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Tag: Legal Issues

  • Was it legal to fly the flag upside down at Alito’s house?

    Was it legal to fly the flag upside down at Alito’s house?

    Media reports that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house displayed an upside-down American flag, a traditional sign of political dissent, after the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, set off a firestorm of criticism over whether the move was a political statement that compromises his impartiality. 

    Hanging the flag upside down is technically against U.S. law. But legal experts say Alito likely did not act illegally.

    The initial May 16 New York Times article reported that the upside-down flag, a longstanding sign to communicate distress in “instances of extreme danger to life or property,” was by then a common symbol for supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss. “A flood of social media posts exhorted Trump supporters to flip over their flags or purchase new ones to display upside down,” the Times reported.

    The justice later told Fox News that he had no role in the flag being flown in that manner. Rather, he said, his wife Martha-Ann Alito had raised the upside-down flag “for a short time” as a response to verbal attacks by her neighbors.

    As the controversy developed, Alitos’s Democratic critics urged him to recuse himself from cases involving Trump and his actions during that period, saying the justice’s impartiality could not be assured. Supreme Court recusals are up to the justice, with no external mechanism to require them.

    But the episode has spotlighted an even more basic question: Was flying the flag upside down against the law?

    In a technical sense, perhaps. In a practical sense, no, legal experts say.

    U.S. law lays out lengthy instructions for the proper display and treatment of the flag. 

    For the Alitos, the most relevant portion of U.S. Code is: “No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America. … The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.”

    The notion of hanging a flag upside down to communicate distress has a long history in maritime culture, likely dating back to the British Isles in the 17th century, according to the North American Vexillological Association, an organization of flag scholars and enthusiasts. It was commonly used by ships through the 18th and 19th centuries until the development of more effective communication systems, notably radio. 

    By now, “neither the International Code of Signals nor U.S. inland rules of the road recognize the inverted ensign as a distress signal,” and “signal books published by the U.S. maritime agencies specifically discourage its use.” (Today, ships in dire distress are supposed to signal with “N” and “C” international code flags — which stand for “November” and “Charlie” — or other specified flags.)

    As a result, an inverted flag “has largely become a political signal,” the association has written.

    For instance, prior to becoming an election-denial symbol in 2020, “many Cuban-Americans in Miami used it to protest the federal government taking Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives and sending him back to his father in the spring of 2000,” said Howard M. Wasserman, a Florida International University law professor.

    But despite being part of U.S. law, it provides no enforcement mechanism for flying the flag right side up. In addition, the flag code’s text uses the softer term “should” when it discusses how flags should be treated, rather than “shall.” 

    “The U.S. Flag Code can be understood as an etiquette manual,” Ted Kaye, the North American Vexillological Association’s secretary, told PolitiFact. 

    And even if U.S. law did specify an enforcement mechanism, it would be impractical to charge all violators with criminality. 

    For instance, another portion of the flag code forbids flags from being “used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever” and being printed “on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use.” This is a common practice today and is never prosecuted. 

    A big reason for the hands-off approach: Several rulings, most recently Texas v. Johnson in 1989, affirmed First Amendment protections for mistreating a flag. Since the 1989 decision, efforts to amend the Constitution to allow the prosecution of flag burning have come to naught.

    “Punishing someone for flag misuse or desecration violates a bedrock free speech principle — that government has no power to punish a speaker based on the message they seek to convey, including through the potent symbol of the U.S. flag,” said Timothy Zick, a William & Mary law professor.

    “Flying the flag upside down to send a political message is protected by the First Amendment,” said Gregory P. Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. 

    With the Supreme Court having taken the flag’s mistreatment out of the legal realm more than three decades ago, questions of flag-display propriety shift instead to the world of norms, Magarian said.

    “Alito couldn’t be prosecuted for altering the flag to send a political message,” he said. “However, the statute still makes a normative statement about behavior of which society should disapprove. I think that’s the likeliest sense in which the statute could be relevant for the present discussion.”

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  • The Supreme Court case reshaping LGBTQ+ rights: A primer

    The Supreme Court case reshaping LGBTQ+ rights: A primer

    This spring, multiple federal government agencies announced changes to antidiscrimination policies for LGBTQ+ people at work, at the doctor and in the classroom. Around the same time, a federal court ruled that restricting gender-affirming care and barring a West Virginia transgender student from playing girls’ sports violates antidiscrimination law.

    Behind these policy and legal shifts is a 2020 Supreme Court case most people likely have never heard of: Bostock v. Clayton County. 

