and old, worthless cell phones; and assaults on bank money dispensers disappear because the cash they can give to their clients has not exceeded twenty U.S. dollars,” Briceño-León said.
There has also been a consolidation of gang activity, which has led to a reduction in crime. In its report, OVV wrote that the drop in crime “can be attributed to the reduction of disorganized criminal activities and the growing concentration and monopolization of violence by powerful criminal organizations. These criminal organizations are now focusing on specific niches of criminal opportunities, which has led to a decreased overall level of violence in the country.”
“The decrease in ‘disorganized’ violence, which causes high lethality, has been reduced by the notable emigration of young people and the loss of opportunities for crime,” the report stated. “In recent years, there has been a reduction in the lethality of violence in certain parts of the country. This trend has been attributed to agreements made between criminal gangs regarding the distribution of tasks during business operations, as well as the demarcation of areas of operation, which has allowed for their expansion and consolidation. However, in municipalities where there are no such agreements or where criminal control has not been fully established, violent events continue to occur.”
The consolidation of organized crime has led to “a kind of mafia peace” in areas they control, Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan investigative journalist, told us in Spanish.
The “humanitarian emergency” in Venezuela has also had implications for criminals as well. Venezuela, she said, “stopped being attractive for crime, because it no longer made sense to kidnap. … It made no sense to steal, because everyone was poor. In Venezuela … no one had money, people were starving and then for crime, for criminals, it was no longer profitable to have criminal activities.”
Rísquez said another reason for the decrease in crime is that Venezuelan authorities, sometime between 2015 and 2021, began “a large number of alleged extrajudicial executions” of people accused of belonging to criminal groups.
The OVV report notes that some criminals have also left Venezuela “seeking to continue their criminal life in other places where they find greater opportunities for profit,” Briceño-León said. But, he said, the vast majority of emigrants from Venezuela are “honest workers fleeing the country’s poverty, looking for a job and a better future.”
The vast majority of those fleeing Venezuela have settled in nearby South American countries. But more and more are making their way to the U.S. Prior to President Joe Biden taking office, relatively few Venezuelan emigrants were intercepted by U.S. Border Patrol. For most of the 2010s, less than 100 Venezuelans a year were caught trying to cross the southwest border illegally. The number grew to more than 2,000 in fiscal year 2019. But beginning in 2021 the numbers began to swell, and topped 187,000 and 200,000 in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, respectively.
A Venezuelan asylum seeker carries his daughter before they cross the Rio Grande into Brownsville, Texas, in December 2022. The U.S. has seen a surge of migrants from Venezuela since 2021. Photo by Veronica G. Cardenas/ AFP via Getty Images.
As of January, the U.S. had the third-largest number of Venezuelan emigrants in the world (545,000) — though Colombia remained by far the largest destination (2.9 million), followed by Peru (1.5 million). Brazil, Ecuador, Chile and Spain each had roughly the same number as the U.S.
Criminal groups with origins in Venezuela have quickly spread to neighboring South American countries where most Venezuelans have settled. According to a U.S. State Department trafficking report for Colombia released in 2023, “El Tren de Aragua – Venezuela’s most powerful criminal gang – and the National Liberation Army (ELN) operate sex trafficking networks in the border town of Villa del Rosario in the Norte de Santander department. These groups exploit Venezuelan migrants and internally displaced Colombians in sex trafficking and take advantage of economic vulnerabilities and subject them to debt bondage.”
And some criminals from Venezuela have come to the U.S.
Nieto, of the Venezuelan nongovernmental organization A Window to Freedom, attributed the decrease in crimes to the mass emigration from the country in recent years, a number, he said, that “undoubtedly does not exclude criminals.”
There is some evidence Tren de Aragua gang members have also made their way to the U.S. The U.S. Border Patrol told CNN en Español that 38 potential members of Tren de Aragua were arrested at the border between October 2022 and October 2023.
On April 5, U.S. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens posted on social media to “[w]atch out for this gang. It is the most powerful in Venezuela, known for murder, drug trafficking, sex crimes, extortion, & other violent acts.”
And suspected members of the Venezuelan gang have been linked to a number of crimes in the U.S., including the murder of a former Venezuelan police officer in Miami in November, and a spate of cell phone robberies in New York City.
In March, Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. María Elvira Salazar led a group of 23 federal legislators petitioning Biden to formally designate Tren de Aragua as a transnational criminal organization, which would allow the U.S. to freeze assets its members have in the U.S. In a Senate subcommittee hearing on April 11, Chris Landberg, deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, told Rubio that “we’re closely tracking Tren De Aragua and have similar concerns to you,” though he declined to discuss internal deliberations about its designation.
Rísquez, author of “The Aragua Train: The gang that revolutionized organized crime in Latin America,” said that while some criminals are inevitably among those who have emigrated from Venezuela to the U.S., “There is no element, no evidence, nothing that indicates that in Venezuela prisoners are being released to leave or to be sent to the United States to commit crimes. There is no plan from the Venezuelan government that points toward that.”
Prison Releases
Complicating the issue is that Venezuela has, in fact, been actively trying to reduce its prison population.
Venezuela has been seeking to address severe overcrowding in its preventive detention centers, which were only designed to hold inmates for 48 hours but have become the de facto prisons of the country, Nieto said.
In March, the Presidential Commission for Judicial Revolution announced the release of 100 inmates from such a facility as part of a directive issued by Maduro to evaluate the preventive detention facilities and address overcrowding.
Preventive detention centers were designed to be temporary holding cells for people awaiting a court date. But that’s not what they became, Nieto said.
