Seeking to present a unified Republican front, former President Donald Trump and embattled House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., met at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, to tout several issues the GOP sees as key in the 2024 election, including voting laws and immigration.
Johnson focused his remarks on forthcoming legislation to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. This push comes on top of existing efforts by the party to prevent noncitizens from voting, which is already illegal under existing law.
In a televised press conference after Trump’s and Johnson’s remarks April 12, Trump made several false or misleading comments. Here are a few of them.
“Venezuela announced that their crime is down 67% because of the fact that they’ve taken the gang members, the leaders and the members and they’ve deposited them very nicely into the United States of America.”
This is False.
Although Venezuelan government data is unreliable, some available data from independent organizations shows that violent deaths have recently decreased, though not by 67%. From 2022 to 2023, violent deaths dropped by 25%, according to the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence.
However, criminologists told PolitiFact that the reason for the drop is not immigration to the United States.
Violent deaths have dropped because of Venezuela’s poor economy, and the government’s extrajudicial killings, experts say. So many people have left Venezuela that criminals have fewer people to assault, too. The experts say there is no evidence that the Maduro government is emptying its prisons and sending criminals to the United States.
Democrats are in favor of an “execution of a baby after birth. And you can say what you want, but that’s extreme.”
This is False.
Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric exaggerates by saying the party supports killing an unwanted infant after birth. That would be infanticide and is illegal in every state, and mainstream Democrats do not support this.
Situations resulting in a fetal death in the third trimester are rare, and involve emergencies such as fetal anomalies or life-threatening medical emergencies affecting the mother. Babies that are delivered are not killed.
For fetuses with very short life expectancies, doctors may induce labor and offer palliative care to make the newborn as comfortable as possible. Some families choose this option when facing diagnoses that limit their babies’ postbirth survival to just minutes or days after delivery, reproductive health experts said.
At the press conference, Trump called back to a controversy from 2019. In 2019, Trump said that Virginia’s then-governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, “stated that he would even allow a newborn baby to come out into the world and wrap the baby, and make the baby comfortable, and then talk to the mother and talk to the father and then execute the baby. Execute the baby.”
We ruled at the time that Trump was putting words in Northam’s mouth and rated it False. Northam, a physician, never said he would sanction the execution of newborns. He said during a radio interview that in rare, late-pregnancy cases when fetuses are nonviable, doctors deliver the baby, keep it comfortable, resuscitate it if the mother wishes and then have a “discussion” with the mother.
“The Biden administration … actually took the top guy, one of the top guys (from the Justice Department) and put them into the (Manhattan District Attorney’s) office to run” the Trump’s prosecution.
There is no evidence that the Biden administration has been colluding with the Manhattan DA’s office to prosecute Trump.
Trump is referring to one of Bragg’s prosecutors, Matthew Colangelo, who formerly worked for the Justice Department and the New York attorney general.
While working for the New York attorney general, Colangelo investigated the Trump Foundation and led lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Some legal experts told PolitiFact that Bragg could have avoided controversy by not hiring Colangelo, but they agreed that his hiring does not signal that the White House or campaign officials coordinated with the district attorney’s office.
“Why would it be strange or suspicious for a prosecutor to hire another prosecutor with a New York license and experience working on complex prosecutorial matters?” said Matthew J. Galluzzo, who worked as a Manhattan prosecutor before Bragg’s tenure and is now in private practice. “Most federal prosecutors in this country have worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations.”
President Joe Biden in his classified documents case “gets off scot-free and I’m still fighting that trial.”
An independent special counsel, Robert Hur, investigated Biden’s retention of documents from his vice presidency and declined to press charges, though he criticized some of Biden’s document-handling practices.
Trump is in a different situation; he was indicted in June 2023 on about three dozen counts, including willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements.
Hur’s report drew several distinctions between his Biden investigation and Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump’s handling of classified documents.
Hur wrote in his report that Biden cooperated with the investigation by turning in documents to the National Archives and Justice Department, consenting to property searches, and sitting for an interview, while Trump thwarted federal efforts to retrieve documents.
Hur wrote that according to Trump’s indictment, the former president “not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it.”
“Trump’s indictment alleges a pattern of deliberate and willful behavior and lying to federal investigators that Hur does not find in the Biden investigation,” Joan Meyer, who has worked as a federal and local level prosecutor and is now a partner at the law firm Thompson Hine LLP, told PolitiFact at the time.
PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman and Staff Writers Maria Ramirez Uribe and Samantha Putterman contributed to this report.
Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de Google Translate.
SciCheck Digest
O.J. Simpson, a football star who was acquitted in the murder of his ex-wife and her friend, died of cancer on April 10 at age 76. Misinformation spread online within hours of the news. Social media posts falsely claimed that the cancer was related to his COVID-19 vaccination. Simpson was vaccinated, but there is no evidence that vaccination causes cancer or that it was to blame for his death.
Full Story
Conspiracy theorists and vaccine opponents quickly spun the death of O.J. Simpson into anti-vaccination fodder, even though his death was unrelated.
Simpson, a football star who was acquitted in 1995 of the murder of his ex-wife and her friend, died of cancer at age 76 on April 10, his family announced on social media the following day.
Within hours of the announcement, posts began circulating online claiming that his death was related to his vaccination against COVID-19.
Some of them advanced the widespread but false claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause “turbo cancer.”
“How’d that vaccine safety belt work out for ya OJ? #TurboCancer,” said one post on Instagram.
O.J. Simpson speaks during his parole hearing on July 20, 2017, in Lovelock, Nevada. Simpson was serving a nine- to 33-year prison term for a 2007 armed robbery and kidnapping conviction. Photo by Jason Bean-Pool via Getty Images.
Simpson received the COVID-19 vaccine shortly after it became available, sharing a picture of himself getting the shot in January 2021. He also advocated for others to get vaccinated.
But there’s no link between COVID-19 vaccination and “turbo cancer,” which is a made-up term used by vaccine opponents online. There has been no link between the vaccines and any kind of cancer, for that matter, including prostate cancer, which is what Simpson reportedly had.
We’ve written before about the false claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause “turbo cancer.” It’s worth noting that people who have cancer are at a heightened risk for severe disease and death from COVID-19, and the vaccines can offer protection.
This tactic used by social media influencers to tie high-profile deaths, such as Simpson’s, to vaccination has been happening since the COVID-19 shots first rolled out. Here are some examples that we’ve written about before:
Henry “Hank” Aaron — In the first full month that the vaccines were available, January 2021, baseball legend and civil rights activist Hank Aaron died. He died from natural causes, according to the medical examiner’s office in Fulton County, Georgia, and there was no evidence that his death was a result of being vaccinated against COVID-19. But claims falsely connecting his death to the shot swirled online.
Betty White — The actress best known for her role in the television sitcom “The Golden Girls” died at age 99 on Dec. 31, 2021. White died of natural causes, according to her agent, but various falsehoods appeared on social media about White, including claims that she died after getting a COVID-19 booster shot.
Doug Brignole — A 62-year-old bodybuilder who had heart disease died on Oct. 13, 2022, after contracting COVID-19. “Mr. Brignole’s underlying medical conditions, including heart disease from atherosclerosis would have made him less able to tolerate the effects of COVID-19, contributing to his death,” according to the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner’s report. But vaccine opponents falsely suggested that he died from the COVID-19 vaccine. He didn’t. He had been vaccinated 18 months before his death, and there was nothing linking his death to the vaccine.
Jake Flint — The country singer died unexpectedly on Nov. 27, 2022, hours after his wedding. Social media posts baselessly suggested that Flint died because of the COVID-19 vaccine, but the 37-year-old singer received his second dose more than a year before his death. His representative said Flint’s death was “not related in any way” to the vaccine.
Grant Wahl — Wahl, who was a sportswriter, died unexpectedly while covering the soccer World Cup in Qatar on Dec. 9, 2022. Purveyors of vaccine misinformation suggested that his death was caused by COVID-19 vaccination, but he died from the rupture of an aortic aneurysm that he didn’t know he had, his wife, Dr. Céline Gounder, wrote in a post on his Substack on Dec. 14, 2022.
In fact, misinformation purveyors are so quick to try to tie any death to vaccination that, in one case, they declared a death that hadn’t even happened. When Damar Hamlin, a 24-year-old safety for the Buffalo Bills, collapsed on the field during a nationally televised game, conspiracy theorist Stew Peters suggested that Hamlin had “#DiedSuddenly,” a reference to the widespread, but completely unsupported conspiracy theory that COVID-19 vaccines are killing people in large numbers.
As we’ve explained before, Hamlin said his doctors told him he suffered from a cardiac arrest caused by a blow to his chest.
So, the use of Simpson’s high-profile death to perpetuate bogus anti-vaccination claims is nothing new.
Clarification, April 12: We updated this story to clarify that Hamlin said his doctors told him he suffered from a cardiac arrest caused by a blow to his chest.
Sources
McFadden, Robert D. “O.J. Simpson, Football Star Whose Trial Riveted the Nation, Dies at 76.” New York Times. 11 Apr 2024.
Simpson, O.J. (@TheRealOJ32). “On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer…” X. 11 Apr 2024.
Simpson, O.J. (@TheRealOJ32). “Get your shot. I got mine!!!” X. 29 Jan 2021.
Madani, Doha. “O.J. Simpson, NFL star whose murder trial gripped the nation, dies of cancer at 76.” NBC News. Updated 12 Apr 2024.
Yandell, Kate. “COVID-19 Vaccines Have Not Been Shown to Cause ‘Turbo Cancer.’” FactCheck.org. 31 Aug 2023.
Gore, D’Angelo. “Hank Aaron’s Death Attributed to Natural Causes.” FactCheck.org. 28 Jan 2021.
Jones, Brea. “Death of Betty White Leads to Swirl of Falsehoods on Social Media.” FactCheck.org. Updated 11 Jan 2022.
Hale Spencer, Saranac. “Bodybuilder Died from COVID-19, Not the Vaccine as Social Media Posts Claim.” FactCheck.org. 3 Nov 2022.
Jones, Brea. “Country Singer’s Death Not Related to COVID-19 Vaccine.” FactCheck.org. 7 Dec 2022.
Hale Spencer, Saranac. “Grant Wahl Died from Aortic Aneurysm, No Link to COVID-19 Vaccine.” FactCheck.org. 16 Dec 2022.
A Tennessee bill that would designate vaccine-containing foods as drugs is being misleadingly characterized online.
“Tennessee has become the first State in America to ban Bill Gates’ toxic mRNA from being pumped into the food supply,” read a screenshot of a news article posted April 6 on Facebook reads. The screenshot included a photograph of Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, signing papers.
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.)
Tennessee has not “banned” mRNA vaccines from food. That’s partly because such edible vaccines — vaccines administered through foods — are not approved for use anywhere in the world, World Health Organization spokesperson Margaret Harris told PolitiFact.
The Facebook post’s screenshot is from a news article by The People’s Voice, a website that has spread misinformation before. The article refers to Tennessee House Bill 1894, which would classify vaccine-containing foods as drugs. But that bill mentions neither Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates nor anything about mRNA being banned from the food. Gates is a frequent conspiracy theory target. In 2023, we fact-checked, and rated False, a claim that Gates was poisoning produce with chemicals.
H.B. 1894 “classifies any food that contains a vaccine or vaccine material as a drug.” When discussing the bill during a Tennessee Senate session, state Sen. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, said he knew of no specific examples of vaccine-containing food in Tennessee. But he said such foods are in development.
A legislative study said that if the bill became law there would be no associated costs because “there is no known test for these vaccines in food and no known lab doing this kind of analysis.”
Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not authorized use of edible vaccines, researchers are developing them in genetically modified foods such as potatoes, bananas, lettuce, corn and rice.
Researchers have long pursued edible vaccines as a cost-effective way to distribute, store and administer vaccines. The World Health Organization found they can be “produced cheaply in very high amounts.”
Charles Arntzen, a plant molecular biologist, was the first to produce a hepatitis B vaccine in tobacco in 1990. And, in 1998, researchers supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases reported the results of the first human trials of E. coli vaccines in potatoes.
Despite these efforts, Arntzen said in 2004 that he hasn’t found vaccine manufacturers willing to finance larger human trials of edible vaccines. Edible vaccines vary by dose, which makes it difficult for regulatory agencies to approve them.
However, scientists are revisiting edible vaccines. University of California Riverside researchers, for example, announced in 2021 that they were studying whether mRNA vaccines can be administered through edible plants, such as lettuce.
The Tennessee House and Senate both approved H.B. 1894 April 8. Lee has not yet signed it into law. In Tennessee, if a bill is not signed by the governor after 10 days, it becomes law.
The photograph of Lee signing a bill was first posted on Lee’s Facebook account in 2021, a reverse-image search found.
We rate the claim that Tennessee has become the first state in the U.S. to ban Bill Gates’ mRNA from being pumped into the food supply False.
RELATED: No, mRNA vaccines aren’t widely used in livestock and can’t get into the food supply
As a new presidential election quickly approaches, the legitimacy of the 2020 election is still being questioned online.
A viral Facebook post claims the vote total for former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania was suspiciously reduced. The April 5 post includes two screenshots, one labeled “before” that shows Trump’s vote count at 1,690,589 and second one labeled “33 second later” that shows his count at 1,670,631. “We ALL saw it… 2020 was stolen!,” the post’s caption said.
The Facebook post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
This claim is inaccurate. Biden was certified as the winner of Pennsylvania and several courts (including the U.S. Supreme Court) have rejected attempts to challenge the state’s election result. Biden won the state by more than 80,000 votes.
Pennsylvania has the fifth largest number of electoral college votes, and voters there have flipped between Democratic and Republican candidates, making it a crucial state for presidential candidates.
In the hours and days after polls close, television stations rely on partners to supply them with information about vote counts. Sometimes human error means that information is inaccurate. Results also change as more votes are counted after Election Day. In the case of the 2020 presidential election, Pennsylvania had a high number of mail-in ballots. Most of the mail-in ballots went to Biden, propelling him to victory in that state.
PolitiFact has previously debunked similar claims that attempt to use television news coverage as evidence of electoral fraud. Such claims were made in the 2022 Georgia Senate runoff and in the 2021 California governor recall election.
Claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump were a rallying call that eventually led the former president’s supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to disrupt Congress’ certification of Joe Biden as the winner.
We rate the claim that photos of Pennsylvania vote tallies on CNN prove the 2020 election was stolen False.
Snoop Dogg, a rapper known for his love of marijuana, trolled social media users in 2023, claiming he’d “decided to give up smoke” after discussions with his loved ones.
Days later, he revealed he’d been joking and posted an ad for a smokeless stove.
This time around, an April 8 Facebook post tries to convince us that Snoop Dogg has given up smoking cigarettes.
“You know what f— cigarettes,” the rapper appeared to say in a video clip shared on Facebook. “I realized I needed to quit smoking as soon as possible when my buddies started having health problems one after another. And we are talking serious problems like COPD, shortness of breath and even heart attacks. So, I’ve tried to quit many times, but man those cravings took over every time until someone from Out Circle brought these gummies for quitting smoking.”
The audio continued, claiming that taking the gummies eliminated cigarette cravings within two days.
“We didn’t even have any withdrawal symptoms and mind you we’ve been smoking for decades,” Snoop Dogg appeared to say in the video. “I’m not trying to promote anything here, but if you want to quit smoking for good and repair the damage done to your body you should definitely give them a try.”
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.)
(Screenshot from Facebook.)
The audio accompanying this clip has been manipulated. If you watch closely, the words do not align with the movement of his mouth.
PolitiFact used a reverse-image search to locate the original video clip from Snoop Dogg’s January appearance on the late-night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” In both clips, the rapper is wearing a tan sweater with a cheetah print and sporting a large pendant on a chain.
In the real clip, Snoop Dogg and Kimmel discussed several topics, including smoking pot, Snoop’s picture with most of the cast of “Oppenheimer,” drug testing and that Snoop Dogg will help cover the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris for NBC.
Snoop Dogg did not advocate for using gummies to quit smoking cigarettes.
The video is part of a trend of scams that use manipulated audio or video to make it seem that celebrities are promoting certain products. We’ve fact-checked false claims that singer Kelly Clarkson promoted diet products and that celebrity surgeon and former politician Dr. Mehmet Oz endorsed gummies to treat high blood pressure.
We also searched Google and Nexis and found no reputable news reports showing that Snoop Dogg suggested using gummies to quit smoking cigarettes. We tried to contact Snoop Dogg but did not hear back by deadline.
We rate this claim False.
RELATED:Singer Kelly Clarkson keeps appearing in videos promoting diet drugs, but they’re fake
RELATED: No, Dr. Oz didn’t endorse gummies to treat high blood pressure
Are grocery stores that spray mist on fresh produce spraying toxic chemicals?
That’s the claim in two social media videos that appear to have been recorded in the same store.
“If you are buying organic produce at the grocery store, there is something called (ProduceMaxx) on top of all the produce,” a March 31 Instagram video’s narrator said as he stood in the produce section of a Sprouts Farmers Market, part of a grocery store chain specializing in natural and organic foods. The narrator added that ProduceMaxx is “a bunch of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, and they’re also spraying antibiotics.”
The Instagram post’s caption said it’s “deceiving” to call the produce organic because “they are drenching” it in pesticides.
A separate video shared the same day on Facebook featured a different person making a similar claim about ProduceMaxx. That video originated on TikTok, where it had more than 24,000 likes. Both videos said the product is so toxic its containers cannot not be disposed of in the regular trash.
We found similar posts being shared on TikTok and X.
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.)
(Instagram screenshot)
It’s accurate to call ProduceMaxx a pesticide; it’s registered as an antimicrobial pesticide with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which describes those products as substances used to “destroy or suppress the growth of harmful microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, or fungi on inanimate objects and surfaces.”
The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act defines a pesticide as a substance intended for “preventing, destroying, repelling, or mitigating any pests.” That includes cleaning products that control bacteria, according to the EPA.
The EPA categorizes pesticides in four ways: conventional (synthetic chemicals used to kill pests); antimicrobial (for microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses or fungi on inanimate objects); biopesticides (derived from natural materials such as animals and plants); and inert ingredients (such as emulsifiers and solvents).
