Category: Fact Check

A 2022 movie and book called “2,000 Mules” outlined what it maintained was credible evidence of a widespread effort by people — “mules” — illegally depositing ballots into ballot drop boxes to sway the 2020 election.

The film made a splash in conservative circles, where clips of the movie’s creator, Dinesh D’Souza, populated social media. Journalists from outlets including PolitiFact, roundly debunked its claims.

On May 31, with months until the next presidential election, Salem Media Group Inc., the company that produced the book and film, issued an apology — specifically for falsely representing Georgia voter Mark Andrews as having engaged in illegal voting.

“It was never our intent that the publication of the 2000 Mules film and book would harm Mr. Andrews,” Salem’s statement said, before announcing that the company had removed the film from its platforms and would no longer distribute the book or the movie.

The about-face didn’t come from nowhere. Andrews had sued Salem over the movie, arguing he’d been falsely accused of election crimes and the accusations led to threats against Andrews and his family. Salem settled the lawsuit for a “significant” undisclosed amount.

Salem Media Group released this apology May 31, 2024. (Screenshot from Salem Media Group.)

Salem’s settlement and apology made it one of a growing list of groups and people who’ve faced legal consequences, often from defamation lawsuits, for spreading election fraud falsehoods.

“Defamation law has been one of the rare successful tools in combating rampant, democracy-harming lies,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah law professor and First Amendment scholar. “Courts declaring that these were lies — and ordering those who told the lies to pay substantial damages — is a win in our ongoing battle for shared objective truth in a democracy.” 

Here are eight other examples of the fallout from spreading 2020 presidential election misinformation. 

1. Gateway Pundit, a conservative news website, declared bankruptcy amid defamation lawsuits: The Gateway Pundit’s parent company, TGP Communications, filed for bankruptcy in April, citing what it called “lawfare attacks,” seemingly a reference to the lawsuits. 

PolitiFact and other news organizations have rebutted election falsehoods The Gateway Pundit promoted. The website is facing at least two defamation lawsuits — one brought by Georgia election workers and another by Eric Coomer, a former executive at Dominion Voting Systems, an election equipment company. Both lawsuits argue that The Gateway Pundit published false stories accusing the plaintiffs of election crimes.

In a statement posted online, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft denied fault. 

When contacted by PolitiFact, Hoft said his organization is “very proud” of its record; he also criticized PolitiFact and its coverage. 

2. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell ordered to pay $5 million: In 2021, Lindell launched a “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge, offering $5 million to anyone who could disprove that data he provided showed Chinese interference in the 2020 presidential election. Software developer Robert Zeidman took the challenge and found the data didn’t prove election interference. When Zeidman did not win the challenge, he filed for arbitration. An arbitration panel ruled in April 2021 that Lindell owed Zeidman $5 million plus interest. A federal judge affirmed that decision Feb. 21. 

Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, an election software company, both of which were the target of false election fraud claims, are also suing Lindell.

MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, speaks to reporters outside federal court in Washington, D.C., June 24, 2021. (AP)

3. Fox News settled Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit for $787.5 million: Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for $1.6 billion, arguing the network defamed Dominion by broadcasting multiple false claims that its voting technology had rigged the 2020 presidential election. 

The lawsuit settlement in April 2023 came hours before the trial’s opening arguments were set to begin. In a statement, Fox acknowledged “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

A few months later, the state of Oregon and New York City’s pension funds sued Fox Corp. for failing to uphold its duty to shareholders by persistently broadcasting 2020 presidential election falsehoods that opened the network to defamation lawsuits. That lawsuit is ongoing, as is another defamation lawsuit brought by Smartmatic.

4. One America News Network settled lawsuits related to election falsehoods: OANN, a conservative cable channel that pushed 2020 election conspiracy theories, has settled at least two defamation lawsuits since that year’s presidential election. 

On April 24, OANN reached a confidential settlement agreement with Smartmatic. 

In April 2022, OANN also settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Fulton County, Georgia, election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss. In their lawsuit, Freeman and Moss said the network falsely claimed they committed fraud to alter the outcome of the election.

Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a former Georgia election worker, is comforted by her mother Ruby Freeman, right, during her congressional testimony at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., June 21, 2022. (AP)

As a result of the settlement, on May 9, 2022, OANN ran a brief segment correcting the record about Freeman and Moss. In the segment, a narrator said that Georgia officials determined there was “no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020.” 

The segment’s narrator said Freeman and Moss “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night,” and that the workers’ lawsuit had been “resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties” with an unspecified settlement agreement. 

Chip Babcock, OANN’s legal counsel, told PolitiFact the network had published “newsworthy allegations” made by people like Giuliani and Trump “on a matter of public concern” — even if some of the more “incendiary allegations” of election fraud proved to be inaccurate. 

Dominion Voting Systems filed a lawsuit against OANN that continues. 

5. Rudy Giuliani ordered to pay $146 million over defamatory election claims: On Dec. 20, 2023, a federal judge ordered Giuliani, formerly a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, to immediately pay $146 million to Freeman and Moss for his defamatory claims that the pair had committed election fraud to benefit President Joe Biden. (The jury’s initial $148 million verdict was lowered.) A day later, Giuliani filed for bankruptcy, declaring his primary form of debt was multiple lawsuits, including the one brought by Freeman and Moss.