“The Ministry for the Penitentiary Service many years ago gave the order not to allow the entry of new people [to the traditional prisons] if they did not authorize it,” Nieto said. “This ministry prohibited the entry of new inmates into Venezuelan prisons, which is where they should be. This caused the preventive care centers to collapse and the preventive care centers to become, as they are today, the new prisons of Venezuela.”
Nieto estimates there are as many as 70,000 people held in these preventive care centers, far greater than they were designed to house.
In response, the government created two commissions to review the cases of prisoners and to determine if they should be “granted freedom,” Nieto said. “In fact, there are many who have been released.”
While some in the U.S. have claimed the Venezuelan government is releasing its most violent criminals, the Venezuelan government doesn’t disclose the charges against those released, so there’s no way of knowing, he said.
“Look, people are released, first, in many cases because they have been detained there for several years and a trial has not even been initiated against them,” Nieto said. “Also because in many cases they are minor crimes that do not merit such heavy penalties. So, well, that frees people. There are cases [of those] that have even already served the sentence established at that time.”
In addition, the Venezuelan government under Maduro has attempted recently to militarily regain control of traditional prisons, whose operation had previously been ceded to criminal groups. The leader of the Tren de Aragua gang, Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, and hundreds of others escaped from the prison where the gang originated shortly before the prison was raided by government authorities in September, CNN en Español reported. He remains at large, and InSight reported that it is believed he is being protected by criminal associates in a mining town in Venezuela near the border with Guyana.
According to the World Prison Brief website maintained by Helen Fair of the Institute for Crime and Justice Police Research, Venezuela’s prison population (not including pre-trial detainees) declined from 37,543 in 2020 to 32,200 in 2022 (and had been declining for the four years before that as well).
The government’s efforts to retake control of the prisons “has involved relocating some prisoners from one prison to another, and there are some prisoners who are unaccounted for,” LaSusa, of InSight, said. “However, the Venezuelan government has no known policy of selecting particular inmates to send them outside the country.”
Speculation
Again, Trump has provided no evidence to back up his claim that the Venezuelan government is emptying its prisons and sending inmates to the U.S.
Some supporters of Trump’s immigration policy say that, while perhaps speculative, there is good reason to believe Trump may be right.
Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates lower immigration, wrote a column noting that Cuba did something like that in the 1980s, and he argued that since there are ideological and political ties between Cuba and Venezuela, “the idea may not be as specious as some have claimed.”
In 1980, Cuban leader Fidel Castro allowed the mass migration of some 125,000 Cubans to the U.S. in what was known as the Mariel boatlift.
“Most were true refugees, many had families here, and the great majority has settled into American communities without mishap,” the Washington Post wrote in 1983. “But the Cuban dictator played a cruel joke. He opened his jails and mental hospitals and put their inmates on the boats too.”
According to the Post, about 22,000 of the new arrivals “freely admitted that they were convicts.” Some were political prisoners, but others were convicts who had committed serious felonies, including violent crimes.
Arthur pointed to a drop in Venezuelan crime, the close alignment between the Cuban and Venezuelan governments, and anecdotal evidence of Venezuelans committing crimes in the U.S.
“None of this is evidence of anything,” Arthur told us, but “all of this does raise some questions.”
But the bar is higher than that for such a definitive and repeated claim by Trump, and numerous officials say they have seen no evidence to support Trump’s claim. (Not to mention the fact that Trump claims the emptying of prisons and mental institutions is happening “with many other countries.”)
“This claim has come up repeatedly about various countries, Venezuela is just the latest example,” Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, told us. “While the actions of institutions in Venezuela is not our specialty, we are unaware of any action by Venezuelan authorities (or those of any other country) to empty its jails and prisons or its mental-health institutions to send criminals or people with mental-health issues to the U.S.”
“They are neither emptying the prisons nor the mental shelters to send people to the United States, nor is the reduction in crime associated with [Trump’s claim],” Rísquez, the Venezuelan investigative journalist, told us. “Those statements by former President Trump, it seems to me that they have no basis, that they are political, that they have to do with, well, some intention to criminalize migration or the processes that are occurring in the United States with migrants.”
In an interview with CBS News in March, Owens, the U.S. Border Patrol chief, was asked if it was accurate — as Trump has said — that “we have millions and millions of people coming from jails and prisons.”
“I don’t know,” Owens said. “I don’t know if other countries are releasing people from jails and those folks that got released are making their way up, or not, I don’t know what the numbers would be. It’s the unknown that scares us. I can tell you that there are at least 140,000 that we know about that have gotten away [since October], that we have detected but have not been able to apprehend. And I know there’s a good likelihood that there’s plenty more that we have not detected that also got away. Is it possible that at least a portion of them come from violent criminal backgrounds or served time in prison in other countries? Absolutely.”
But among the large number of Venezuelan migrants who are crossing illegally into the U.S. and then seeking asylum status, “I think they absolutely are by and large good people,” Owens said.
Nonetheless, he said, there is “a very small amount” among those apprehended that have criminal backgrounds, including “convicted sexual predators” and “convicted gang members.” Owens said it is only logical that there is a “higher incidence” of criminals among the so-called gotaways, because they are afraid to turn themselves in for CBP scrutiny.
“Most of the folks who we’re encountering that are turning themselves in, they’re coming across because they’re either fleeing terrible conditions or they’re economic migrants looking for a better way of life,” Owens said. “It doesn’t make them bad people. It’s just that they’re not being respectful of the laws that we’ve established as a country and they’re actually putting people in this country in harm’s way because they’re pulling the border security apparatus off of task.”