    Weighing cases in which employees said they were fired for being gay or transgender, the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock that firing people for their sexual orientation or gender identity amounts to “sex discrimination,” which is prohibited under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

    The landmark Bostock ruling’s impact on LGBTQ+ civil rights is proving significant. Here’s a crash course on the case, how it is shaping federal policy and being used to challenge legislation that aims to curb transgender rights.

    Bostock v. Clayton County unpacked

    In June 2020, as the world reeled from the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests against police brutality gripped the United States, the Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County. The ruling combined three Title VII lawsuits in which employees said they were fired because they were gay or transgender. 

    All three cases were “direct evidence” cases, said Jennifer Shinall, Vanderbilt University law professor. That means there was no dispute that the plaintiffs were fired for their LGBTQ+ identities; the question was whether that counted as illegal discrimination.

    In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court found that it did. 

    Neil Gorsuch, considered to be a “reliable conservative vote” on the Supreme Court, authored the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the four liberal justices on the bench at the time.

    Justice Neil Gorsuch in his chambers at the Supreme Court in September 2019. Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County. (AP)

    Gorsuch said the 1964 Civil Rights Acts’ authors likely did not consider LGBTQ+ identities when drafting the bill. But, he wrote, even if “sex” referred only to biological sex assigned at birth, “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” 

    He gave an example he said shows such discrimination: A woman being attracted to men is tolerated, but a man being attracted to men is not. “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex,” Gorsuch wrote. “Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

    This ruling is binding precedent only for Title VII employment cases, and Gorsuch made it clear that it did not address questions beyond those narrow circumstances. Nevertheless, many LGBTQ+ advocates and legal experts saw potential for the same legal logic to be applied to other laws that prohibit “sex discrimination,” such as Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools; the Affordable Care Act; and even the U.S. Constitution. 

    How the Bostock case is shaping federal policy

    On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing each federal agency to review and revise its policies to ensure they reflected the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Bostock. 

    The Biden administration’s call to expand Bostock’s reasoning to other federal laws and corresponding policy drew criticism. Nevertheless, federal agencies including the Justice Department, Department of Agriculture, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Health and Human Services responded, releasing guidance, and in some cases, formal regulations clarifying that “sex discrimination” includes discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

    The Education Department’s recently released regulations for Title IX are one of the most controversial changes. Title IX, passed in 1972, aims to protect students against sex discrimination and harassment in classrooms and school admissions. But it is best known for changing athletics to require that women and men receive equitable participation opportunities.

    On April 19, citing the Bostock case, the Education Department updated its regulations to extend protections against sex discrimination to LGBTQ+ students. Although the regulations stopped short of providing guidance on the controversial issue of transgender athletes in school sports, the inclusion of LGBTQ+ identities under the nation’s leading gender-equity law prompted backlash.

    House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., wrote on X about the rule change, “This expansion embraces radical gender theory & erases the protections women fought for.”

    Twenty-two state attorneys general have filed lawsuits challenging the new Title IX regulations. Some of those states have passed laws that potentially violate the new regulations.

    Interpretations of Title VII and Title IX have often informed one another, said Shinall, the Vanderbilt University law professor. So, it’s not unusual that an interpretation of a term in one statute would affect the other. 

    But opponents are expected to argue that Bostock only applies in limited circumstances, and these changes overstep agencies’ policy-making authority.

    “The bottom line is that the (Biden) Administration is interpreting Bostock more broadly than perhaps the (Supreme) Court will ultimately accept,” Duke University law professor Doriane Lambelet Coleman told PolitiFact in an email. 

    Title VII is a general nondiscrimination rule, but other statutes, such as Title IX, make exceptions for single-sex accommodations such as sex-segregated living facilities and single-sex sports teams. 

    It’s unclear how the Supreme Court will apply Bostock’s logic to those statutory exceptions — such as whether barring a transgender girl from playing on a girls’ sports team is unlawful discrimination. 

    Issues of privacy, safety, fairness or equal opportunity could figure in deciding how nondiscrimination rules should apply beyond employment. 

    “I think that the margins of Bostock are going to be subject to a tremendous amount of litigation,” said Elana Redfield, federal policy director at the Williams Institute, a think tank at the UCLA School of Law. “As the Biden administration continues to examine the applicability of Bostock in other contexts, that’s going to provide new testing ground for the scope of the ruling.”

    How Bostock is being used in legal challenges to anti-trans laws

    The Bostock case also has been cited by individual plaintiffs in lawsuits nationwide that challenge laws restricting transgender access to bathrooms, school sports teams and gender-affirming care.