But the social media posts are inaccurate to describe ProduceMaxx as an herbicide, fungicide, insecticide or antibiotic, said Nigel Glennie, a spokesperson for Ecolab, the parent company of ChemStar, which makes ProduceMaxx.
The posts also get it wrong when they say ProduceMaxx can’t be used on organic produce and its containers can’t be thrown away in the regular trash. The product is certified by the Organic Materials Review Institute, an independent organic food standards group, as safe to use in organic food production, and a product safety data sheet says empty containers can be recycled and that unused product can be diluted and flushed into the sewer.
Glennie said although ProduceMaxx appears alongside pesticides in EPA databases, the product is more accurately described as an antimicrobial produce wash. ProduceMaxx kills 99.999% of one type of E.coli, Salmonella enterica and listeria, according to its product label.
ProduceMaxx is “added to water to reduce bacteria on fruit and vegetables, control decay-causing bacteria in hydrating water, and reduce bacterial pathogens on fruit and vegetable surfaces,” said Glennie, who added it helps to extend shelf life and reduce food waste.
Glennie said more than 50 retail brands across more than 10,000 stores in North America use ProduceMaxx. It’s used professionally in grocery and convenience stores, kitchens and food service operations.
ProduceMaxx is used to wash fruits and vegetables — including those cut for packaged products — to crisp produce, and to keep misting lines in stores clean and free of bacteria.
ProduceMaxx label (Chemstar)
ProduceMaxx uses hypochlorous acid as its active ingredient, combined with water and inorganic salt.
Hypochlorous acid occurs naturally in humans and other mammals, and is created by white blood cells to fight infection. It’s also created commercially for skin care products, disinfecting swimming pools, wound care and in dentistry to treat water lines in offices and as a mouth rinse. It is used in health care settings, including to disinfect against COVID-19.
Lauren Frank, a Sprouts Farmers Market spokesperson, confirmed that the grocery chain uses ProduceMaxx in its stores. She said products such as ProduceMaxx “are used extensively in the food industry because they can reduce bacteria and foodborne pathogens.”
Does spraying ProduceMaxx on organic produce mean those foods can no longer be considered organic? No.
ProduceMaxx “may be used in certified organic production or food processing and handling according to the USDA National Organic Program regulations” says a certificate from OMRI, a nonprofit that reviews products intended for use in certified organic production against organic standards.
“If this product is used in accordance with our certificate, then it is compliant for use in certified organic operations,” Organic Materials Review Institute spokesperson Roger Plant said. The institute’s certificate for ProduceMaxx says it may be used in direct contact with food at levels approved by the FDA or EPA.
“Hypochlorous acid is allowed to contact organic produce,” Plant added. He pointed to a Federal Code section about nonorganic substances allowed for use on food labeled as organic that lists hypochlorous acid, the active ingredient in ProduceMaxx.
Typically, produce washed with ProduceMaxx must later be rinsed with water to meet organic standards, but that does not apply to its use in grocery store misting lines. Glennie said ProduceMaxx is more heavily diluted when it’s used in misting lines to meet the EPA’s regulatory standard for chlorine in safe drinking water of 4 milligrams per liter.
Our ruling
An Instagram post said ProduceMaxx sprayed on organic produce at grocery stores contains pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides and antibiotics.
ProduceMaxx is EPA-registered as an antimicrobial pesticide, but it’s not a herbicide, fungicide, insecticide or antibiotic.
The product is certified for use on organic food by an independent standards group, and federal law allows its active ingredient, hypochlorous acid, to be used on food labeled organic.
The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
We’ve fact-checked a lot of claims from the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees — after all, they’re the same two men who faced off in 2020. Some of President Joe Biden’s and former President Donald Trump’s assertions are well-worn talking points they will likely continue to trot out on the campaign trail.
As a primer for the 2024 election, here’s our guide to the top 10 falsehoods and distortions — so far — in terms of Trump’s and Biden’s propensity to repeat them.
No ‘Rigged Election’
At just about every opportunity, Trump makes the false claim that the 2020 election was “rigged,” claiming that he and his allies “found tremendous voter fraud” in swing states that he lost, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia.
But there is no evidence to support Trump’s claims, and, in fact, there is ample evidence that the 2020 election was — in the words of the Trump administration’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — “the most secure in American history.”
The fact is, Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits challenging the election results. In Georgia, for example, Trump not only lost 11 post-election lawsuits, but a statewide hand audit and a machine recount. “Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said in announcing the results of the audit on Nov. 19, 2020.
William Barr, who served as the U.S. attorney general under Trump, told a House committee in testimony released June 13, 2022: “In my opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.”
Barr gave that testimony to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Like Barr, other top Justice Department officials in the Trump administration testified that they repeatedly told Trump the department found no evidence of widespread election fraud. For example, Richard Donoghue, who was deputy attorney general under Trump, told the Jan. 6 committee that he tried “to put it in very clear terms to the president” that “major allegations” of fraud in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada were “not supported by the evidence.” (For more, see our June story “Trump Ignored Aides, Repeated False Claims.”)
Yet, Trump has made baseless claims about a stolen election a key part of his 2024 campaign.
Deficit Decline Due to Pandemic Spending
Biden often misleadingly suggests that his administration is responsible for the federal budget deficit declining from about $3.1 trillion in fiscal year 2020 to about $1.7 trillion in fiscal 2023. “Our administration has already cut the deficit by $1 trillion,” he said during April 9 remarks from Washington, D.C.
But as we’ve written, the large decline in the deficit had more to do with expiring emergency COVID-19 funding than it did with Biden’s policies. Experts have said that his push for more pandemic and infrastructure spending early in his presidency increased deficits. The drop that Biden cites would have been larger in fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022 if not for his policies.
Unsupported Illegal Immigration Claim
Virtually every campaign speech Trump has delivered for more than a year has included some version of the unsupported claim that countries around the world are “emptying out their prisons, insane asylums and mental institutions and sending their most heinous criminals to the United States.” As we have reported, immigration experts say they have not seen evidence to support that.
Trump at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on April 2.
Trump has offered scant evidence to back up his claim, at various times claiming to have read media reports that support it — but which journalists, including those at FactCheck.org, have been unable to locate and the Trump campaign has failed to provide.
More recently, in a speech in Green Bay on April 2, Trump cited a drop in violent crime in Venezuela as circumstantial evidence that “they’re taking their gangs and their criminals and depositing them very nicely into the United States.”
The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, which has access to the country’s crime data, reported a 25% decrease in violent deaths between 2022 and 2023. But the group’s founder and director, Roberto Briceño-León, told us via email, “We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying the prisons or mental hospitals to send them out of the country, whether to the USA or any other country.”
Rather, he said, the drop in crime is due to worsening economic and living conditions in the country, which has led to a massive out-migration of nearly 8 million people.
“Crime is reduced in Venezuela due to a reduction in crime opportunities: bank robberies disappear because there is no money to steal; kidnappings are reduced because there is no cash to pay ransoms; robberies on public transportation cease because travelers have no money in their pockets and old, worthless cell phones; and assaults on bank money dispensers disappear because the cash they can give to their clients has not exceeded twenty US dollars,” Briceño-León said.
Some criminals have left Venezuela “seeking to continue their criminal life in other places where they find greater opportunities for profit,” he said, but the vast majority of emigrants from Venezuela are “honest workers fleeing the country’s poverty, looking for a job and a better future.”
Misleading Jobs Comparison
In speeches and on social media, Biden continues to misleadingly contrast the jobs gained during his presidency with the job losses under Trump — ignoring that the loss under Trump was because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here’s a chart that has been pushed out by the White House:
The economy under Biden has added about 15.2 million jobs between January 2021 and March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That comes out to about 400,000 jobs a month, as the chart says. And Trump’s number is correct, looking at the entirety of his time in office. But under Trump, jobs were growing at an average of about 180,000 per month until the pandemic hit. The U.S. lost 20.5 million jobs in April 2020, as efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus led to business closures and layoffs.
It wasn’t until June 2022, under Biden, that employment numbers reached their pre-pandemic levels.
On the campaign trail, Biden also frequently boasts that the 15 million jobs added in his first three years “is a record in American history.” While that may be true in raw numbers, in terms of the percentage of job growth, which accounts for population growth, the first three years under Presidents Jimmy Carter (12.5%) and Lyndon Johnson (12.1%) were higher than Biden’s 10.3% so far.
Still ‘Energy Independent’
Trump regularly makes the misleading claim that the U.S. was “energy independent” during his term, suggesting that is no longer the case under Biden. In his Super Tuesday victory speech on March 5, Trump said, “Three years ago … we were energy independent. We were going to be very shortly energy dominant, and today we’re getting oil from Venezuela.”
But under Trump, the U.S. never stopped importing sources of energy, including crude oil, from other countries. In addition, as the country did when Trump was president, the U.S., during Biden’s presidency, has exported more energy, including petroleum, than it imported, and it has produced more energy than it consumed. Those are ways some people define “energy independence,” and the U.S. still meets those metrics.
Also, the U.S. is producing record amounts of oil and natural gas under Biden, contrary to claims that his policies “crushed” American energy.
No Plans to Cut Medicare, Social Security
Increasingly, Biden makes the unsupported claim that Trump wants to cut Medicare and Social Security.
As we wrote, Biden in December claimed Trump “is proposing …. cutting Social Security and Medicare,” even though the former president has said he has no plan to cut either program and has publicly warned Republicans not to do so.
Biden at a speech in North Carolina on March 26.
More recently, Biden repeatedly points to a single statement that Trump made in March to claim he has proof that Trump wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements,” Trump said in a March 11 interview on CNBC.
Biden excerpted part of that quote on at least three occasions in March while in North Carolina, Texas and New Hampshire.
But in context, the Trump campaign said, the former president was talking about cutting waste and fraud in those programs – not benefits. And there is evidence to support the Trump campaign.
Trump has consistently stated his opposition to cutting Social Security and Medicare. When he first ran for president in 2015, he said he would “get rid of the waste and fraud” and “save” the programs “without cuts.”
As an aside, experts have told us that Social Security cannot be “saved” by simply cutting waste and fraud.
When House Republicans in early 2023 began to debate among themselves how to reduce government spending, Trump said in a video post on Jan. 20: “Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security to help pay for Joe Biden’s reckless spending spree.”
Some critics argue that Trump’s words cannot be trusted because of the budgets he proposed as president. But, as we have written, Trump did not propose cuts to Social Security retirement benefits, and his budgets included only bipartisan ideas to reduce the growth of Medicare spending.
Another aside: Trump, too, has made similar claims about Biden. Earlier this month, he told supporters in Wisconsin, “Unlike Biden and the open borders Democrats, I will always protect Medicare and Social Security for our great seniors.” There is no support for the idea that Biden wants to cut the programs’ benefits, either.
An Abortion Distortion
Trump falsely claims that Democrats support abortion “even after birth,” as he said in Iowa in January. More recently, he made the claim in an April 8 video, saying: “The baby is born, the baby is executed after birth.” That’s homicide, and it’s illegal.
“No such procedure exists,” the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says on its website.
The former president has wrongly said that this was permitted under Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion. It was not.
Under Roe, states could outlaw abortion after fetal viability, but with exceptions for risks to the life or health of the mother. As we’ve explained, many Republicans have objected to the health stipulation, saying it would allow abortion for any reason. Democrats say it’s an exception for medical risks for the mother. But Trump’s extreme claim of abortion “after birth” goes well beyond the GOP viewpoint that the health exception is a loophole.
In June 2022, after Trump had appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, the court overturned Roe in a 5-4 ruling. Biden supports restoring Roe as “the law of the land,” as he said in his State of the Union address.
Billionaires Pay Higher Federal Tax Rates
As part of his proposal for a billionaire minimum tax, Biden routinely says that billionaires pay an average federal tax rate of about 8%, “less than a teacher or a firefighter,” as he said in February. In the State of the Union address, he included “a sanitation worker, or a nurse.” He leaves the misleading impression that billionaires pay that tax rate under the current tax system. Instead, the figure comes from a White House calculation that factors in earnings on unsold stock as income.
When looking only at income, the top-earning taxpayers, on average, pay higher tax rates than those in the income groups below them, as we’ve explained. Earnings on assets, such as stock, aren’t taxed until that asset is sold, at which point the earnings are subject to capital gains taxes. Biden has proposed that those with wealth over $100 million pay a 25% minimum tax, as calculated on both standard income and unsold investment income combined.