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“Breaking: Steelers’ Coach Tomlin Directs Team To Not Participate In Pride Month, ‘It’s Woke Crap’ read a June 9 Facebook post that showed an image of Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin alongside another image of people holding rainbow flags.
(Screenshot of Facebook Post)
The 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.)
The viral post links to a story in the comments section. That story claimed Tomlin made anti-Pride celebration comments during a press conference. “We are here to play football, not to get involved in social or political movements,” it quoted him as saying. “Pride Month is woke crap, and it has no place in our team activities.”
A Steelers spokesperson confirmed that Tomlin made no such comments, and a review of Tomlin’s recent press conferences shows he didn’t mention Pride Month.
The story appears to have started on SpaceXMania.com and its affiliated website Essports.com — the same network of satire websites that gave rise to a False story about the Kansas City Chiefs refusing to participate in Pride Month.
When the Steelers claim was first shared on Facebook it had a satire disclaimer, but as it spread and the story was reposted on other websites, that disclaimer disappeared.
Some National Football League teams have made headlines this month because the teams have not made public statements acknowledging Pride Month on social media.
As of June 13, the official Steelers X account, Instagram, and Facebook had not shared anything LGBTQ+ related for Pride Month, but the team’s official community relations account on X posted a picture on June 1 after it said some of its staff marched in a local pride parade.
We rate the claim that Tomlin directed his team to not participate in Pride Month and called it “woke crap,” False.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Quick Take
Russian warships conducted simulated military exercises on their way to Cuba in June. But social media posts share clips from a 2018 Russian video of missile tests in the White Sea to claim the warships fired live missiles “off the coast of Florida” before arriving in Havana. A Department of Defense spokesperson said the claim is “not true.”
Full Story
A four-ship Russian convoy, including a military frigate and a nuclear-powered submarine, the Kazan, arrived in Cuba on June 12 for a five-day visit, CNN reported. Russian state media said that on the way to Cuba, the warships conducted military exercises “using computer simulation for naval targets, designating ship groupings of a simulated enemy,” CNN also reported.
But posts on social media shared clips of a years-old video to falsely claim the Russian ships fired live missiles “off the coast of Florida” on their way to Cuba.
A June 12 Instagram post by an account called packingpatriot.2 bears a caption that claims, “Russia is showing off its naval firepower right off the coast of Florida today thanks to Joe Biden and his useful idiots.”
The narrator on the post claims the Biden administration is “pushing us to the brink of World War III with their support of Ukraine.” He then shows a video of four missiles apparently launching from a ship through roiling smoke and into the sky. Those images are followed by a submarine on the surface of the water, then submerging, as Russian-speaking crew members are seen operating inside the ship. The text overlaid on the video says, “Russians showing off their firepower right off the coast of Florida.”
The post had received more than 6,800 likes as of June 14.
A similar Instagram post also shared on June 12 has text that claims, “Breaking[:] Russia conducting marine exercises with nuclear submarines just 66 miles off the coast of Florida…” That post also shows the video of the missiles blasting off and the Russian crew inside the submarine.
But a Google search of images from the Instagram posts shows that a longer version of the video was shared six years ago on YouTube with the title, “Russia’s Nuclear Submarine Successfully Test-Fires 4 Bulava intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.”
An image from that video also appeared in an article on the Indian news site The Week on May 24, 2018. That article reported, “As a warning to the western nations, and in particular the US, Russia test-fired four Bulava intercontinental ballistic missiles from the nuclear submarine Yuri Dolgoruky on May 22. Fired from the submarine in a submerged position from the White Sea, the missiles successfully hit targets on the Kura range in the Kamchatka Peninsula.”
An Associated Press story that appeared in the Navy Times on Oct. 14, 2019, also shows the image used on the Indian news site, and the caption reads: “In this photo made from the footage taken from Russian Defense Ministry official web site on Thursday, May 24, 2018, the Russian nuclear submarine Yuri Dolgoruky test-fires the Bulava missiles from the White Sea.”
So the video in the Instagram posts does not show Russian missiles being fired “off the coast of Florida” in June 2024. Rather, the video — provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense — shows missiles being fired by a different submarine in the White Sea toward Kamchatka in eastern Russia in 2018.
We asked the U.S. Department of Defense for a response to the social media claim that a Russian ship fired missiles near the Florida coast while en route to Cuba, and a spokesperson emailed a one-line reply: “That is not true.”
The Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov did fire a 21-gun salute as it arrived in Havana harbor, CNN reported.
U.S. officials told the New York Times that the Russian warships posed no threat and were not carrying nuclear weapons. The Department of Defense has been monitoring the movement of the ships through the Atlantic Ocean, a spokesperson told the Times. The Russian Ministry of Defense said the warships practiced locating targets and used precision missiles to simulate destroying those targets at distances of more than 350 miles, according to the Times.
CNN reported that U.S. officials said Russian ships traveled to Cuba every year between 2013 and 2020.
The Russian-Cuban alliance goes back further. In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane captured images of nuclear missile sites being built by the then-Soviet Union in Cuba. Then-President John F. Kennedy placed a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent more Soviet supplies from arriving and demanded that the missiles be removed. The Americans and Soviets reached a deal in which the missiles were dismantled and the U.S. promised not to invade the island, ending the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis.
Sources
Associated Press. “Russia slates drills for nuclear forces.” 14 Oct 2019.
CNN. “Russian frigate receives 21 gun salute as it enters Havana harbor.” 12 Jun 2024.
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. “Cuban Missile Crisis.” Accessed 13 Jun 2024.
Oppmann, Patrick, et al. “Russian ships arrive in Cuba as Cold War allies strengthen their ties.” CNN. 12 Jun 2024.