As their first lawsuit against Giuliani reached resolution, Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani again Dec. 18, 2023, arguing that he continued to make false statements about them. In May, Giuliani agreed to permanently stop claiming that Freeman and Moss “engaged in wrongdoing” during the 2020 election.

Rudy Giuliani speaks during a news conference after his defamation trial outside the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., Dec. 15, 2023. (AP)

6. James O’Keefe and Project Veritas settled an election falsehoods lawsuit: A Pennsylvania postal service worker filed a lawsuit against conservative activist O’Keefe and Project Veritas, the organization he once led. Robert Weisenbach, the postmaster, said Project Veritas spread false claims that he had illegally backdated ballots. 

In February, the lawsuit was “settled to the satisfaction of the parties,” according to Weisenbach’s lawyer. In a Feb. 5 X post, O’Keefe said “I am aware of no evidence or other allegation that election fraud occurred in the Erie Post Office during the 2020 Presidential Election.” Project Veritas shared a similar statement. O’Keefe was removed as Project Veritas’ chairman Feb. 19, 2023.

James O’Keefe and Project Veritas released these statements. (Screenshots from X and YouTube)

7. Sidney Powell faced Michigan fines, sanctions for spreading election lies: Courts ordered Powell, who was an attorney for Trump, and other lawyers who filed a conspiracy theory-filled lawsuit that sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, to pay more than $130,000 in legal fees incurred by those who had to defend against the lawsuit. A federal judge in Michigan imposed sanctions on Powell and the other lawyers in August 2021. 

In October 2023, Powell pleaded guilty to several misdemeanors related to a high-profile election interference case in Fulton County, Georgia. Powell agreed to serve six years probation, pay a $6,000 fine, pay $2,700 to the Georgia secretary of state’s office and to testify truthfully at co-defendants’ trials.

Powell also faces lawsuits from Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems.

Sidney Powell, former attorney for former President Donald Trump, leaves federal court in Washington, D.C., June 24, 2021. (AP)

8. Newsmax settles defamation lawsuit with former Dominion Voting Systems executive: Coomer, the former Dominion Voting Systems executive, sued conservative media outlet Newsmax for amplifying false claims about Coomer manipulating votes in Biden’s favor.  

On April 30, 2021, Newsmax and Coomer reached a confidential settlement agreement. 

Newsmax apologized to Coomer on its website and in a broadcast.

“Newsmax has found no evidence that Dr. Coomer interfered with Dominion voting machines or voting software in any way, nor that Dr. Coomer ever claimed to have done so,” the statement said. “We would like to apologize for any harm that our reporting of the allegations against Dr. Coomer may have caused.” 

Lawsuits that Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic filed against Newsmax continue.

Litigating election fraud falsehoods has limits

Although some election-related defamation lawsuits have yielded payouts and public apologies, experts said the U.S. legal system is not well positioned to fight misinformation. 

Defamation law focuses on false statements about people or companies that “damage reputation,” said A.J. Bauer, a University of Alabama journalism and creative media professor. That’s a narrow category and there are “few legal mechanisms to combat falsehoods beyond the individual scale,” he said. 

Already, Bauer said he’s seen a shift in election misinformation: “By keeping election denial vague and nebulous they avoid legal punishment while perpetuating distrust in democratic systems. This isn’t going away any time soon.”

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

RELATED: Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News: What to know before the trial

A persistent theme of former President Donald Trump’s false immigration rhetoric is that immigrants are pouring across the border after leaving mental institutions, jails or prisons.

He has made such claims broadly about immigrants, and specifically about people from Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“The Congo has just released a lot of people from jail,” Trump said May 31 after his New York conviction for falsifying business records. “Congo, Africa, just released a lot of people, a lot of people from their prisons and jails and brought them into the United States of America.”

We found no evidence that Congo’s government releases prisoners and sends them to the United States. We previously also could not corroborate the claim about masses of Venezuelan prisoners coming to the U.S.

Here we’ll focus on Trump’s claims about people from Congo, something he’s been repeating at least since January.

Experts had no evidence to back up Trump’s statement

We asked the Trump campaign if he was referring to people who crossed the border legally or illegally and for his evidence that Congolese were coming from jails and prisons to the U.S.

In her response, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt pointed to overall data about illegal immigration including “gotaways” — a term immigration officials use for people who evade U.S. Border Patrol detection. 

“Border Patrol continues to apprehend special interest aliens and terror suspects at the border from countries like the Congo, China, and Afghanistan,” she said.

We’ve found that Customs and Border Protection does not publicly release data on “special interest aliens.” We’ve also reported that U.S. immigration officials have encountered rising numbers of people on the terrorist watchlist. But not everyone on the list is a terrorist, and not everyone encountered is allowed to enter the country.  

Leavitt also cited a PBS NewsHour story that said human traffickers are “smuggling people from as far away as Congo, India and China.” None of these sources said that Congolese were being released from jail or prison and sent to the U.S. 

The Democratic Republic of Congo is the “big Congo,” a former Belgian colony, whose capital is Kinshasa, said Lewis Mudge, Central Africa director at Human Rights Watch, a research and advocacy group. The Republic of the Congo is the “little Congo,” a former French colony that has Brazzaville as its capital. They are adjacent to each other and separated by the Congo River. The majority of the U.S. Border Patrol encounters are with people from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In 2022, increased violence exacerbated insecurity in the Democratic Republic of Congo, internally displacing hundreds of thousands of people, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. The agency says more than 6.2 million people are displaced and 1 million have sought asylum, mostly within Africa. 

U.S. border officials stopped people from both the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of the Congo more than 2,800 times during the Trump administration and have done so more than 3,700 times during Biden’s administration. 

About 12,600 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo arrived in the U.S. from fiscal years 2021 to 2022 (latest figures available). Fiscal year 2021, which ran from Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021, includes a few months of the Trump administration. The numbers of refugees from the Republic of Congo were in the single digits annually for Trump and Biden. Refugees arrive in the U.S. legally and must pass security background checks before being let into the country.

Experts on prisons or the Congo said that they had no evidence to back up Trump’s statement about people coming to the U.S. from Congo’s jails and prisons.

“No one in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) is aware of this fact,” said Abdoulaye Diarra, Amnesty International’s Central Africa researcher.

Mudge said, “We have looked into this on the DRC side and have seen no evidence of this.” 

Helen Fair, a World Prison Brief researcher, also said she could not substantiate Trump’s statement.

“I do a daily news search to keep an eye on what’s going on in prisons around the world, and I haven’t seen any news reports of the mass release of people from prisons in Congo, and certainly not that they’ve then been sent to prisons in the US,” Fair told PolitiFact.

Joshua Z. Walker, programs director at the Congo Research Group at New York University, said that beginning in late March, approximately 300 prisoners from the main prison in Kinshasa were released. But Walker said he knew of no evidence that the released prisoners went to the U.S. 

The Congolese government is facing an insurgency by a Rwanda-backed armed group that is occupying much of the government’s attention and resources.

“There is no chance that it would be interested in pursuing the costly, complicated, and risky endeavor of sending former prisoners to illegally enter the U.S,” Walker said.

Our ruling

Trump said “Congo, Africa, just released a lot of people, a lot of people from their prisons and jails and brought them into the United States of America.”

Trump’s comments leave the impression that some official entity in Congo is releasing prisoners and bringing them to the U.S. We found no evidence to back that up.

The Trump campaign pointed to overall data on illegal immigration during Biden’s administration and one news article that said human traffickers  brought people from multiple countries including Congo. There are some immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean they were part of a government-run effort to send criminals to the U.S.

We rate this statement Pants on Fire!

RELATED: Trump’s ridiculous claim that “millions” of immigrants came illegally from jails, mental facilities

RELATED: Fact-checking claim about Venezuela sending prisoners to the US southern border

A mangled vehicle in the middle of the road appears in an image multiple recent Facebook posts shared. 

“‘It is with heavy hearts that we announce that, following an accident, he has left us!’” the June 9 posts say. “What sad news. He died in a car accident.” 

The posts encourage users to “find out in the first comment.” 

The comments link to different blogs with the same story that says Filipino artist Andrei Sison died in a car accident in the Philippines. The story gives no date.

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.)

Sison’s talent agency said in a statement that Sison was killed in an early morning car crash March 24, 2023. Sison, who was known for his livestreams and TikTok dance covers, had been taping a variety show in Quezon City the night before, according to news reports.

The photo in the Facebook posts, meanwhile, has been online since January 2017. It appeared on a Romanian website in connection with a crash that reportedly injured two military airmen near Cernavodǎ, Romania.   

We rate claims this photo shows the scene of the crash that killed Sison False.

President Joe Biden has sought to bolster his outreach to Black voters as polls show him with lower-than-usual support within that demographic.

In graduation remarks May 19 at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, a historically Black institution, Biden touted achievements for Black Americans that he said were reached during his presidency.

“Today, record numbers of Black Americans have jobs, health insurance, and more (wealth) than ever,” Biden said. 

Both Biden and former President Donald Trump have prioritized outreach to Black voters as the presidential race continues to be close and as some polling shows the votes of Black voters could be up for grabs this fall.

Here, we examine the data for each part of Biden’s statement. 

Biden is on target that Black employment data is strong

When contacted for comment, the White House pointed PolitiFact to federal data on the number of Black Americans employed. This number peaked at just less than 21 million in March 2023, during Biden’s presidency, although it has decreased since then. In May 2024, the most recent month with available data, Black employment stood at 20.6 million.

But Biden’s referring to “record numbers” of Black Amerians with jobs is not the most instructive metric, because population increases over time, potentially bolstering employment numbers even absent economic growth. 

A more relevant metric is one that adjusts for population: the employment-population ratio for people 20 years and older. 

The Black employment-population ratio for people 20 and older reached 63% during Biden’s term. The only time it was higher going back to 1972, when the statistic was first collected, was in the late 1990s, when it peaked around 65%.

Biden is right about high levels of health insurance coverage

This is accurate in raw numbers and by percentage.

KFF, a Washington, D.C.,-based group studying health care policy, collected Census Bureau data on Black Americans’ health insurance rates. KFF’s analysis found the Black uninsured rate fell to 10% in 2022, the last full year with available data. That’s a record low.

The Black uninsured rate is significantly lower now than it was before the 2013 enactment of the Affordable Care Act, which provided government subsidies for buying insurance plans and let states expand coverage under the federal-state Medicaid program. After three years of modestly lower Black insurance coverage rates under then-President Donald Trump, the rates rose again under Biden in 2021 and 2022.

Varying data on gains in Black wealth

Biden said American Blacks now have “more (wealth) than ever,” and we have rated a similar claim Half True, because racial wealth gap data shows mixed results for the last 35 years, the period with available data.

One way to determine the racial wealth gap is to measure Black families’ wealth compared with white families’ wealth. This is calculated by dividing the median total wealth for Black families by the median total wealth for white families.

The white-Black wealth ratio narrowed modestly in 2022, the most recent data available, as the Federal Reserve has reported. Even so, white families had vastly more wealth than Black families. In 2022, for every $100 the average white family held, the average Black family had $15.75. That’s the most since 2001, when Black families had $15.79, but it still accounts for only about one-sixth of the white level.

Another way the Federal Reserve measures the racial wealth gap is the absolute-dollar value difference in wealth between white and nonwhite families. By that measure, the racial wealth gap widened in 2022.

The absolute-dollar 2022 median wealth for white families was $285,000, and just less than $45,000 for Black families, the Federal Reserve reported.

Both ways of measuring the racial wealth gap are legitimate, Jonathan Welburn, a senior researcher specializing in economics at the Rand Corp., a nonpartisan research organization, told PolitiFact in January.

Welburn and other Rand researchers estimated in a May 2023 article that it would take trillions of dollars to eliminate the wealth gap between white and Black Americans.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear which improvements in Black wealth can be traced to Biden’s policies. 

The Federal Reserve report said net housing wealth, investment income and businesses or self-employment were the top Black income growth drivers from 2019 to 2022. But other factors helping to reduce the wealth gap predated Biden’s presidency.

The report said during this period, which intersected with the COVID-19 pandemic, incomes for nonwhite families were “propped up” by temporarily expanded government benefits, such as unemployment insurance and food stamps. Stimulus checks were another pandemic-era lifeline for Black Americans. Congress and the Trump administration approved these programs and Biden continued them.

PolitiFact Staff Writer Sara Swann contributed to this report.

In a closely watched case involving the U.S. president’s son, a jury in Delaware on June 11 returned guilty verdicts in all three counts against Hunter Biden.

The jury found that the younger Biden had violated federal laws designed to keep people with drug addictions from owning firearms.

President Joe Biden released a statement after the verdict saying he loves his son and is proud of him. He added: “So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery.”

A separate trial on tax-related charges is scheduled for September in California.

Here are some answers to questions about Hunter Biden’s criminal cases and what could come next.

What was the Delaware case about?

Hunter Biden had been under investigation since 2018 over his business dealings and tax issues in a case overseen by David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware. 

Biden had tentatively agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failing to pay $100,000 in 2017 and 2018, for which prosecutors would have recommended a sentence of probation. He also agreed to a “diversion” program on a gun-related charge, which is available to nonviolent offenders with substance abuse problems.

But at the hearing to address the plea deal, U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed concerns about the deal’s parameters, and both sides backed off. In August 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Weiss as a special counsel to prosecute the case.

In September 2023, a grand jury indicted Biden on three gun-related charges: making a false statement on a federal form used to apply for a gun purchase from a licensed dealer about his drug use when purchasing a firearm, making a false statement to the gun dealer and knowingly possessing a firearm while addicted to drugs.

Was this prosecution unusual?

Before the verdict, several Republicans said that prosecuting Hunter Biden was atypical. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said, “I don’t think the average American would have been charged with the gun thing.” And former South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy who was once a federal prosecutor, said on Fox News, “I bet you there weren’t 10 cases prosecuted nationwide of addicts or unlawful drug users who possessed firearms or lied on applications.”

Indeed, the prosecutors’ first instinct — to work out a plea deal — speaks to the rarity of a case with these charges and this set of facts going to trial, legal experts said.

A trial in a case like this “is uncommon,” said Neama Rahmani, a former prosecutor who later co-founded the firm West Coast Trial Lawyers. 

Joan Meyer, a former local and federal prosecutor who is now with the firm Thompson Hine LLP, agreed, saying, “In my experience, the particular provision Hunter Biden was charged with is not often used by federal prosecutors. Most garden-variety gun possession cases involve drug traffickers or felons possessing guns with a history of violent crime.”

Although such a trial may be rare, the evidence was clear, Meyer added. “Biden’s verdict is sound,” she said.

And prosecuting Biden — particularly once the plea deal fell through — was justified, said Bill Otis, former head of the Appellate Division of the U.S. attorney’s office for Virginia’s Eastern District and special counsel to George H.W. Bush.

“It’s uniformly, and correctly, believed in law enforcement that guns and drugs are a bad, bad mix,” he said. “Not to prosecute Hunter, given the amount of evidence and the fact that cocaine is a hard drug, would create the smell of favoritism.”