    Most recently, the U.S Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit applied Bostock’s reasoning to a case in which a Houston County, Georgia, sheriff’s department employee alleged discrimination because the health insurance policy would not cover her gender-affirming surgery. The court ruled in her favor, writing, “Applying Bostock’s reasoning to the facts in this case, we conclude that the district court was correct in finding that the (policy) violated Title VII.”

    Other lower courts are also weighing whether Bostock’s reasoning applies to other federal laws that prohibit sex discrimination or the Constitution’s equal protection clause. 

    (Source: U.S. Courts)

     

    Several circuit courts have found that Bostock’s LGBTQ+ protections apply to other federal statutes, and in some cases, the Constitution’s 14th Amendment equal protection clause.

    Most recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled in both a school athletics case and a case about access to gender-affirming care that discrimination against transgender people constituted illegal discrimination under federal law, and in the case of health care, constitutional law.

    But some circuit courts have decided differently. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, in the case LW v. Skrmetti, said Bostock was limited to Title VII and does not apply to the Constitution.

    Most lawsuits make a two-part argument, alleging discrimination under federal laws such as the Affordable Care Act or Title IX, and that certain state laws violate the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

    “In all of those cases to some degree, the question of Bostock’s applicability beyond Title (VII) is at issue” said Joshua Block, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union‘s LGBTQ & HIV Project. The ACLU is serving as legal representation for transgender plaintiffs in several of these cases.  

    The Supreme Court has declined in the past to review cases that wrestle with similar issues. But given the number of cases related to Bostock, and disagreement among the circuit court rulings, experts wonder if the Supreme Court will have to resolve the issue. 

    “The court is always more likely to take cases with clean facts that allow the court to only decide one issue and decide as narrowly as possible,” Shinall said.

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  • Abortion activist sentenced under 1994 clinic access law

    Abortion activist sentenced under 1994 clinic access law

    An anti-abortion activist convicted for her role in the October 2020 invasion and blockade of a Washington, D.C.-area abortion clinic was sentenced May 14 to 57 months in prison.

    Lauren Handy, the activism and mutual aid director for the group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, was convicted in August 2023 of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a 1994 law that prohibits obstructing entrances to reproductive health clinics. She was also found guilty on a felony civil rights charge. 

    Lila Rose, the founder of the anti-abortion group Live Action, said on social media that Handy’s sentence was too severe for her actions.

    “30-year-old pro-life activist Lauren Handy has just been sentenced to 57 months in federal prison for handing roses and resources to women at an abortion facility,” Rose wrote in a May 14 Instagram post. “Meanwhile, abortionists who dismember and kill children walk free. A grave injustice!”

    The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

    Rose’s claim, however, misstates the reason for Handy’s conviction. After PolitiFact contacted Rose, Live Action spokesperson Noah Brandt referred us to Rose’s May 15 X post that clarified her claim. She made the same clarification on her Instagram post. Here is the original archived version.

    “CLARIFICATION: While Lauren has passed out roses and offered counseling and resources at many abortion facilities, Lauren and fellow defendants were convicted of violating the FACE Act — a law that has primarily been used to penalize pro-life activism — for their participation in a non-violent sit-in at Cesare Santangelo’s Washington, D.C. late-term abortion facility,” she wrote, in a post that went on to criticize the conviction and sentence as unjust.

    Prosecutors, in their sentencing memorandum, said Handy and her co-defendants planned a “lock-and-block” invasion of the Washington Surgi-Clinic, “during which they used force and physical obstructions to interfere with access to the clinic.”

    Handy planned, organized and directed the protest, which lasted for several hours on Oct. 22, 2020, prosecutors said. Co-defendant Jonathan Darnel, who livestreamed the event, also co-organized the event. He was sentenced May 15 to 34 months in prison.

    Eight other activists were also convicted or pleaded guilty in the case on similar charges. Handy’s sentence is the longest in the case, so far; two other people await sentencing.

    Handy identified herself to police officers as a “blockade organizer,” and admitted her role in social media posts, prosecutors said. She also used a fake name to schedule an appointment to gain access to the clinic. She identified herself using the fake name to a clinic worker as her co-defendants, one of whom had a bag of chains, locks and ropes, hid in the building’s stairwell, prosecutors said.

    Prosecutors said a nurse injured her ankle when another protester, Jay Smith, pushed her as he forcibly entered the clinic. Other defendants were accused of pushing or shoving clinic workers. Prosecutors said the obstruction Handy planned was “especially traumatic” for two clinic patients who testified at trial, one of whom was forced to climb through a window to receive care and another who collapsed in pain while being blocked from the clinic.