The problem with the current system, the White House has said, is that unrealized gains could go untaxed forever if wealthy people hold on to them and pass them on to heirs when they die. At the time of an inheritance, an asset’s value is adjusted to the fair market value, essentially eliminating any taxes on the gains that had accumulated from the time the asset was purchased and when it was passed on to heirs.
Not the ‘Greatest Economy’
Trump repeatedly makes the false claim that under his leadership the U.S. had the “greatest economy in history” — a claim he made throughout his time in office. On his last day in office and in his first speech announcing his 2024 campaign, Trump said he “built the greatest economy in the history of the world.” He repeated that claim recently at a rally in Ohio.
But it’s not true.
Economists generally measure a nation’s health by the growth of its inflation-adjusted gross domestic product. Under Trump, growth was modest. Real GDP in Trump’s four years grew by 2.5% in 2017, 3% in 2018 and 2.5% in 2019 — before the economy went into a tailspin during the pandemic in 2020, when real GDP declined by 2.2%, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
So, at best, U.S. real GDP grew annually by 3% under Trump. By contrast, the nation’s economy grew at a faster annual rate 48 times and under every president before and after Trump dating to 1930, except Herbert Hoover. The economy grew at 3% or more six of Ronald Reagan’s eight years, including 7.2% in 1984, and it grew 5% or more 10 times under Franklin D. Roosevelt, including 18.9% in 1942.
Misleading on Preexisting Conditions and the ACA
Just as he did during the 2020 campaign, Biden continues to tout the benefits of the Affordable Care Act and claims Trump wants to end it. His go-to, and misleading, talking point: “100 million Americans can no longer be denied health insurance because of a preexisting condition because of that law,” as he said March 9 in Atlanta, adding that Trump “wants to repeal” the ACA.
The ACA greatly expanded protections for those with preexisting conditions: It barred insurers in all markets from denying coverage or charging more based on someone’s health status. But those protections were most important for the individual, or nongroup, market, where people buy their own coverage. About 20 million Americans were in that market in 2022. Before the ACA, employer plans couldn’t deny a policy to an employee. If a new employee had a lapse in insurance coverage, they could decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period.
The 100 million figure is an estimate of how many Americans not on Medicare or Medicaid have preexisting conditions. But, again, if the ACA were repealed, only those buying their own plans on the individual market would be at risk of being “denied health insurance.”
As for Trump, he has said he wants to get rid of the law, posting on social media in November that Republicans “should never give up” on terminating the ACA. More recently, in late March, Trump said he wanted to make the ACA better and cheaper. But he hasn’t released a health care plan.
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A social media user took to Facebook to spread the word about what he claims is documented evidence of voter fraud.
“Show your Democrat friend this post when they claim voter fraud doesn’t occur,” read the April 2 Facebook post. “From the Federal Social Security website (link below), you can see how many people each of the 43 states are registering to vote who DO NOT HAVE IDs.”
The post included a screengrab of a spreadsheet and a link to a Social Security Administration webpage.
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.)
(Screenshot from Facebook.)
The linked page showed the Social Security Administration’s “Weekly Data for Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) Transactions by State January 2011 to Present Totals.”
However, this data wasn’t what the post promised.
Rather than showing how many people have registered to vote without IDs, the table’s data reflects the number of times a state requested information from a Social Security Administration system used to verify voters’ identities.
The Help America Vote Verification System
Under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, state election officials must verify new voters’ information. States can do this by verifying a voter’s driver’s license number against the state’s Motor Vehicle Administration’s database or, in cases in which the voter does has no driver’s license, verifying the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number.
In response to the 2002 law, the Social Security Administration set up the Help America Vote Verification system, sometimes called the HAVV system.
Today, the Social Security Administration reports that 43 states use this system to verify a person’s name, birth date and last four Social Security number digits. The table the post linked to tracks states’ requests for four-digit matches from January 2011 on. It shows how many have been processed, how many could not be processed, how many yielded matches and how many weren’t matched. The data does not reflect numbers of people, let alone people registered to vote.
Sean Morales-Doyle, who directs the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said it is inaccurate to claim the table shows how many people states have registered to vote without IDs.
“The fact that a state is verifying the last four digits of a registrant’s Social Security number does not mean that that person registered to vote without an ID,” he said.
Federal law requires that people registering to vote in a federal election provide a driver’s license number, a state ID number, the last four digits of a Social Security number or check a box saying they have none of those things, Morales-Doyle said.
New York State’s voter registration form. (Screenshot from New York State Board of Elections)
On some states’ voter registration forms, voters who have IDs and Social Security numbers could simply choose to fill in the Social Security number because it’s a number they have memorized, he said. Filling out that section of the application does not in itself mean the applicants lack IDs.
States can also repeatedly request verifications on the same person’s Social Security number.
In a 2010 audit of the Social Security Administration system, the inspector general’s office found that during fiscal year 2008, 32% of transactions submitted by 25 states “related to the same voter data being re-submitted 10 or more times.”
Ohio, for example, “submitted the same voter information 1,778 times during the year for a 77-year-old man who died in December 2005,” the audit found.
The Social Security Administration’s press office did not immediately respond to our questions about the data.
Officials in multiple states rebut this claim
Responding to claims misrepresenting the Social Security Administration’s data, election officials in Arizona, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin said that the data does not show millions of people registering to vote without IDs.
Although the system was developed to verify identities when people lack driver’s license numbers, Morales-Doyle said, “That doesn’t actually mean that every time someone is being run through this system it’s because they just registered and they don’t have a driver’s license number.”
The data contains no specific information about whether the people registering had photo IDs.
“In Pennsylvania, the Department of State uses the Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) to check partial social security numbers (SSN) not only for voter registration applications, but also for absentee and mail ballot applications,” Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson Ellen Lyon told PolitiFact.
Robert Kehoe, a Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator, said that the state’s data as it appears on the Social Security Administration’s website reflects that a voter registered without providing a state ID or driver’s license number. Wisconsin voter registrations are verified using Wisconsin Department of Transportation data or, if an ID number is unavailable, using Social Security number verification.
JP Martin, a spokesperson for Arizona’s secretary of state, told PolitiFact that 90% of verification of citizenship proof is done through the Motor Vehicles Division in Arizona, not through the Social Security Administration.
This isn’t the first time this data has been used to amplify unsupported claims of supposed voter fraud by noncitizens. We’ve similar statements from conservative internet influencers, former President Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk and rated them False.
Fraudulent voter registration and voting by noncitizens is rare and usually happens because of a misunderstanding or a mistake. (Voting by noncitizens carries high risks that include deportation or incarceration.) Nevertheless, politicians including Trump and his allies have continuously spread false claims about rampant fraudulent voting by noncitizens.
Not all people without IDs are noncitizens. One 2023 survey found that almost 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens do not have valid, unexpired driver’s licenses.
And, someone registering to vote does not mean a vote was cast, said Cassondra Knudson, a spokesperson for Minnesota’s Secretary of State. Election officials have several layers of verification to ensure only eligible voters cast ballots.
Our ruling
A social media post claimed data on the Social Security Administration’s website showed “how many people each of the 43 states are registering to vote who DO NOT HAVE IDs.”
That’s inaccurate: It shows the results of requests from 43 states to verify partial Social Security numbers under the Help America Vote Act. Sometimes states verify the same voter’s information multiple times, and not all verification requests are for voters registering without IDs.
We rate this claim False.
PolitiFact Staff Writer Sofia Ahmed and PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
RELATED: More than 2 million noncitizens have not registered to vote in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Texas
RELATED: No ID required to vote? That’s not the case for most voters
Amid a fiercely competitive 2024 election rematch against incumbent President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump will become the first former president put on criminal trial.
Trump faces felony charges in four cases, but the first one to go to trial — and perhaps the only one likely to be completed before Nov. 5, Election Day — is a case in Manhattan concerning the alleged mislabeling of payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election. Daniels has said she had an affair with Trump.
Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to Daniels made through Trump’s then-attorney Michael Cohen. (Daniels’ real name is Stephanie Clifford.) Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is prosecuting the case.
Jury selection starts April 15.
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 with the intent 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.
“Paying hush money is not illegal. People can disapprove of it, but it’s not illegal,” said Jon Sale, a criminal defense attorney in Miami and a former Watergate prosecutor.
Rather, Trump is accused of having made false entries in financial records to further another crime.
“Why did Donald Trump repeatedly make these false statements?” Bragg said when he announced the charges. “The evidence will show that he did so to cover up crimes relating to the 2016 election.”
Bragg said Trump’s actions “violated New York election law, which makes it a crime to conspire to promote a candidacy by unlawful means.” He also said the wire payment exceeded the federal campaign contribution cap and falsified financial statements violated New York law.
The number of charges refers to 34 documents the grand jury found to have contained a “critical false statement” related to the payments. The counts also include documents related to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Trump, which Trump has consistently denied.
Trump has three other active criminal cases: one Georgia case involving election interference, a separate federal case on election interference and a federal case on document retention. He has also faced a civil trial in New York over inflated valuations of his businesses. In that case, Trump was found liable but is appealing the verdict.
Here, we will answer questions about the prosecution’s challenges and how the trial will work, and fact-check false and misleading statements Trump has made about the case.
What are the challenges of prosecuting this case?
Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer to President Donald Trump, leaves federal court Aug. 21, 2018, in New York. (AP)
The Manhattan case may be the first to go to trial, but legal experts say it may be the hardest to prove.
They cite three major challenges facing the prosecution.
One is convincing a jury that the misdemeanor business falsification charges collectively advanced a separate crime, enabling Trump to be charged with a felony.
“A juror could easily have a reasonable doubt about whether the true motive behind the payments is … to keep your wife from finding out and protect your public image,” said Bill Otis, former head of the Appellate Division of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and a former special counsel to former President George H.W. Bush.
A second challenge involves some key government witnesses, including Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion, making false statements to a federally insured bank and breaching campaign finance rules. Some charges he pleaded guilty to were related to the Daniels and McDougal cases. In a separate case, he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. Cohen eventually served a little more than a year in prison plus additional time on home confinement.
This history means Cohen “has serious credibility problems,” said Matthew J. Galluzzo, who worked as a Manhattan prosecutor before Bragg’s tenure and is now in private practice.
A third challenge for prosecutors is that it will take only one juror to prevent the unanimous verdict necessary to convict Trump.
“Even in a favorable venue like New York, some jurors could believe that Trump is being treated unfairly by our civil and criminal justice system,” said Neama Rahmani, a former prosecutor who co-founded the firm West Coast Trial Lawyers.
How will jury selection work? Can lawyers screen for pro- or anti-Trump bias?
Adult film actor Stormy Daniels speaks April 16, 2018, outside federal court in New York. (AP)
Citizen residents of Manhattan will comprise the jury. Even though Trump lived in the borough for much of his adult life, Manhattan probably is not a favorable jury pool for Trump: Biden won 86% of the vote there in 2020.
During jury selection, attorneys on both sides will be able to ask potential jurors questions to see whether they have fixed notions about the case that would keep them from ruling impartially.
The juror questionnaire posted by the court includes such questions as the prospective juror’s news and social media consumption habits; whether they have supported or belonged to anti-government groups or identified as QAnon; whether they have attended a Trump rally or signed up for a pro-Trump newsletter; whether they have read his books; and whether they “have any feelings of opinions about how Mr. Trump is being treated in this case.”
Sale said that even though the test is to put one’s beliefs aside “and only decide based on the facts and the law,” getting a fair jury will be a challenge for the defense.
However, Trump’s ace in the hole is that he needs only one holdout.
“Mr. Trump is not going to find 12 jurors in Manhattan to unanimously acquit him,” Galluzzo said. “However, he wins, as a practical matter, if he can convince one juror out of 12 to have reasonable doubt.”
If that happens, the judge would declare a mistrial, and it’s highly likely that Election Day, Nov. 5, will fall before the retrial. That outcome would benefit Trump.
What does the case mean for Trump’s ability to campaign?
Former President Donald Trump salutes at a campaign rally March 16, 2024, in Vandalia, Ohio. (AP)
The trial will be held every weekday except Wednesdays, when Juan M. Merchan, the acting justice of the Supreme Court, holds mental health court. New York law generally requires a defendant to be present during the trial, which, in this case, could last six to eight weeks.
That schedule would mean that Trump can hold campaign events at night, on Wednesdays or on weekends. Trump can also continue posting on his Truth Social platform.
Outwardly, Trump seems unfazed by the logistical constraints, often speaking to press gaggles after court appearances and using the trials to portray himself as a victim of the justice system.
“He is expected to use his trial as a major theme of his campaign,” said Jerry Goldfeder, a senior counsel with the firm Cozen O’Connor who has represented elected officials.
A week before the trial started, a Trump fundraising email said, “Biden will raise millions while I’m stuck defending myself in court!” and asked “one million pro-Trump patriots to chip in.”
A Class E felony is punishable by up to four years in prison, but even if Trump gets convicted, he might not get jail time. Being convicted of a felony is no barrier to running for president or serving. Even being in prison would not block him from serving as president, though it might cause significant logistical headaches.
Trump said Judge Merchan’s gag order is “wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement.” What do experts say?
Trump omits that the order still allows him to criticize key people with power in the prosecution.
Merchan’s April 1 gag order barred Trump from speaking about witnesses or counsel in the case other than Bragg or about members of the court staff or their family members if those statements are made to interfere with the case. In other words, Trump can still criticize Bragg and Merchan. Even though the federal government is not prosecuting Trump in this case, Trump also maintains his right to call it a “Biden trial.”
Trump’s lawyers have challenged the gag order and courts will have the final say. Legal experts agreed that Trump should not be allowed to make comments that incite violence, But beyond that, we heard mixed opinions about the gag order.
Sale said one potentially unfair aspect of the order is that although Cohen has frequently talked about the case on television, outside of court, Trump cannot rebut what Cohen says.
However, experts said the law supports gag orders.
“This case law goes back decades,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University School of Law, “Merchan followed it.”
Duncan Levin, who worked in the district attorney’s office before Bragg and is now a defense attorney, agreed with Gillers. Gag orders “with very limited exceptions have long been found not to violate the First Amendment,” Levin said. Trump “is free to discuss the criminal justice system but not to make ad hominem attacks on particular people associated with the case,” Levin said.
The First Amendment does not protect all speech, said Steven Friedland, an Elon University law professor and former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
“Political speech and ideas are the most highly protected, although they are still not without limits,” Friedland said. “The judge is attempting to protect political speech while at the same time protecting the fair administration of justice.”
Trump said Bragg worked “with Crooked Joe Biden’s people/campaign.” What’s his evidence?
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks April 4, 2023, at a press conference after former president Donald Trump’s arraignment in New York. (AP)
This statement by Trump on Truth Social is unsupported.
Trump points to one of Bragg’s prosecutors, Matthew Colangelo, who formerly worked for the Justice Department and the New York attorney general.
“Colangelo is a radical left (prosecutor) from the DOJ who was put into the state working for (New York Attorney General) Letitia James and was then put into the district attorney’s office to run the trial against Trump,” Trump said during a March press conference.
While working for the New York attorney general, Colangelo investigated the Trump Foundation and led lawsuits against the Trump administration.
But his presence on the team doesn’t prove that Biden White House or campaign officials coordinated the case with Bragg.
Although some legal experts told PolitiFact that Bragg could have avoided controversy by not hiring Colangelo, they agreed that his hiring does not signal that the White House or campaign officials coordinated with the district attorney’s office.
Galluzzo called Trump’s statement “total nonsense.”
“Why would it be strange or suspicious for a prosecutor to hire another prosecutor with a New York license and experience working on complex prosecutorial matters?” Galluzzo said. “Most federal prosecutors in this country have worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations.”
Trump posted a statement that Daniels denied the affair, but omits she recanted
Days before the trial, Trump wrote on Truth Social “look what was just found! Will the fake news report it?” and showed a Jan. 30, 2018, letter by Daniels stating “I am denying this affair because it never happened.”
The letter was publicly released and widely reported on the day it was released.
But soon after, Daniels recanted, saying an affair had in fact occurred. She said her denials were because of a nondisclosure agreement and that she signed the letter because parties involved “made it sound like I had no choice.”
PolitiFact in 2023 fact-checked a claim that the 2018 letter “debunked” Bragg’s case and rated that False.
RELATED: Timeline: What Donald Trump has said about Stormy Daniels and $130,000 payment
RELATED: Read all of PolitiFact’s coverage on Donald Trump indictments
Wild things can happen at city council meetings, but did a man really admit to trying to send sexually explicit images to a 13-year-old?
“Child groomer melts down about getting exposed by vigilantes at city council meeting,” posted an X user April 8 alongside a video clip of a man speaking at a city council meeting. In the clip, the man appears to get emotional as he describes being confronted for trying to send sexually explicit messages and images to a minor. The clip had more than 3.8 million views as of April 10.
(Screenshot of X post)
But the man in the video is a comedian, Cassady Campbell, known for “trolling” Texas city council meetings as various exaggerated personas. On April 1, he went before the Flower Mound, Texas, town council as a character he named “Jeffrey Goldstein,” and described himself as “a proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community,” a kindergarten teacher, and “the head of Groomers Against Pedophiles.” We found no evidence such a group exists.
Campbell posted the full three-minute video of his city council appearance to his YouTube page with the title, “Child Groomer Melts Down About Getting Exposed by Vigilantes at City Council Meeting.”
We have fact-checked similar videos before when Campbell pretended to be an LGBTQ+ activist at a meeting in Plano, Texas.
Campbell’s YouTube page describes him as an “actor and comedian.” His channel features other videos of him speaking in character at Texas city council meetings in Allen, Dallas and McKinney. Flower Mound is a town of 78,000 people northwest of Dallas.
His full comments to Flower Mound’s town council lasted three minutes. In them, he perpetuated the anti-LGBTQ myth that gay men are “groomers” and more likely to sexually abuse children.
The clip was shared on X by Alex Rosen, founder of “Predator Poachers” a group that attempts to expose adults seeking to have inappropriate relationships with children. The original post now has a Community Note clarifying that the video is a “parody.”
Community notes are submitted by certain users and become public if “enough contributors from different points of view rate that note as helpful,” according to X. Similarly, a note can be taken down if enough users downvote it.
This video features a comedian in character, not a real “child groomer.” We rate this claim False.