Justice Department Special Counsel David Weiss, center, speaks June 11, 2024, after guilty verdicts for Hunter Biden in Wilmington, Del. (AP)

When is the sentencing?

Noreika, who presided over the trial, did not immediately set a sentencing date. The New York Times reported that sentencing usually takes place within 120 days of a verdict.

What might Biden’s sentence be?

The charges Biden was convicted of carry a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison and a fine of up to $750,000. However, legal experts don’t expect him to receive a sentence that severe, or even a prison sentence at all, because Biden is a first-time offender.

Under federal sentencing calculations, Biden would still qualify for more than a year in prison, Meyer said. But that, too, seems unlikely, she said.

“The judge has the discretion to depart downwards and sentence him to probation,” Meyer said. Biden “has no criminal history and has been compliant with pre-trial obligations, so I expect that he would be looking at little to no jail time.”

Rahmani said he expects a sentence of home confinement or probation. “Imprisonment for a relatively minor crime where diversion was offered would be surprising, and also a logistical nightmare because Hunter Biden has secret service protection,” Rahmani said.

Cheryl Bader, a Fordham University law professor, said the traditional purposes of incarceration — incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution — do not really apply in Biden’s case. He is not a danger to the community, she said, and he appears to have been rehabilitated and achieved sobriety.

What’s next with Biden’s California tax trial, and how does the Delaware verdict affect it?

Hunter Biden next faces a trial in California over federal tax charges. 

Prosecutors say he avoided at least $1.4 million in income taxes from 2016 to 2019. The indictment, which includes six misdemeanor counts and three felony counts, alleges that Biden spent money on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes.”

The trial is scheduled to start Sept. 5. 

Meyer said the verdict in Delaware will have a limited impact on how the California trial plays out. “Federal rules allow use of prior criminal convictions to question a defendant’s credibility, but not for the purpose of showing a propensity to commit a crime,” Meyer said.

Biden’s Delaware conviction means he may get a stricter sentence if he’s convicted in the California case, Meyer and Rahmani said.

“Biden may want to consider, now that he has been convicted, whether he would want to reconsider negotiating an acceptable plea in the second case rather than taking it to trial,” Meyer said.

Can Joe Biden pardon his son?

Because this is a federal prosecution, the president would have that power. However, he said during a June 6 interview with ABC News anchor David Muir that he wouldn’t do so.

Joe Biden told Muir that he would accept the outcome of the Delaware trial, and he said “yes” when Muir asked him whether he would rule out a pardon for Hunter. Biden reiterated in his statement after the verdict that he “will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.”

Neither of the president’s remarks explicitly addressed a less sweeping option: a presidential commutation of his son’s sentence, which would reduce a sentence while maintaining the original conviction. For instance, if Hunter Biden were to receive a prison sentence, Biden could cut the incarceration time or eliminate it entirely.

The president “has the full power to commute the sentence,” said Brian Kalt, a Michigan State University law professor. “He could do whatever he sees fit to reduce the sentence.”

Daniel Kobil, a Capital University law professor, agreed that “modern practice is to treat the two as distinct forms of clemency, and I interpret Biden’s statement as only ruling out a full pardon.”

If Biden were to commute his son’s sentence, Kobil said, “Hunter would still be a convicted felon and subject to all of the collateral consequences that would attend his federal conviction.”

Jeffrey Crouch, an American University political scientist who studies pardons, said that presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump used their powers to pardon relatives (Clinton pardoned his brother Roger Clinton and Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father). Crouch said Clinton’s and Trump’s pardons for their relatives amounted to an abuse of power and that even a commutation for Hunter Biden would be, too.

Will Hunter Biden lose his gun rights?

Federal law generally prohibits anyone convicted of a crime punishable by imprisonment for more than one year from owning a firearm. The prohibition would apply to Biden even if he isn’t sentenced to prison.

Biden, a Malibu, California, resident, is also barred from owning a firearm in California. There, state law has a lifetime ban for anyone “convicted of a felony or any violent offense.” Delaware, where Biden has lived, has a similar ban.

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh said people with felony convictions could apply in some states for restoration of their civil rights. There technically is a way to apply for restoration of federal civil rights under U.S. code, “but this route has been practically unavailable because Congress ordered federal funds not be spent on it,” Volokh said.

“A presidential pardon would nullify the conviction and thus restore firearms rights as well as other rights. It appears to be the only mechanism,” Volokh said. 

The Justice Department website said, “At present, a presidential pardon is the only means by which a person convicted of a federal felony offense may obtain relief from federal firearms disabilities.” It added that even if a person with a felony conviction has the right to buy a gun restored under state law, that would not apply to federal law.

The federal ban on people with felony convictions owning guns has been challenged in court, and appeals courts have been divided on whether it violates the Second Amendment.

Recent social media posts recycle an old claim about an old book revised over centuries.

“VERY CRITICAL ALERT!!!” a May 29 Facebook post said before referring to the New International Version and English Standard Version Bible translations. “NIV was published by Zondervan but is now OWNED by Harper Collins, who also publishes the Satanic Bible and The Joy of Gay Sex. The NIV and ESV has now removed 64,575 words from the Bible

including Jehovah, Calvary, Holy Ghost and omnipotent to name but a few… The NIV and ESV has also now removed 45 complete verses.”

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.)

Zondervan is a Bible publisher that HarperCollins Publishers acquired in the 1980s. Zondervan publishes the New International Version and New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. (Another publisher, Crossway, publishes the English Standard Version.)

Zondervan didn’t respond to PolitiFact’s questions about the post. But in 2015, when this same “critical alert” was circulating the internet, Zondervan responded to another Facebook post sharing the claim that HarperCollins had removed 64,575 words and 45 complete verses from the New International Version. 

“Often times, readers will come across what they feel are ‘missing verses’ in their NIV Bible,” Zondervan commented in the July 12, 2015, Facebook post. “These verses, however, are not really missing. They are included in the footnotes on the same page of the Bible where the ‘missing’ passage is located.”

Why? Because during a translation for the New International Version, “some verses were found not to be included in the oldest or most reliable manuscripts that the NIV translators had available to use,” Zondervan said in the post. “Most of these manuscripts were discovered after the King James Version was first translated, some 400 years ago.”

When such verses couldn’t be verified by more reliable or older manuscripts, Zondervan said, translators moved them to a footnote “to reflect greater accuracy.”

When another Facebook user criticized this explanation, Zondervan responded again, saying that although the King James Version’s translators used the best available manuscripts in 1611, since then, “many older manuscripts have been discovered and carefully evaluated by scholars.”

The takeaway, according to Zondervan: The New International Version is truer to older manuscripts but “no doctrines of the Christian faith are affected by the differences” between it and the King James Version.

About 95% of the updated 2011 New International Version’s text is the same as the 1984 text it replaced, according to a website about the Bible from HarperCollins. A statement from the NIV’s Committee on Bible Translation about the updates includes examples of what was changed and why. Joseph’s “richly ornamented robe,” in Genesis 37:3, for example, “suggests a garment with decorations hanging from it, but drawings and descriptions of comparable clothing from antiquity now suggest that ‘ornate’ is the best adjective to use.”

“We are more certain than we were forty years ago that the Greek word kataluma used in Luke 2:7 means ‘guest room,’ not ‘inn,’” the statement says. “We likewise know that those crucified on either side of Jesus (called lēstai) were ‘rebels’ rather than ‘robbers.’” 

Biblica, a ministry founded in 1809, holds the New International Version copyright and licenses its commercial rights to Zondervan. It addresses the “missing verses” claim in the New International Version on its website, writing that the NIV committee aimed to “accurately translate the Word of God in a way that enables readers and listeners to hear the Bible as it was originally written, and understand the Bible as it was originally intended.”

When comparing the New International Version, the English Standard Version and other versions to the King James Version, it would seem that there are some verses ‘missing,’ Biblica said in the undated post. “Actually, that is not the case.”

The post echoes Zondervan’s comments on Facebook. 

The verses or phrases that appeared in the King James Version that have been “omitted” in translations today “are not found in the modest and most reliable manuscripts,” Biblica said. Further, “the treatment of these verses has not changed recently and reflects a consensus among the majority of Bible scholars.”

We rate claims that HarperCollins removed tens of thousands of words from the Bible False.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a possible vice presidential pick for former President Donald Trump, said he supports Trump’s promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in the country’s history. 

“If reelected, Donald Trump has said he’s willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military to deport the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country,” NBC News host Kristen Welker said in a May 19 interview. “It would be the largest deportation operation in American history. Do you support that plan?” 

Before saying that he would support the plan, Rubio rebutted Welker’s assertion that there are 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally. 

“Eleven million? That’s an outdated — that was the number 10 years ago,” Rubio said. “We’re talking upwards of 20, 25, maybe 30 million. There’s been almost 10 million people that have entered this country in the last three years.”

Is Rubio right that the population of people living in the U.S. illegally doubled and has reached 20 million to 30 million?

Immigration groups’ estimates don’t support Rubio’s statement.  

“The several organizations that have long issued authoritative data based on rigorous methodologies estimate that the unauthorized population is more in the 11 million range,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director for the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

Rubio’s office did not answer our request for comment. Here’s a look at how groups estimate the number, and why Rubio’s calculation is wrong.

Estimating the population of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally

In April, the Department of Homeland Security estimated that as of January 2022, 11 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the U.S. That’s up from the 10.5 million estimated in January 2020. 

DHS and immigration groups usually publish these estimates annually. Every group has its own methodology, but collectively, the groups rely on data from the Census Bureau, some specifically use its annual American Community Survey, which documents changes in population, workforce and housing.

The groups calculate their figures by subtracting the number of immigrants legally in the country from the total number of foreign-born people. Then the groups estimate how many people are undercounted. That final number is their estimate of people illegally in the country. 

After remaining largely unchanged for more than a decade, the number of immigrants in the U.S. illegally has risen under President Joe Biden’s administration. But not by as much as Rubio says. 

“The methodology and data being used by demographers today provides strong statistical evidence that the undocumented population residing in the United States in January 2022 was about 11 (million) to 12 million,” said Robert Warren, a demographer and senior visiting fellow at the Center for Migration Studies of New York, a think tank studying international migration.

Here are immigration groups’ recent estimates of the number of people illegally in the U.S. They issued their estimates from November 2023 to March 2024:

• 11.2 million in 2021, up from 11 million in 2019, the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

• 10.5 million in 2021, up from 10.2 million in 2019,  the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

• 10.9 million in 2022, up from 10.3 million in 2021, the Center for Migration Studies of New York. 

• 12.3 million in May 2023, up from 10.2 million in January 2021, the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank favoring low immigration levels. Steven Camarota, the center’s research director, recently provided PolitiFact with a preliminary estimate of 14 million people in the country illegally as of March 2024. 

• 16.8 million in 2023, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group advocating for reduced immigration.

Why immigration encounters alone can’t predict the unauthorized immigrant population

Under Biden’s administration, immigration officials have encountered immigrants trying to illegally cross the border more than 9.5 million times. 

But that doesn’t mean that nearly 10 million more people are now living in the U.S. illegally.

Encounters represent events, not people. If one person tries to enter the country three different times and is stopped each time by border officials, for example, that equals three encounters, even if it’s the same person encountered. 

“It’s too simple to suggest based on record arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border that the unauthorized population is swelling by many millions of people,” Mittelstadt said. 

Also, not everyone encountered illegally crossing the border is allowed to settle in the U.S. As of January 2024, the latest month with available data under Biden, around 3.9 million encounters had resulted in people being removed, returned or expelled from the U.S.

Besides encounters, DHS estimates that about 391,000 people have evaded border authorities. (The latest “got-aways” data DHS has published is for fiscal year 2021, which ran from Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021, and includes about four months of the Trump administration.) 

Also, the number of people living in the U.S. illegally isn’t affected just by people entering the U.S. The figure isn’t static, the Migration Policy Institute said in a March analysis. People die, leave the U.S. or change immigration status. 

Our ruling

Rubio said the number of people in the U.S. illegally is “upwards of 20, 25, maybe 30 million.”

The number of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. has increased under Biden’s administration after remaining stable for years. But it is not as high as Rubio says. Most immigration groups that estimate this population agree the number ranges around 11 million to 12 million people, despite differences in methodologies. The highest estimate is 16.8 million. 

Immigration officials don’t let in everyone they encounter, agents have expelled migrants millions of times under Biden. And the number of people living illegally in the U.S. is not static; it fluctuates as people die, leave the U.S. or change their immigration status. Adding the number of border stops under Biden to the estimated number of people already here illegally won’t produce an accurate total.

We rate Rubio’s statement False.

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., a prominent supporter of former President Donald Trump, recently tried to draw Black voters to Trump’s side, but a comparison he made involving the Jim Crow era drew criticism from Democrats.

At a June 4 event in Philadelphia, Donalds compared today’s Black culture with that of the Jim Crow era, when Black people in the South were subject to multiple forms of state-sponsored discrimination. Jim Crow laws were enacted over several decades following the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction in the late 19th century and formally ended with passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960s.

“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Donalds said in a recording published by the Philadelphia Inquirer. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively. And then (the Department of Health, Education and Welfare), Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are.”

Donalds’ mention of Johnson refers to increased federal efforts to fight poverty, which some conservatives say provided incentives for the breakup of families.

Leading Democrats criticized Donalds’ statement as lionizing the Jim Crow era. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, called out Donalds on the House floor, saying his comparison was a “factually inaccurate statement that Black folks were better off during Jim Crow. That’s an outlandish, outrageous and out-of-pocket observation.”

The Congressional Black Caucus, which consists of House Democrats, demanded that Donalds apologize to Black Americans “for misrepresenting one of the darkest chapters in our history for his own political gain.”

Vice President Kamala Harris weighed in May 10, saying, “It’s sadly yet another example of somebody out of Florida trying to erase or rewrite our true history,” referring to a controversy over a proposed rewrite of some Black history standards for middle schools in the state. “I went to Florida last July to call out what they were trying to do to replace our history with lies. And apparently there’s a never ending flow of that coming out of that state.”

Donalds defended his comments on MSNBC, saying he was not being “nostalgic” about Jim Crow but was trying to make the narrow point about Black marriage rates and a stronger conservative identity.

During the Jim Crow period, he said, “the marriage rates of Black Americans were significantly higher than any other time since then in American history” and that since then, “they have plummeted.”

Some Democratic characterizations of Donalds’ remarks were overbroad. But experts told PolitiFact that Donalds’ remarks about Black Americans’ families and conservative identity were thorny in their own right.

Donalds’ office did not respond to an inquiry for this article.

A segregated drinking fountain at the Halifax County Courthouse in North Carolina in April 1938. (Library of Congress, public domain)

Black marriage rates have fallen, but for multiple reasons

There is some statistical evidence to support Donalds’ claim about Black marriage rates being stronger during the Jim Crow era. However, it omits a lot of important context, experts told PolitiFact, including the role of broader social, educational and economic patterns.

The percentage of Black women ages 40 to 44 who were ever married was about 94% in 1930 and remained above 90% through 1970, research by sociologists Kelly Raley of the University of Texas and Megan Sweeney and Danielle Wondra of UCLA shows. Since then, the rate has fallen considerably, to about 63% in 2012. 

The pattern for white women has also fallen, but less dramatically, ending up around 88% in 2012, down from nearly 100% in 1930.

The researchers found a similar pattern of rising divorce rates. “Between 1940 and 1980, both white and Black women experienced large increases in divorce, but the increase occurred sooner and more steeply for Black women,” they wrote.

Some conservative commentators have argued that government policies, including safety net programs that make it possible for women to try single-parenthood, are a leading cause of fractured families. 

However, the presence of other factors makes it hard to pinpoint a single cause for this family fracturing. Raley, Sweeney and Wondra cite such factors as “an enormous decline in unskilled manufacturing jobs during the 1970s and 1980s (that) hit Black men particularly hard” and higher rates of death and incarceration among Black men.

Another factor is the rising status of women and increased female employment. With women, and especially Black women, often ending up with more education than men, the pool of what the authors call “desirable partners” is constrained.

“Donalds ignores the negative impact of poverty on families and the reduction in Black family poverty produced by civil rights enforcement and social welfare programs,” said Dorothy E. Roberts, a University of Pennsylvania law and sociology professor. “Surely, Black families would be stronger if the United States had less structural racism, including lower incarceration rates, and more generous social welfare programs.”

Black Americans’ political motivations during Jim Crow are difficult to prove

Donalds’ claim that Black people “voted conservatively” during the Jim Crow era is not possible to prove through hard evidence, experts said.

In the South under Jim Crow, “most Black people could not vote,” University of Pennsylvania historian Kathleen M. Brown said. There might be voting records for the fraction of Southern Black people who were able to vote during the decades of Jim Crow laws, but this small group would not represent the views of the entire Southern Black population.

Black Americans did vote in the North during the Jim Crow period, but they were not living under Jim Crow’s legal and social strictures.

Historians said a pattern of Black voters backing Republicans during the Jim Crow era would not support the idea that they were “conservative” in the way that today’s Republican Party is.

In the North, Black people “voted for Republicans as the party of Abraham Lincoln who ‘freed the slaves,’” said Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania historian whom Democratic President Jimmy Carter named to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. 

Black people in the South would have been likely to vote Republican for the same reason if they’d been able, Harvard University historian Alexander Keyssar said. 

The Republican Party in that period “tended to be more conservative” on economic regulation while also being seen as “more sympathetic to Black rights,” Keyssar said.

“Conservatism” as a defined ideological movement emerged in the 1950s, late in the Jim Crow period, historians said.

Andra Gillespie, an Emory University political scientist, said Black voters have historically compartmentalized their views, separating what Donalds might consider their “conservative” perspectives on social issues from their more liberal views on racial issues.

Today, Gillespie said, conservative Black people “are more likely to still vote for and identify with the Democratic Party, despite the fact that liberals of other racial groups would be strongly predicted to be Democrats and conservatives of other backgrounds would be strongly predicted to be Republican. This is because of the Democratic Party’s 60-year issue advantage on questions of race and civil rights.”

A single syllable can make a difference. Sometimes, a big difference.

In a June 9 X post, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., pounced on video footage of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an ally of former President Donald Trump.

The clip came from an interview Graham had done with CBS’ “Face the Nation” earlier that day. It was captured and posted by the X account @Acyn, which shares a steady stream of video clips to its nearly half-million followers. The account is run by Acyn Torabi, an editor with the liberal website MeidasTouch.com.

The @Acyn account wrote, “Graham: On day one President Trump will deport people here legally by the tens of thousands. Biden will never do that.”

The tweet attracted 1,200 reposts and 2,000 likes by midday July 10. But the post’s traction increased after Swalwell reposted it late July 9.

Swalwell wrote, “”#BREAKING. Trump will round up and deport LEGAL immigrants. No one is safe. If you are not white you may be gone. Tell your family members to be ready.”

By the afternoon of June 10, the post had received 4,900 reposts and 11,000 likes and was still live on the platform. A reader asked PolitiFact to check it.

There was one problem: Graham never said Trump would deport legal immigrants. He said Trump would deport illegal immigrants.

“On Day 1, President Trump will deport people here illegally by the tens of thousands,” Graham said in the clip. “Then and only then will this stop, and Biden will never do that.”

The original interview video shows that Graham’s Southern-inflected cadence did partially swallow the “il-” in “illegally” at the 26:55 time stamp, making it tricky to parse his phrasing. 

CBS’ official transcript of the show marked down the word as “illegally.” A spokesperson for Graham, Taylor Reidy, confirmed to PolitiFact that Graham had said “illegally.” 

We asked Swalwell’s office whether he had other evidence that Trump plans to deport immigrants who are in the country legally, but the office did not respond. 

Trump has proposed far-reaching deportations, and he hasn’t ruled out building detention camps for those deportations. But his standard position focuses on deporting people in the U.S. illegally. He has also said he wants to change the policy to block birthright citizenship for children of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally; under long-standing legal interpretations, such children have citizenship if they are born on U.S. soil.

Our ruling

Swalwell posted on X that Graham said Trump, if elected, “will round up and deport LEGAL immigrants.”

Graham actually said Trump plans to deport immigrants in the U.S. “illegally,” not “legally.”

We rate his statement False.