    Facebook livestream videos of the protest show some protesters holding literature to pass out. Handy appears several times in the video, speaking with protesters and police officers. She also spoke with Darnel, who was narrating the livestream, and she described allowing a man in to join his partner after he promised to give her anti-abortion literature, but she said “under no circumstances” would a doctor who worked at the clinic be allowed to enter. The videos don’t show her handing out roses, although the videos  total more than two and a half hours and Handy is not on screen the entire time.

    Handy’s online bio says she has helped lead the “Red Rose Movement,” an anti-abortion group that goes to abortion clinics and offers patients “red roses as a sign of life, peace and love.” 

    Darnel, in the first video, described the protest as “historic” and said that he knew he and other protesters were breaking the law.

    “These people are not just counseling inside of an abortion clinic, which is illegal. They are physically preventing women from going in to kill their children,” he said. “This could mean severe criminal penalties for them. But it’s worth it.”

    U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, when handing down her sentence, told Handy that “there may be nothing more American” than protests for and against abortion access, but the law doesn’t allow “violence or obstructive conduct,” The Washington Post reported.

    “That’s what you’re being punished for, not your views on abortion nor your very American commitment to peaceful protest,” Kollar-Kotelly said.

    Rose’s claim that Handy was arrested for “handing out roses and resources” at an abortion protest understates what Handy was accused and convicted of doing. Protesters forcibly invaded a clinic and prevented patients from accessing care, prosecutors said. Rose issued a clarification after PolitiFact contacted her, correctly describing why Handy was convicted. Her original statement is False.

    PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this fact-check.

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  • Trump omits full story about FEC response to New York case

    Trump omits full story about FEC response to New York case

    Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, saying Bragg  brought forward the case against him after other investigative bodies passed.

    In remarks to reporters after court May 6, Trump also singled out the actions of the Federal Election Commission and the U.S. attorney’s office in New York’s southern district.

    “The FEC said they threw it away,” Trump said, referring to the Federal Elections Commission. “They said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ Southern district didn’t bring the case. Nobody brought the case and then Alvin Bragg brought the case.”

    Trump said Bragg brought the case “when I am running and leading” in the polls. He said, “They all want to keep me off the campaign trail.”

    Trump omitted the full story about the FEC’s actions. The independent federal agency administers and enforces federal campaign finance law. Six commissioners lead it, no more than half of whom can belong to the same political party. 

    Trump is charged in Manhattan with 34 counts of falsifying business records in an alleged scheme to cover up a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. (Daniels’ real name is Stephanie Clifford.)

    FEC commissioners split their vote on general counsel’s recommendation

    Trump’s statement that the FEC “threw away” the case and replied “you’ve got to be kidding” could be interpreted to mean the agency tossed the case quickly. That’s not what happened. The complaints were filed with the agency early in 2018 and not closed until three years later.

    The FEC received complaints against Trump; his lawyer Michael Cohen, who handled the payoff to Daniels; Trump’s campaign; and a few other people and entities.

    The complaints alleged that Cohen, Trump and others violated the Federal Election Campaign Act, the federal law regulating political campaign fundraising and spending, at Trump’s direction to influence the 2016 election.

    In a 70-page report released in December 2020, the commission’s Office of General Counsel recommended that the commission find there was reason to believe that the contributions were illegal and went unreported.

    “The available information indicates that Michael Cohen paid Stephanie Clifford $130,000 … with Trump’s express promise of repayment, for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election” by preventing Clifford from publicizing the allegation, it said. 

    However, in February 2021, the FEC deadlocked on a 2-2 vote on whether Trump willfully violated federal law. The commission often deadlocks along partisan lines when it considers controversial cases. (In this case, the FEC was down from six commissioners to four. One commissioner, an independent, was absent; and one commissioner, a Republican, opted to recuse.)

    The Republican commissioners, Sean J. Cooksey and James E. Trainor III, didn’t address the charges’ validity. They argued Cohen’s guilty plea in federal court made the public record “complete,” and that “pursuing these matters further was not the best use of agency resources.”

    The Democratic commissioners, Shana M. Broussard and Ellen L. Weintraub, argued that the charges against Trump — that he “knowingly and willfully accepted contributions nearly 5,000% over the legal limit to suppress a negative story mere days before Election Day” — were “well-grounded.”

    Book raises questions about Trump administration pressure on federal prosecutors

    In his 2022 book, “Holding the Line,” former U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman described ways that he said the Trump administration interfered in political prosecutions. