Does the District of Columbia allow noncitizens to vote in federal elections? A viral social media post claims that’s so.
The May 25 Instagram post included a photo of the voter registration form for non-U.S. citizens in the District of Columbia. “‘Illegals can’t vote, that’s a conspiracy theory, you’re crazy’ crowd? Y’all real quiet right now,” the caption said. “I have been warning about this for years! Turns out, they can vote in federal elections thanks to a bill passed during the Obama admin.”
The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads, and Instagram.)
Other Instagram posts made similar claims.
The District of Columbia noncitizen voter registration form pictured in the Instagram video includes information telling noncitizen prospective voters that they “must be a United States citizen to vote in federal elections.” The form also lists the specific elections noncitizens are eligible to participate in, but that section of the form is not shown in the Instagram photo. The District of Columbia Board of Elections website also states that “non-citizens cannot vote for federal offices.”
A screenshot of the full District of Columbia noncitizen voter registration form
Noncitizens who live in Washington, D.C., gained the right to vote from a 2022 law passed by the Council of the District of Columbia, the local legislative body. Mayor Muriel Bowser approved the law, which took effect Feb. 23, 2023. The Instagram post mentions “a bill passed during the Obama (administration);” President Barack Obama’s second and final term as president ended in January 2017.
In the United States’ capital, resident noncitizens can vote only in local elections for positions including mayor, attorney general, city council member, State Board of Education member or Advisory Neighborhood Commission member. Noncitizens can also vote on local referendums, ballot initiatives and recalls.
As of April 30, 372 noncitizen residents had registered to vote, according to the District of Columbia Board of Elections. With 450,750 total registered voters as of that date, noncitizens comprised less than 1% of the district’s registered voters.
As of May 29, the number of registered noncitizen voters had increased to 523, Sarah Winn Graham, Board of Elections communications director, wrote in an email to PolitiFact. Latest figures for total registered voters as of the end of May will be published in early June, she added.
The first local election in which noncitizens are eligible to vote will take place June 4. The law also lets immigrants in the U.S. illegally who are living in Washington, D.C., vote in these local elections. The elections body does not track the immigration status of registered noncitizen voters, Graham said.
Other cities that allow noncitizen residents to vote in local elections and referendums include San Francisco (school board elections only), Hyattsville, Maryland and Burlington, Vermont.
Noncitizens cannot vote in federal elections in the District of Columbia or anywhere else in the U.S. A 1996 law passed by Congress explicitly banned noncitizens from voting in federal elections such as for president, U.S. senators or the house of representatives.
Although the District of Columbia is not a U.S. state, it conducts some federal-level elections for “a non-voting delegate to the US House of Representatives, two shadow Senators, and one shadow Representative whose task is to petition Congress for statehood.” None of these representatives have any voting power in the U.S. legislature. However in U.S. presidential elections, its residents have three Electoral College votes.
PolitiFact has found that voting by noncitizens is rare and not enough to change the outcome of federal elections. Registered noncitizen voters in the District of Columbia receive only ballots marked “local” and “voter information is stored in a separate component within our Voter Focus database system and the physical voter registration form is a different color (yellow),” Graham said.
Washington, D.C.’s unique territorial status allows the U.S. Congress to block local laws. On May 23, U.S. House Republicans passed a bill that blocks the district’s noncitizen voting law with support from 52 House Democrats. The bill would need to pass in the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate and gain President Joe Biden’s signature to become law.
We rate the claim that noncitizens in Washington, D.C., can vote in federal elections False.
RELATED: Mike Johnson’s false claim about noncitizens registering to vote at DMV, ‘welfare’ offices
President Joe Biden delivered a commencement speech May 25 to graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and one social media post described a moment we didn’t see.
“Joe Biden just told the military to be stand back and stand by because he will be calling on them to ‘defend democracy’ in case the 2024 election doesn’t go his way,” text on an Instagram post said.
The poster, conservative commentator Joey Mannarino, also said Biden told the graduates, “stand back and stand by because, if Donald J. Trump wins the 2024 election, I am going to call on y’all to make sure that doesn’t happen.’ … Joe Biden basically told everybody he is not planning to accept the results of the 2024 election.”
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.)
PolitiFact contacted Mannarino through his X and Instagram accounts but did not get a response.
The phrase “stand back and stand by” refers to comments then-President Donald Trump made during a 2020 presidential debate with Biden when moderator Chris Wallace asked him whether he would condemn white supremacist groups and militants.
In his answer, Trump addressed the far-right group Proud Boys, saying, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”
Biden, in his recent address to West Point, did not mention the 2024 election or ask West Point graduates to keep him in power if he was not reelected. He referred to the preservation of American democracy, which he has made a centerpiece of his reelection campaign.
Here’s what Biden said, according to a transcript of the speech.
Acknowledging the Class of 2024’s motto, “Like None Before,” Biden said: “And just as this historic institution helped make America free over two centuries ago, and just as generations of West Point graduates have kept us free through every challenge and danger, you must keep us free at this time, ‘like none before.’”
He also said, “From the very beginning, nothing is guaranteed about our democracy in America. Every generation has an obligation to defend it, to protect it, to preserve it, to choose it.”
Biden also said graduates took an oath to the U.S. Constitution, not to a political party or president.
The Instagram post refers to a Politico article about the speech. Although the article said the speech had “clear political undertones,” it does not mention Biden asking graduates to fight for him if he loses the 2024 election.
Biden has not said that he would not accept the 2024 election’s results, but he has said he believes there’s a strong chance Trump will not. Trump on May 1 told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he may not accept the results out of Wisconsin, a battleground state.
We rate the claim that Biden told the West Point graduates that “he is not planning to accept the results of the 2024 election” and he wants them to “stand back and stand by” to make sure Trump doesn’t win False.
As Election Day looms, many Republican politicians are facing the same question from reporters on the campaign trail: Will they accept the results of the 2024 election?
Amid former President Donald Trump’s repeated false claims that he won the 2020 election, including in Wisconsin, some Republicans took up his case, casting doubt on the results and advocating for probes and policy changes they say were aimed at making elections more secure.
Today, their answers to that question are mixed.
In a May 2 interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Trump did not commit to accepting the results of November’s election in Wisconsin if he lost, saying he would only do so “if everything’s honest.” The Cap Times reported that U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said May 19 that he would reject the outcome if he believes it’s not “honest.”
Republican businessman Eric Hovde, who is running to oust Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin from office, has struck a different tone.
Appearing May 19 on WISN-TV’s “Upfront,” Hovde said he would accept the results of his election in November and that he believes “everybody should.” He also asserted it’s not just his party that deserves scrutiny on the issue.
“I love how this has been framed recently that this is just a Republican issue,” he said. “Let’s not forget, in 2016, Hillary Clinton said the election was stolen – Russian interference.”
It’s not the first time that a politician has sought to link the voter fraud claims Republicans pushed in 2020 to statements Clinton made in 2016.
But the comparison isn’t quite apples to apples.
Here’s what to know about the issue.
Clinton has said 2016 election was tainted
In 2016, Trump bested Clinton with 306 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 232. However, Clinton won the popular vote, a scenario that has happened just a handful of times in American history.
Clinton has said on several occasions that election was tainted, including in 2019, when she said, “You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.”
The 2019 comment was part of a speech in Los Angeles, where she said she’d been telling candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination that even if they ran a perfect campaign, the election could be stolen from them.
She said she’d been reading the report on Russian election interference from special counsel Robert Mueller, and warned the same tactics could be “alive and well” in 2020.
(The report and a bipartisan investigation conducted later by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russia did run a campaign to help Trump win, but did not draw a conclusion on whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.)
In a CBS News interview later that year, Clinton referred to Trump as an “illegitimate president” and said “he knows” about “the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories.”
And in a 2017 interview with National Public Radio, she said she would not rule out questioning the 2016 election’s legitimacy if it was learned that Russia interfered more deeply than currently known.
Unlike Trump, Clinton didn’t take steps to change election results
In 2020, President Joe Biden beat Trump with 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232, and in the popular vote, getting more than 81 million votes to Trump’s 74 million. In some states, the vote totals were much closer — as in Wisconsin, where Biden won by about 20,000 votes.
Trump refused to concede to Biden’s 2020 win, repeating unfounded conspiracy theories and launching legal battles across the country to try to overturn the results – many of which were thrown out because no widespread fraud was found. His insistence that he won the election, and Republican support of his claims, drove the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Trump maintains he won Wisconsin in 2020, but his loss has been confirmed by recounts he paid for in Dane and Milwaukee counties, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by a prominent conservative group.
Clinton — and other Democrats — have been plain about calling the 2016 election fishy due to events during the campaign leading up to it. But even when Clinton said she wouldn’t rule out questioning the legitimacy of the results, she never took steps to do so. She conceded Trump’s win immediately after the election.
In the 2017 NPR interview, she noted challenging the results of her election loss would be unprecedented and said, “I just don’t think we have a mechanism” for it. That’s where the comparison with Republicans’ claims of election fraud breaks down.
As such, while both of them raised questions about their election losses, what each decided to do about it was pretty different. Trying to equate the two responses is a stretch.
Our conclusion
It’s not hard to find proof that Clinton did have questions and theories that led her to believe her loss in 2016 wasn’t fair. She even used the term “stolen” to describe it.
But equating her response to that election with the Republican response to the 2020 election leaves out key context. Unlike Trump, Clinton immediately conceded, and her statements questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election weren’t followed by action to change the results.
It makes the two responses not so similar after all.
As news broke that a third United States farmworker had been infected with bird flu, misinformation spread on social media about supposed protection from the virus, called H5N1, and a pharmaceutical company seeking to squash it.
“While everyone is focused on the fact that Hailey Bieber is pregnant… they are trying to distract us from the fact that Pfiz3r sued Barbara O’Neill for $54 million because she exposed the secrets that will keep everyone safe from the birdflu outbreak,” a May 28 Facebook post said.
An Instagram post from the same day claimed the recent legal troubles of hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs were similarly devised to “distract us” from the Pfizer lawsuit.
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.)
Pfizer told PolitiFact in a statement that the claim is false — the company isn’t suing O’Neill, who promotes alternative medicine and was banned by New South Wales authorities from providing health services in 2019.
We found no news stories about Pfizer suing O’Neill, and no legal cases against O’Neill in the PACER database of federal court cases involving the company. Searching for credible sources to corroborate the post’s claim, we found only more social media posts, including one that took the allegation even further. A May 10 TikTok post claimed O’Neill had been “sentenced for life for revealing the secrets to keep everyone safe from the birdflu outbreak.”
We also found nothing about a Pfizer lawsuit on social media accounts associated with O’Neill.
With not a shred of evidence behind the claim that Pfizer is suing O’Neill, much less for $54 million, we rate it Pants on Fire!
RELATED: No proof Barbara O’Neill’s cousin ‘was sentenced to life in prison’
After a jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts, some social media users pointed to how this conviction affects his Second Amendment rights.
A May 30 X post said, “Under federal law, Trump’s felony convictions mean he can no longer possess guns.”
Other social media posts made similar claims, drawing more than 1,000 engagements each.
Giffords Law Center, which advocates for gun violence prevention; Jobin Joseph, an attorney with New York law firm Rosenblum Law; and Adam Winkler, a University of California, Los Angeles, law professor, told PolitiFact this statement is accurate.
Federal law generally prohibits the possession of firearms by, and the sale of firearms to, a person convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment of more than one year — typically a felony.
Because of these felony convictions, Trump is also barred from possessing a gun under state laws in Florida, where he lives, and in New York, where he was convicted, according to Giffords Law Center.
People convicted of a felony in New York can have their gun rights restored in some cases. Because Trump’s 34 felony counts were all Class E, meaning they are less severe crimes, he would be eligible for gun rights restoration.
To restore his gun rights, Trump could apply for a “Certificate of Relief from Disabilities” so long as his 34 felony counts are considered part of the same criminal occurrence, Joseph said.
If Trump were convicted of additional felonies in another court case, Joseph said, then he would have to take a different approach and apply for a “Certificate of Good Conduct,” after a waiting period dependent on the crime’s severity.
Trump was not convicted of these felony counts in Florida, so he could not regain his gun rights under that state’s law.
In a 2012 Washington Times interview, Trump said that he had a concealed carry permit in New York City and he owns “a couple of different guns,” including a “H&K (Heckler & Koch) .45 and a .38 Smith & Wesson.” In 2016, Trump told a French publication that he “always” carries a weapon.
It’s unclear whether Trump still owns firearms. In 2023, Trump visited a gun store in South Carolina, but did not buy any firearms.
We rate the claim that under federal law, Trump’s “felony convictions mean he can no longer possess guns” True.
Seven crew members died aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 after the spacecraft exploded 73 seconds into the flight due to a leak that ignited a fuel tank.
But a recurring conspiracy theory maintains they’re alive.
“Astronauts from the Challenger are ALIVE!” reads the text above a video of a recent meeting of the Brevard County Commission in Florida that we saw shared several times on Instagram.
The video shows a man speaking during the meeting’s public comment period. “I think we all remember the Challenger explosion that took place in 1986 that tragically took the lives of all seven astronauts on board,” he says. “A couple decades later, this thing called the internet came out and someone allegedly found almost all of those astronauts alive and well, many using the same exact names.”
He then points to a board showing the photo of astronaut Judith Resnick “and also a Judith Resnick Yale Law professor.”
“Michael J. Smith, the pilot of the Challenger and astronaut, and also a professor at the University of Wisconsin,” the man says. “Commander Dick Scobee, who is now president of Cows in Trees.”
He then says it’s statistically impossible to have three people with the same names, ages and faces as their supposed doppelgangers.
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.)
The video comes from a May 21 meeting of the Brevard County Commission. In a full video of the meeting, the speaker makes his comments 2 hours and 53 minutes into the recording.
But his claims are wrong. We’ve dug into a similar claim before. In 2022, we debunked an Instagram post claiming that the Challenger never exploded.
Many Americans watched the event on live television and the crew members, including teacher Christa McAuliffe, died in what The New York Times called “the worst accident in the history of the American space program.”
NASA Chief Historian Brian C. Odom told PolitiFact that “the Challenger accident did indeed occur on January 28, 1986, causing the deaths of the crew.”
The other deceased: U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Francis Richard Scobee, the Challenger’s commander, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka and Gregory B. Jarvis.
There is a Judith Resnick at Yale Law School. In 1986, when the Challenger exploded, she was teaching at the University of Southern California, according to her résumé, posted on Yale’s website. Although Resnick the astronaut attended Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Maryland in the 1970s, Resnick the lawyer attended Bryn Mawr College and New York University School of Law.
There’s also a Michael J. Smith at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he’s a professor emeritus in the college of engineering. While he was earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the university in the 1960s, Smith the astronaut was enrolled at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Scobee, who went by Dick, was cremated and his remains are buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, along with those of other crew members. Another Richard Scobee, CEO of Cows in Trees Ltd., was working as a CEO of a marketing company in Chicago at the same time that Dick Scobee was training with NASA to be an astronaut.
Burger King has recently closed some stores, but it is not closing “for good,” as social media users claimed.
“Fast food giant says it’s closing its doors for good,” a May 29 Facebook post with a Burger King logo said.
But neither Burger King, nor its parent company Restaurant Brands International, has made such an announcement. We also searched Google and the Nexis news database and couldn’t find any credible reports of the company saying it will shutter all locations.
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.)
Ashley McGowan, a Burger King spokesperson, told PolitiFact that the Burger King brand has not announced that it is shutting down all its stores.
Restaurant Brands International CEO Josh Kobza said on an earnings call last year that the chain typically closes “a couple hundred” stores each year, and would likely close 300 to 400 U.S. stores in 2023.
Restaurant Business magazine reported that Burger King closed nearly 300 locations in the fourth quarter of 2023. As of March, the company has more than 6,000 restaurants in the U.S., according to HasData, which scrapes data about Burger King locations from Google Maps.
Burger King made plans to update its U.S. stores this year. Restaurant Brands International announced in May that it had acquired more than 1,000 Burger King restaurants from Carrols Restaurant Group.
The home of the Whopper said it plans to invest $1.05 billion to modernize stores, including 600 of the stores acquired from Carrols. Restaurant Brands International said Burger King plans to increase the number of U.S. franchisees by about 100 to 200 over the next five years.
We rate the claim that Burger King is “closing its doors for good” False.
In remarks from Trump Tower almost nine years after he launched his first presidential campaign there, former President Donald Trump lashed out about his Manhattan trial and sought to defend his record and his character. Trump criticized a judicial gag order and the prosecution that one day earlier resulted in 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records.
As he has since the first of his four criminal indictments, Trump blasted the prosecution as “political interference” and said the outcome was “rigged.” Over the course of 44 minutes, he attacked the trial judge and witnesses, including his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, and reiterated his claim that U.S. elections are corrupt.
Trump did not take questions.
He is scheduled to be sentenced July 11 and is expected to appeal his conviction, a process that could last beyond Election Day. But the verdicts mean his schedule could open a bit, allowing him more freedom to campaign because he is no longer in court multiple days a week. Trump has sought to parlay his legal troubles into energy among his voter base, which responded with a cash infusion that the campaign says topped $30 million in one day.
Trump listed grievances that echo those he often shares in campaign rallies. Meanwhile, at the White House, President Joe Biden praised the justice system and its resilience.
“The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed” in the Manhattan case, Biden said, adding that Trump was afforded the opportunity to defend himself.
Biden also sought to counter Trump’s narrative, saying “it’s reckless, it’s dangerous, it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged, just because they don’t like the verdict.”
Here is a fact-check of some of Trump’s May 31 remarks at Trump Tower.
Trump continued his theme of trashing U.S. elections
“Our elections are corrupt,” Trump said. Trump has falsely described elections as “rigged” at least since 2016. Elections are administered in thousands of local areas nationwide, each with safeguards, making any attempt to “rig” a national vote highly improbable.
Trump falsely linked New York case to Biden (again)
Trump said his Manhattan trial was “all done by Biden and his people.” That’s False. The Manhattan district attorney’s investigation began in 2018 before Biden was his party’s presidential nominee. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed the charges in 2023; Trump’s fighting a subpoena lengthened the timeline before trial.
Trump has been critical of Bragg’s hiring of Matthew Colangelo, a former Justice Department prosecutor who, when he worked for the New York attorney general, investigated Trump. It’s common for seasoned prosecutors to move among federal, state and local offices. Reasonable people may question the political wisdom of Bragg’s hire, but it doesn’t prove Biden has directed the Manhattan investigation.
Trump was convicted of felonies, not misdemeanors
“It’s only a misdemeanor,” Trump said. On its own, falsifying records in the second degree is a misdemeanor. However, the charge transforms into a felony if the person accused is convicted of falsifying business records intending to commit another crime or to aid or conceal a crime committed. The upgrade would make the crimes Class E felonies, New York’s lowest level.
Trump was correct that he has been fined for violating gag order
“Now I’m under a gag order” Trump said. He called it a “nasty gag order, where I’ve had to pay thousands of dollars in penalties and fines, and was threatened with jail.” An April 1 gag order bars Trump from talking about witnesses or jurors in the New York case about falsifying business records. Trump has been found in violation 10 times, and fined $1,000 for each violation.
Is Trump “supposed to go to jail for 187 years”?
Even if Judge Juan Merchan does hand down a sentence that includes prison time, legal experts say Trump’s characterization of 187 years is a wild exaggeration.
If Trump gets any prison time at all, he would likely be sentenced to serve the sentences for each count concurrently. Legal experts also told PolitiFact that the crime Trump was convicted of has prison time capped at 20 years.
“On a class E felony, which this is, the maximum sentence is four years,” said Cheryl G. Bader, an associate clinical law professor at Fordham University. “The judge has discretion to sentence consecutively on the multiple counts, but I can’t imagine a sentence of more than four years. I also can’t imagine a sentence of four years, and I think any sentence of incarceration is unlikely and would be only a token amount of time to make the point that Trump is not above the law.”
Trump omitted full story about DA Alvin Bragg
“Bragg didn’t want to bring that,” Trump said of his case. That’s not the full story.
Bragg took office as Manhattan district attorney in January 2022. The next month, two prosecutors who were heading the investigation into Trump’s business dealings resigned.
Days later, Bragg’s office said a new prosecutor had been assigned to lead the case.
But even then it wasn’t clear whether Bragg was pursuing the case against Trump. In March 2022, The New York Times published the resignation letter of Mark Pomerantz, one of the prosecutors who resigned. In the letter, Pomerantz told Bragg he disagreed with his decision not to prosecute Trump and take the case to a grand jury.
Bragg said in an April 7, 2022, statement that the investigation against Trump was continuing.
What Trump omitted about actions of the FEC, Southern District
Trump said the case about business records “was dropped by the highly respected Southern District,” ,a reference to the U.S. Attorney’s office of the Southern District of New York, and the Federal Election Commission. The Federal Election Commission’s general counsel recommended commissioners find reason to believe that Trump engaged in wrongdoing. But the case died after commissioners split on their vote along party lines. Trump also omitted the full story on the actions of the U.S. attorney’s office.
Did Michael Cohen’s legal trouble have nothing to do with Trump?
Referring to Cohen without naming him, Trump said, “This was a highly qualified lawyer. … He did work. But he wasn’t a fixer. … Now he got into trouble, not because of me. He got into trouble because he made outside deals and he had something to do with taxicabs, and medallions and he borrowed money.”
In news reports, Cohen has sometimes been called a “fixer,” a term with no formal definition. In August 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court to a series of criminal charges. Some of the charges were unrelated to his work with Trump, but they included a campaign finance law breach that implicated Trump.
In announcing Cohen’s guilty pleas, the U.S. attorney’s office for New York’s Southern District wrote that he “caused $280,000 in payments to be made to silence two women who otherwise planned to speak publicly about their alleged affairs with a presidential candidate, thereby intending to influence the 2016 presidential election.”
Trump disputed former aide’s testimony about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021
Trump commented about testimony related to his actions on Jan. 6, 2021. “I did not attack the Secret Service agent in the front of a car,” he said. “It never happened. It was all made up. And that was proven to be made up. It proved to be a false story.”
Former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before a 2022 congressional committee that when Trump got into the presidential vehicle on the Ellipse, he thought he was headed to the Capitol. When he was told he wasn’t, he grabbed for the steering wheel and a Secret Service agent pulled Trump’s hand away, Hutchinson said, recounting information that she said Tony Ornato, the top White House aide for security, told her when she, Ornato and the agent met afterward. A House Republican report contradicted Hutchinson’s testimony.
“None of the White House employees corroborated Hutchinson’s sensational story about President Trump lunging for the steering wheel of the Beast,” the report stated, referring to the president’s armored limousine.
PolitiFact Copy Chief Matthew Crowley contributed to this story.
During a May 31 press conference, former President Donald Trump said he plans to appeal his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Even before he announced that intent, however, some people speculated about which justices might hear a Trump appeal.
“The appeals court,” one X user wrote, sharing a photo of five African American women in judicial robes. “I’m thinking the appeal won’t go well.”
The conservative X account Hodgetwins reshared that post, echoing the sentiment, “Trump is screwed on appeal.”
The photo spread beyond conservative accounts.
Liberal commentator and podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen also shared the viral photo of the five justices, though he did not echo the claim that the demographics of the photographed justices would affect the outcome of Trump’s appeal.
“New: Trump’s appeal oral arguments will take place in front of the first all-Black women appellate bench,” he wrote on X May 31.
(Screenshots from X.)
Claims that the photo shows the justices who will hear Trump’s appeal are inaccurate.
Experts told PolitiFact it is impossible to know now which New York justices might hear Trump’s appeal.
Legal experts familiar with New York’s appellate system said that because the case is a Manhattan case, a randomly selected panel of justices from New York’s Appellate Division, First Department would hear Trump’s appeal.
The Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department includes 21 justices of the court, according to its website. They include 13 women and eight men, all from various racial and ethnic backgrounds.
The five justices in the viral photo — from left, justices Bahaati Pitt-Burke, Troy K. Webber, Presiding Justice Dianne T. Renwick, Tanya R. Kennedy and Marsha D. Michael — are on the court. But there’s no guarantee these five justices would hear an appeal.
A panel of four or five, but most likely five, judges would be selected to hear the case, according to Daniel A. Warshawsky, a professor at New York Law School who worked in the Office of the Appellate Defender for 15 years.
“The panel of judges that will hear and decide Trump’s appeal gets selected after the briefs are in and before oral argument,” said Sam Feldman, an attorney who specializes in criminal appeals in New York City. “It’s a random process. There’s no way to know now who will be on that panel.”
Brooklyn Law School professor Cynthia Godsoe agreed with Feldman. The most we can know right now, she said, is that the justices will likely be selected from the pool of First Department justices, unless the case gets moved for some reason — for example, Trump’s team petitions for it to be moved somewhere else.
“It’s just a pure jurisdiction thing,” Godsoe said. Trump’s legal team “could file to move it, like they tried to move the trial, but (it’d be) highly unlikely, especially for an appeal,” she said.
The First Department shared this photo of five judges in a Feb. 14, 2024, press release that acknowledged the first time oral arguments before the Appellate Division’s First Department were heard “by an all African-American bench.”
PolitiFact contacted the court and received no response before deadline.
The appeals process will likely take time, experts said.
“After sentencing, his lawyers will file a notice of appeal,” Feldman said. “Then the appeal needs to be briefed, which can take many months.”
Trump’s lawyers will file a brief, the prosecution will file a responding brief and then Trump’s lawyers can file a reply, he explained. After that, the case would be scheduled for oral argument.
“In an ordinary case it can take years between sentencing and oral argument in the appeal,” Feldman said. “Even if things move quicker in Trump’s case, I would be very surprised if the oral argument occurred before 2025.”
Godsoe said that it was probably statistically unlikely that the justices in the viral photo shared by social media users would be the ones randomly selected to hear Trump’s case. With 21 justices, more than 20,000 different five-person panels could be randomly generated, statisticians confirmed to PolitiFact.
If they were, however, Godsoe said she knew of no reason they wouldn’t be impartial justices.
There are ethics policies in place that help ensure justices can rule on cases without bias. And there’s nothing inherent in a person’s race or gender that means they will not, Godsoe said: “White men hear claims by people who are very different from them all the time.”
“If there’s a conflict of interest or even an appearance of impropriety, (justices) could recuse themselves or be required to recuse themselves,” Godsoe said. That means Trump would get five randomly assigned judges from the First Department, “but if somehow one of them had a conflict, then they would be off the five and they’d put someone else, randomly, on.”
Our ruling
Social media users shared a photo they said showed the justices who will rule on Trump’s appeal.
The group justices who will rule on Trump’s appeal will not be assigned until Trump’s legal team has filed an appeal and briefs have been filed, experts told PolitiFact.
It’s possible the justices in the photo would be randomly selected to hear Trump’s appeal, but that has not been determined. They are among 21 people who could be chosen for a four- or five-person panel and chances are statistically slim those exact five would be picked.
Based on what is known May 31, one day after a jury convicted Trump, we rate these claims False.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
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Donald Trump became the first U.S. president, current or former, to be convicted of a criminal offense when a 12-person jury in New York on May 30 found him guilty on 34 felony counts of business fraud as part of an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 election by making payments to suppress a sordid tale of sex with a porn star.
The unprecedented conviction raises questions about what’s next for the 77-year-old man who is in line to become the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2024.
In remarks at Trump Tower a day after his conviction, Trump called the United States “a corrupt country” and declared that he would be “appealing this scam.”
(Trump also repeated many of the false, misleading and unsupported claims he has made about the judge, the judge’s rulings, the district attorney and other issues related to the trial. For more about Trump’s talking points, see our May 30 article, “Trump’s Repeated Claims on His New York Hush Money Trial.” He also repeated false and unsubstantiated claims on other issues, such as taxes and migrants.)
Here, we answer some of the questions raised by the former president’s conviction:
What are the next steps in the case? What punishment could Trump face? Will he go to prison? Can Trump vote in the 2024 election? Can a felon run for president, hold office? Can Trump pardon himself on this conviction, if he wins?
What are the next steps in the case?
Sentencing and an appeal are up next in this case.
Sentencing by Justice Juan Merchan is scheduled for July 11. Before that date, a probation officer or someone in that department will interview Trump, and potentially others involved in the case or connected to Trump, and prepare a pre-sentence report for the judge. The report includes the personal history and criminal record of the defendant, and it recommends what sentence the defendant should receive, according to the New York State Unified Court System.
“The pre-sentence interview is a chance for the defendant to try to make a good impression and explain why he or she deserves a lighter punishment,” the state court system explains.
Trump’s lawyers have to wait until after the sentencing to appeal the conviction. First, Trump’s lawyers will file motions before the judge “in a couple weeks” saying why they found the trial to be “unfair,” Trump’s defense attorney Todd Blanche told CNN hours after the guilty verdict.
Demonstrators hold up signs near Trump Tower as former President Donald Trump holds a press conference on May 31 in New York City after his conviction. Photo by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images.
Cheryl Bader, a clinical associate professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, said these motions are typical when a defendant is convicted. The defense attorneys will ask the judge to overturn the jury’s conviction. “It’s rarely, rarely granted, and I don’t think there’s a chance that will happen in this case,” she told us in a phone interview.
Blanche told CNN that if the motions aren’t successful, “then as soon as we can appeal, we will. And the process in New York is there’s a sentencing, and then — and then we appeal from there.”
Bader, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, walked us through the appeals process. “The case is considered completed at sentencing,” she said. “At that point, his lawyers file a notice of appeal … letting the court know that he intends to appeal.”
At that point, they will also request a “stay” on the sentence, meaning a pause on imposing the sentence while the case is being appealed.
This appeal goes to the Appellate Division, First Judicial Department in Manhattan. The appeals court doesn’t retry the case. “They’re not going to substitute their judgment on the facts for the jury’s judgment,” Bader explained. Instead, “they’re looking for where there was error that would have led to an improper prosecution or an unfair trial.”
The appeals process would take several months to a year, she said. After the notice of appeal is given, the record of the case is gathered, including trial transcripts, the indictment, pretrial motions, evidentiary rulings, jury selection and instructions, and more. Trump could also appeal the sentencing. The lawyers need to write their arguments for all of the issues they’re objecting to, and that takes time, Bader said.
And then the appeals court needs to consider the case and write a decision on it.
If Trump ultimately isn’t successful at the appellate level, he can appeal to the highest court in New York state, which is called the Court of Appeals. But the court decides whether or not it takes the case.
After such an appeal to the highest state court, the case would be over — unless Trump tries to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. But there has to be a U.S. constitutional issue for that. “I don’t see one,” Bader said, but perhaps Trump’s lawyers would try to make an argument.
What punishment could Trump face? Will he go to prison?
Whether Trump is sentenced to any time in prison is up to the judge.
Each of the 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, a class E felony, carries a maximum sentence of up to four years in prison. The judge could decide to impose the sentences consecutively or simultaneously. However, under New York law, 20 years is the maximum prison time that Trump could get — not 187 years, as Trump falsely claimed in his May 31 remarks.
Norman Eisen, a CNN legal analyst and a senior fellow in governance studies for the Brookings Institution, said that “in the most serious” cases of business records falsification in New York that he studied, “a sentence of imprisonment was routinely imposed.” Trump’s case “is the most serious one in NY history,” he wrote on X, predicting that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin “Bragg will likely ask for incarceration & Merchan will consider it.”
While possible, Bader, with Fordham’s School of Law, told us she doesn’t think incarceration will happen.
For a first-time convicted felon, with a low-level, nonviolent felony and a person of advanced age, “under any circumstance like that, there’d be a relatively low chance of incarceration,” she said.
“On the other hand, I could see the prosecutor arguing that here’s a man who has shown disrespect for the court system and the rule of law and has violated the court’s orders on numerous occasions. He is not remorseful. And that in order to promote general deterrence, he needs to be punished,” she said in describing a possible argument from the prosecutor.
Bader said any incarceration sentence “would be only a token amount of time to make the point that Trump is not above the law.” Other sentencing possibilities include probation or a “conditional discharge” with conditions other than incarceration or probation.
The “simplest” option might be for the judge to fine Trump, she said.
Can Trump vote in the 2024 election?
Yes, Trump can vote as long as he is not in jail on Election Day, which this year is on Nov. 5.
Trump owns homes in New York and Florida, but in 2019 he changed his primary residence to Florida. However, Florida law does not apply in Trump’s case because he was convicted in New York. Instead, New York law applies.
“If you were convicted outside Florida, your voting rights are governed by the state where you were convicted,” as the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida explains on its website.
In 2021, New York state enacted a law that “restores the right to vote for a person convicted of a felony upon release from incarceration, regardless of if they are on parole or have a term of post-release supervision,” the New York State Board of Elections says. “If a convicted felon is not incarcerated, they are eligible to register to vote.”
Can a felon run for president, hold office?
Yes. According to Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, there are three qualifications to serve as president: He or she must be at least 35 years old upon taking office, a U.S. resident for at least 14 years and a “natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States.”
“These qualifications are understood to be exclusive,” Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown University law professor, told us last year when we were writing about Trump’s federal indictment related to allegations of mishandling sensitive classified documents after he left office. “Anyone can be president so long as they meet the constitutional qualifications and do not trigger any constitutional disqualifications.”
“Someone can run for president while under indictment or even having been convicted and serving prison time,” said Chafetz, who pointed to the example of Eugene V. Debs, the late labor leader, who, in 1920, ran for president from prison on the Socialist Party ticket and got almost 1 million votes.
There is an exception to that rule. The Constitution says in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment that no U.S. officeholder, including the president, can serve if they are convicted of “engag[ing] in insurrection or rebellion” against the U.S. — something Trump has not been charged with either in this case or the three others he faces.
Six Colorado voters successfully sued in state court to prevent Trump from appearing on that state’s ballot, citing the constitutional amendment barring insurrectionists from holding federal office. But the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the state ruling, “[b]ecause the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates.”
Can Trump pardon himself on this conviction, if he wins?
The short answer is no.
Trump was convicted in New York for offenses in violation of state law. Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states that a president has the “[p]ower to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States.” According to Constitution Annotated, a government-sanctioned record of the interpretations of the Constitution, that means the power extends to “federal crimes but not state or civil wrongs.”
In a case decided in 1925, Ex parte Grossman, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that interpretation, writing that the Constitution’s language specifying presidential pardon power for offenses “against the United States” was “presumably to make clear that the pardon of the President was to operate upon offenses against the United States as distinguished from offenses against the States.”
The New York governor has the power to pardon Trump for his conviction of crimes under state law. That’s currently Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat. After the verdict, Republican Rep. Nick LaLota called on Hochul “to immediately announce her intention to pardon President Trump and pre-emptively commute any sentence. To not do so is to allow America to become a banana republic.” Hochul released a statement on May 30 saying, “Today’s verdict reaffirms that no one is above the law.”
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