Sampson, Eve. “Russian Warships Enter Havana Harbor as Part of Planned Exercises.” New York Times. 12 Jun 2024.
The Week. “Russia’s nuclear submarine test fires four Bulava missiles.” 24 May 2018.
U.S. Department of Defense. Spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 13 Jun 2024.
Reproductive rights — including access to contraception — have emerged as a flashpoint in the 2024 presidential race.
In May, former President Donald Trump said he was “looking at” restrictions on contraception, but quickly walked back his comments and said he would never support such a policy.
On June 5, Democrats forced a vote in the U.S. Senate on the Right to Contraception Act, which would codify a right to birth control. That vote failed, even with two Republicans joining Democrats in support.
Democrats pursued the bill after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In that ruling, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas indicated he favored the court revisiting Griswold v. Connecticut, the decision establishing the right to birth control.
So, like abortion, contraception access is emerging as a state-level issue. That point was made by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to state Legislatures.
“In 2024 alone, GOP-controlled legislatures across the country have targeted birth control,” a June 5, 2024, news release read. “In Wisconsin, Republicans refused to schedule a vote on a bill that would have codified a right to birth control.”
That claim caught PolitiFact Wisconsin’s attention, especially as Democrats push to regain a majority under Wisconsin’s new legislative maps and could highlight access to contraception during their campaigns.
Let’s take a look at where Wisconsin’s right-to-contraception bill ended up this year, and whether Republicans in the state are targeting birth control.
Bill never received hearings in committees, Republicans rejected floor vote attempt
In response to a PolitiFact Wisconsin inquiry, DLCC’s press secretary Sam Paisley pointed to Senate Republicans’ control of the Legislature and their votes against bringing the bill to the floor.
“Democrats pushed to ‘withdraw’ it from committee in order to get a floor vote as soon as possible, as opposed to waiting for the lengthy process through committee,” Paisley said.
Let’s explain that process a little bit further.
That bill was introduced last July. It would have “(established) that a person has a statutory right to obtain contraceptives” and that health care providers have a right to provide it and share information about it.
In short, it would have outlined the right to contraception in Wisconsin’s state law, in case the U.S. Supreme Court precedent establishing that federal right was overturned.
That bill was assigned to committees in the Assembly and Senate, but the Republican chairs of both committees never held a public hearing for it. That’s typical for most bills introduced by Democrats.
In February, Senate Democrats made a last-ditch attempt to take the bill out of committee and bring it to the floor for a vote. Their motion failed, with all Republicans rejecting the effort to vote on the bill.
So, the second half of DLCC’s statement is correct. Republicans never held votes — either on the floor or in committees — much less public hearings for the bill.
Republicans introduced bill allowing pharmacists to prescribe some forms of birth control
But let’s go back to the first part of the statement: that GOP-controlled Legislatures like Wisconsin’s have “targeted birth control.” Wisconsin is listed as an example by DLCC.
Unlike Oklahoma, another example mentioned by DLCC, Republicans in Wisconsin didn’t introduce any bills last session that would have added new restrictions on contraception.
In fact, a Republican-authored bill supported by many Republicans and Democrats would have made accessing some forms of birth control more convenient.
The bill would have allowed pharmacists to prescribe birth control pills and patches, rather than only physicians or advanced practice nurses. It passed the Assembly, but not the Senate.
Some Republicans voted against that bill in the Assembly, but all Democrats voted for it. Many medical groups registered in favor of it.
So while Republicans did not advance a bill that would have codified a right to contraception, many of them did support a bill that would have actually expanded the ways people can get a birth control prescription.
Our ruling
The DLCC claimed Republican legislatures “have targeted birth control” and in Wisconsin “refused to schedule a vote on a bill that would have codified a right to birth control.”
The group is right about Republicans not holding a vote on a particular Democratic bill. But the claim falls short about the GOP specifically targeting birth control.
Indeed, Republicans also introduced a bill – supported by Democrats and medical groups – that would have expanded how people can get a birth control prescription.
Because the second part of their claim is correct, but the first part is off the mark, we rate their claim Half True.
President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign wants voters to contrast his record on health care policy with his predecessor’s. In May, Biden’s campaign began airing a monthlong, $14 million ad campaign targeting swing-state voters and minority groups with spots on TV, digital, and radio.
In the ad, titled “Terminate,” Biden assails former President Donald Trump for his past promises to overturn the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Biden also warns of the potential effect if Trump is returned to office and again pursues repeal.
“That would mean over a hundred million Americans will lose protections for preexisting conditions,” Biden said in the ad.
Less than six months from election day, polls show Trump narrowly leading Biden in a head-to-head race in most swing states, And voters trust Trump to better handle issues such as inflation, crime and the economy by significant margins.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll of about 2,200 adults released in early May, shows the only major policy issues on which Biden received higher marks than Trump were health care and abortion access. It’s no surprise, then, that the campaign is making those topics central to Biden’s pitch to voters.
As such, we dug into the facts surrounding Biden’s claim.
Preexisting condition calculations
The idea that 100 million Americans are living with one or more preexisting conditions is not new. It was the subject of a back-and-forth between then-candidate Biden and then-President Trump during their previous race, in 2020. After Biden cited that statistic in a presidential debate, Trump responded, “There aren’t a hundred million people with preexisting conditions.”
A KFF Health NewsPolitiFact HealthCheck at the time rated Biden’s claim to be “mostly true,” finding a fairly large range of estimates — from 54 million to 135 million — of the number of Americans with preexisting conditions. Estimates on the lower end tend to consider “preexisting conditions” to be more severe chronic conditions such as cancer or cystic fibrosis. Estimates at the spectrum’s higher end include people with more common health problems such as asthma and obesity, and behavioral health disorders such as substance use disorder or depression.
Biden’s May ad focuses on how many people would be vulnerable if protections for people with preexisting conditions were lost. This is a matter of some debate. To understand it, we need to break down the protections put in place by the ACA, and those that exist separately.
Before and after
Before the ACA’s preexisting condition protections took effect in 2014, insurers in the individual market — people buying coverage for themselves or their families — could charge higher premiums to people with particular conditions, restrict coverage of specific procedures or medications, set annual and lifetime coverage limits on benefits or deny people coverage.
“There were a number of practices used by insurance companies to essentially protect themselves from the costs associated with people who have preexisting conditions,” said Sabrina Corlette, a co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University and an expert on the health insurance marketplace.
Insurers providing coverage to large employers could impose long waiting periods before employees’ benefits kicked in. And though employer-sponsored plans couldn’t discriminate against individual employees based on their health conditions, small-group plans for businesses with fewer than 50 employees could raise costs across the board if large numbers of employees in a given company had such conditions. That could prompt some employers to stop offering coverage.
“The insurer would say, ‘Well, because you have three people with cancer, we are going to raise your premium dramatically,’ and therefore make it hard for the small employer to continue to offer coverage to its workers because the coverage is simply unaffordable,” recalled Edwin Park, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy who researches public health insurance markets.
As a result, many people with preexisting conditions experienced what some researchers dubbed “job lock.” People felt trapped in their jobs because they feared they wouldn’t be able to get health insurance anywhere else.
Some basic preexisting condition protections exist independent of the ACA. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, for example, restricted how insurers could limit coverage and mandated that employer-sponsored group plans can’t refuse to cover someone because of a health condition. Medicare and Medicaid similarly can’t deny coverage based on health background, though age and income-based eligibility requirements mean many Americans don’t qualify for that coverage.
Once the ACA’s preexisting condition protections kicked in, plans sold on the individual market had to provide a comprehensive package of benefits to all purchasers, no matter their health status.
Still, some conservatives say Biden’s claim overstates how many people are affected by Obamacare protections.
Even if you consider the broadest definition of the number of Americans living with such conditions, “there is zero way you could justify that 100 million people would lose coverage” without ACA protections, said Theo Merkel, who was a Trump administration health policy adviser and is now a senior research fellow with the Paragon Health Institute and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank.
Joseph Antos, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, called the ad’s preexisting conditions claim “the usual bluster.” To reach 100 million people affected, he said, “you have to assume that a large number of people would lose coverage.” And that’s unlikely to happen, he said.
That’s because most people — about 55% of Americans, according to the most recent government data — receive health insurance through their employers. As such, they’re protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act rules, and their plans likely wouldn’t change, at least in the short term, if the ACA went away.
Antos said major insurance companies, which have operated under the ACA for more than a decade, would likely maintain the status quo even without such protections. “The negative publicity would be amazing,” he said.
People who lose their jobs, he said, would be vulnerable.
But Corlette argued that losing ACA protections could lead to Americans being priced out of their plans, as health insurers again begin medical underwriting in the individual market.
Park predicted that many businesses could also gradually find themselves priced out of their policies.
“For those firms with older, less healthy workers than other small employers, they would see their premiums rise,” he told KFF Health News.
Moreover, Park said, anytime people lost work or switched jobs, they’d risk losing their insurance, reverting to the old days of job lock.
“In any given year, the number (of people affected) will be much smaller than the 100 million, but all of those 100 million would be at risk of being discriminated against because of their preexisting condition,” Park said.
Our ruling
We previously ruled Biden’s claim that 100 million Americans have preexisting conditions as in the ballpark, and nothing suggests that’s changed. Depending on the definition, the number could be smaller, but it also could be even greater and is likely to have increased since 2014.
Though Biden’s claim about the number of people who would be affected if those protections went away seems accurate, it is unclear how a return to the pre-ACA situation would manifest.
On the campaign trail this year, Trump has promised — as he did many times in the past — to replace the act with something better. But he’s never produced a replacement plan. Biden’s claim shouldn’t be judged based on his lack of specificity.
When former President Donald Trump joined TikTok June 1 with a video showing him at an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight, he said it was “an honor.” A few days later, he vowed in a TikTok video to “never ban TikTok.”
Those two moments stood in sharp contrast to Trump’s 2020 announcement that he would seek to ban the social media app from operating in the United States, where TikTok reports having 170 million users.
But Trump is far from alone in sending mixed messages about the Chinese-owned platform. President Joe Biden two years ago blocked federal employees from accessing TikTok on government devices. Then, in February, his campaign joined the platform. As the Biden-Harris HQ account actively posted punchy videos featuring the president’s trademark aviator sunglasses and poking fun at his opponent, Biden in April signed a bipartisan bill that would ban TikTok if its parent company did not sell the app to a U.S. company.
With members of Congress displaying wide bipartisan support to force a sale or ban it entirely, both Biden and Trump face criticism for jumping to the app as a campaign messaging platform — and, in Trump’s case, for changing his stance on whether the app should be banned at all.
The 2024 election season represents the first time TikTok is a central presidential campaign issue. Both Trump’s and Biden’s campaigns have pointed to TikTok’s massive audience as reasons for joining and posting to the platform.
In 2021, only 12% of U.S. adults used TikTok — but in 2023 about 33% reported using the platform, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Usage was highest among adults under 30, with 62% of those surveyed saying they used TikTok.
We looked at how and why TikTok has risen in prominence, how Biden and Trump’s thoughts about the issue have evolved and where they each stand on the app’s future.
PolitiFact has a partnership with TikTok to review and assess the accuracy of content; read more about our partnership here.
When and why did TikTok rise to an issue of congressional concern?
TikTok was introduced by ByteDance in 2017 as the global version of its existing popular app, Douyin, which is accessible in mainland China. It was introduced in the U.S. in 2018 and quickly replicated Douyin’s success, but its Chinese connections began to trouble some lawmakers.
In 2019, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., asked the Treasury Department to investigate the platform’s acquisition of another app that allowed users to make voiceovers. He expressed concerns about reports of censorship by TikTok and questioned its ties to China. Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., also asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to investigate “the national security risks posed by TikTok.”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew arrives to testify to a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, March 23, 2023, in Washington. (AP)
The Federal Trade Commission fined the platform nearly $6 million in 2019 for illegally collecting children’s data, further intensifying scrutiny. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has testified twice in Congress, where he faced intense bipartisan questioning from legislators about how the app handled user privacy data and the extent of its relationship to the Chinese government through parent company ByteDance.
Trump’s role in escalating concerns about TikTok
In June 2020, some TikTok users said they had requested scores of tickets to a Trump campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a coordinated stunt to cause low attendance. Trump campaign officials denied the mass registrations had affected attendance.
In July 2020, Trump began signaling a move to ban TikTok — in part as retaliation for the COVID-19 pandemic, which he blamed on China. His campaign released political ads on Facebook and Instagram that accused TikTok of “spying” on users.
“Do you think we should ban TikTok? Sign the petition NOW!” the ad, which has since been deleted, said.
On Aug. 6, 2020, Trump signed Executive Order 13942, which sought to ban the app, citing national security concerns.
“At this time, action must be taken to address the threat posed by one mobile application in particular, TikTok … The United States must take aggressive action against the owners of TikTok to protect our national security,” Trump wrote in the order.
Trump argued that TikTok’s data collection practices threatened “to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information,” which could be used for blackmail and corporate espionage.
The order sought to implement its TikTok ban within 45 days unless ByteDance agreed to sell the app to a U.S. company. American companies including Microsoft, Oracle and Walmart lined up to do a deal that would have sold off TikTok’s business in the U.S. and other Western countries.
But two federal courts struck down Trump’s order in October 2020. A month later, Trump lost the presidential election, bringing an end to his presidential attempts to ban the app.
What was Biden’s response to these early concerns?
Initially, Biden was less vocal about his stance on TikTok, although his actions revealed concern.
In July 2020, when he was running against Trump for the presidency, Biden told campaign staff to remove TikTok from their work and personal devices over security concerns.
Some of the first comments we could find from Biden on TikTok came shortly after, on Sept. 18, 2020. One day after refusing to call China an “opponent,” Biden told reporters in Duluth, Minnesota, that he believed Chinese technology companies presented a national security threat.
“I think that it’s a matter of genuine concern that TikTok, a Chinese operation, has access to over 100 million young people particularly in the United States of America,” Biden said.
Supporters of TikTok rally at the Capitol in Washington, March 22, 2023. (AP)
In response to lawmakers’ focus on the Chinese government’s potential influence over ByteDance, TikTok emphasizes that 60% of ByteDance is owned by global investors, 20% by its co-founders and 20% by employees, including thousands of Americans. The Chinese government has a 1% share in one of ByteDance’s China-based subsidiaries, not in TikTok. And TikTok argues that the Chinese government cannot compel access to data that, since 2022, has been stored only in the U.S. and controlled by a U.S.-led security team.
Where does Trump stand today?
Almost four years after his attempt to ban TikTok, Trump now says he opposes a ban.
In a June 2 statement, a day after joining TikTok, Trump said he created the account “to use every tool available to speak directly with the American people about how Joe Biden’s failed presidency is tearing apart our beautiful nation and how I am going to stop him.”
Months before signing up on TikTok, Trump had signaled a change in his posture toward the platform. In response to a bipartisan bill in Congress that sought to ban TikTok, the former president said he no longer favored a ban because it would help Facebook.
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” he wrote on TruthSocial March 7, referring to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
In a March 11 CNBC interview, Trump blamed Congress for his inability to ban TikTok in 2020. He said that although he considered TikTok’s national security and privacy concerns, the company was not the only social media platform with those problems.
In a subsequent Fox News interview, Trump said he opposed a ban because “there is a danger with banning it, with you know, freedom of speech.”
Trump also denied accusations from some supporters, including political strategist Steve Bannon, that he had reversed his position after a March meeting with Jeff Yass, a major Republican donor whose investments include TikTok’s parent company. He told Fox News he didn’t know about Yass’ link to the company at the time of the meeting and said they didn’t talk about TikTok.
What have Biden and the Biden administration said and done about TikTok?
In June 2021, shortly after taking office, Biden revoked Trump’s 2020 executive order but requested a report into threats posed by access to U.S. data by foreign adversaries.
Months before Biden signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act on Dec. 29, 2022, which prohibited federal employees from using TikTok on government-owned devices, TikTok had offered the government a deal.
In August 2022, the app proposed to let officials pick its U.S. operation’s board of directors, giving the government veto power over new hires, and said it would pay an American company that contracts with the Defense Department to monitor its source code, according to reporting by The Washington Post.
The U.S. declined.
The government never publicly said why it rejected TikTok’s proposal, but a senior administration official told the Post in a statement that the government determined the proposal would be “insufficient” to address the security risks and that divestment from its Chinese ownership was necessary.
On Feb. 6, 2023, a reporter asked Biden whether the U.S. should ban TikTok. “Well, that — the answer, I’m not sure. I know I don’t have it on my phone,” Biden answered. The “Biden-Harris HQ” TikTok account released its first video Feb. 11. It features Biden answering questions about his Super Bowl picks.
His campaign said it uses separate devices to access and post on the app — an attempt to circumvent the risk Biden sought to mitigate with the legislation that banned TikTok on government-owned devices. (The ban has exceptions for law enforcement, national security and security research purposes).
The Biden campaign told PolitiFact that the fragmented media environment requires communicating with voters where they are.
“TikTok is one of many places we’re making sure our content is being seen by voters,” the campaign wrote in an emailed statement. “When the stakes are this high in the election, we are going to use every tool we have to reach young voters where they are. We are using enhanced security measures.”
Vice President Kamala Harris told ABC News in March that the administration didn’t favor an outright ban on TikTok, but said its ownership needed to change.
“We do not intend to ban TikTok,” Harris said. “That is not at all the goal or the purpose of this conversation. We need to deal with the owner, and we have national security concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok.”
When asked whether the campaign account should be maintained even if TikTok wasn’t sold to a U.S. company, Harris said, “We will address it when we come to it.”
In April, Biden signed legislation that would eventually ban TikTok unless it is sold to a U.S. company. House Republicans added the TikTok ban as part of an aid package to Ukraine and Israel, which the Biden administration had been wanting for months.
TikTok has challenged the law in federal court.
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
RELATED: US frets about TikTok feeding data to China; banning app won’t end the threat, experts say
A recent Instagram post bemoans the disappearance of “all our favorite restaurants,” claiming that 16 chains are shuttering many or all locations this year.
“Restaurants closing in 2024,” the May 22 post says. “Fuddruckers is expected to close ALL locations by the end of the year. Old Country Buffet is closing ALL remainder locations. IHOP is closing 100 locations.”
Other Facebook posts include as many as 24 restaurant chains, and these claim definitively that Fuddruckers, a hamburger chain, is “closing ALL locations.”
These posts were 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.)
Some of the information in these posts is accurate; some of the most dramatic claims, such as Fuddruckers closing all its locations, aren’t.
In May, Fuddruckers posted a statement from owner and CEO Nicholas Perkins, calling the closure claim “misinformation stated by a non-credible blog.”
“Our brand will not be closing all stores in 2024,” the statement said. “This year, we will be welcoming new franchisees into our system.”
The last Old Country Buffet, meanwhile, closed in Illinois in 2020, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Fox Business reported that same year that IHOP was closing nearly 100 restaurants. We found no stories about 100 more locations closing in 2024. Rather, up to 25 new IHOP restaurants are set to open this year.
Other claims in the posts, such as that Applebee’s is closing 35 restaurants, track with recent news reports.
But Fuddruckers isn’t shuttering. We rate the claim that the chain will close all locations False.
Newly released video footage from Jan. 6, 2021, has reignited conservatives’ long-standing claims that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bears the blame for the National Guard’s delayed response to the U.S. Capitol attack.
On June 10, Republicans on the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight shared on X a short video of Pelosi leaving the Capitol by car as rioters overtook the building Jan. 6. In the clip, Pelosi presses her chief of staff Terri McCullough about why the National Guard hadn’t arrived yet.
The subcommittee’s X post said, “Since January 6, 2021, Nancy Pelosi spent 3+ years and nearly $20 million creating a narrative to blame Donald Trump. NEW FOOTAGE shows on January 6, Pelosi ADMITTED: ‘I take responsibility.’”
Social media users across X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok reshared the footage and made a slightly different claim: that the video shows Pelosi, D-Calif., saying “she takes responsibility for not having the National Guard” at the Capitol that day.
The Instagram and Facebook posts were 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.) The TikTok posts were identified as part of TikTok’s efforts to counter inauthentic, misleading or false content. (Read more about PolitiFact’s partnership with TikTok.)
No member of Congress has the authority to activate the District of Columbia National Guard. Only the president, Defense secretary and U.S. Army secretary do.
In response to the newly released footage, Pelosi said in a June 10 MSNBC interview that former President Donald Trump and “his toadies do not want to face the facts. They’re trying to do revisionist history.”
Aaron Bennett, Pelosi’s spokesperson, told PolitiFact in a statement that Jan. 6, 2021, footage in its entirety shows Pelosi called Pentagon officials who can authorize use of the National Guard and urged them to deploy the guard.
“Cherry-picked, out-of-context clips do not change the fact that the Speaker of the House is not in charge of the security of the Capitol Complex — on January 6th or any other day of the week,” Bennett said.
What does the newly released footage show?
As part of Republican efforts to reinvestigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, the Oversight Subcommittee obtained 45 minutes of footage from HBO that Alexandra Pelosi, a documentary filmmaker and Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, had filmed, Politico reported June 9. Politico reviewed the footage and said much of it had never been seen before; the news outlet did not say how it obtained the footage, which the Oversight Subcommittee has not publicly released in full.
The subcommittee shared on X two versions of the same Jan. 6, 2021, scene of Pelosi leaving the Capitol by car.
The first clip, which is 41 seconds long, has been more widely shared online than the second clip, which is 1 minute and 28 seconds long. The subcommittee described the longer clip as “the full video” on X.
The longer clip begins with Pelosi talking about Capitol security officials’ guidance to congressional members: “I mean, we asked them to put out a piece of paper saying, you know, ‘Go through the tunnel, don’t go outside.’ They say they got stuff, but they can’t tell us what it is. It’s too — they don’t want the other side to know.”
The 41-second clip doesn’t include this. It begins when Pelosi says, “We have responsibility, Terri. We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have. This is ridiculous. You’re going to ask me in the middle of the thing — when they’ve already breached the inaugural stuff — ‘Should we call the Capitol Police?’ I mean, ‘the National Guard?’ Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?”
McCullough begins to reply that Capitol security officials thought that they had “sufficient resources” before Pelosi interrupts.
“There’s not a question of how they — they don’t know. They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more,” Pelosi said.
This is where the 41-second clip ends.
In the longer clip, Pelosi continues, “Because it’s stupid that we should be in a situation like this. Because they thought they had what? They thought these people would act civilized? They thought these people gave a damn? What is it that is missing here, in terms of anticipation? They give us a piece of paper. It says, ‘Walk through the tunnel, don’t walk outside.’ That’s our preparation for what’s going on?”
Pelosi’s role in the National Guard deployment on Jan. 6, 2021
PolitiFact and other news outlets have previously fact-checked false and misleading claims related to Pelosi’s role on Jan. 6, 2021, including that the former House speaker was culpable for the attack, that she was responsible for Capitol security that day, and that footage of Pelosi on Jan. 6, 2021, proves the attack was staged.
There’s ample evidence that Pelosi was a target of the attack and no evidence that she was responsible for the event or that the attack was contrived.
As House speaker, Pelosi shared responsibility for Capitol security. The House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, who report to the House speaker and Senate majority leader, respectively, serve as the Capitol’s chief law enforcement officers. The two sergeants-at-arms, along with the Senate doorkeeper and the Capitol architect, comprise the board that oversees the Capitol Police.
The U.S. president, defense secretary and U.S. Army secretary are the only people authorized to activate the District of Columbia National Guard. The House select committee on Jan. 6, after its 18-month-long investigation, concluded that official records and witness testimony showed Trump didn’t make that order Jan. 6, 2021.
On the day of the Capitol attack, Paul Irving, then-House sergeant-at-arms, first asked Pelosi’s chief of staff for permission to contact the Pentagon for National Guard support at 1:40 p.m. — about 30 minutes after rioters had broken through the barricades surrounding the Capitol. A few minutes later, Pelosi approved Irving’s request. But because of delayed approval from Pentagon officials, National Guard troops didn’t arrive at the Capitol for another four hours, The New York Times reported.
Previously released footage shows Pelosi and then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., after they evacuated the Capitol, negotiating with government officials to deploy the National Guard. (Schumer was sworn in as Senate majority leader on Jan. 20, 2021.)
Also, MSNBC aired June 10 other clips, which the network said it obtained from “congressional sources,” of Pelosi and Schumer discussing the National Guard’s delayed deployment Jan. 6, 2021.
One clip showed Schumer on the telephone with then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy demanding to know why the National Guard had not yet been deployed. Pelosi is seen beside Schumer talking on the phone.
In another clip, Pelosi tells then-Vice President Mike Pence, “And we were disappointed that the fact that it took so long to approve the National Guard. But I’m glad to hear that that’s at least moving.”
Politico reported that these clips of Schumer and Pelosi were part of the 45 minutes of footage that HBO sent to the Oversight Subcommittee. The subcommittee has not shared these clips on its website or social media accounts.
“The new footage does not bolster GOP claims of Pelosi being at fault,” Politico reported. “Instead, it largely aligns with and adds depth to previous snippets of Alexandra Pelosi’s footage released by the Jan. 6 select committee and in an HBO documentary that was released in 2022.”
Our ruling
Social media users said a video shows Pelosi “takes responsibility for not having the National Guard” at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In the video, Pelosi said, “I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more,” when talking about U.S. Capitol security. As then-House speaker, Pelosi did not have the authority to deploy the National Guard. The president, defense secretary and U.S. Army secretary are the only people authorized to deploy the District of Columbia National Guard.
Records show that Pelosi approved a request to contact the Pentagon for help getting National Guard troops to the Capitol as rioters laid siege.
Survivors of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, graduated high school June 12, more than a decade after 20 of their fellow first grade classmates were killed in one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history.
Multiple recent Instagram posts wrongly claim that the girls killed in the shooting were crisis actors who are not dead.
“Here are the Sandy Hook girls that did not die like they said they did!” the posts say, sharing an image of nine girls posing for the camera alongside portraits of the children who were killed. “I am pretty sure they pay them with lottery money so nobody can find them. This was in 2021 so yeah where are they now they might have their own kids now!” The posts also say that the girls are still “alive and well connected enough” to gather for a “big commemoration photo.”
These posts were 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.)
There is no evidence to support the unfounded claim that the unidentified girls in this photo are the children who died at Sandy Hook. That’s because those children were killed — news reports have recounted the horrors encountered by crime scene investigators in the school and how they affected them. Final reports on the shooting were published on the website of the Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection and included 911, telephone and radio communications; cell phone recordings; videos of officers processing the crime scene; photographs and more.
The deaths of 20 children, a school principal, school psychologist and four teachers, unmoored a community and left dozens of grieving families vulnerable to misinformation and false allegations like this one.
In 2022, for example, we rated as Pants on Fire a claim that a parent of a Sandy Hook shooting victim was a crisis actor.
That same year, a judge ordered conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay $965 million to the family members of victims who Jones falsely claimed were actors hired as a plot to seize Americans’ guns. Crisis actor claims are often packaged as a supposed scheme to disarm gun owners and such false flag conspiracy theories have followed every mass shooting in recent memory.
We rate the claim that a photo shows “the Sandy Hook girls that did not die like they said they did!” Pants on Fire!
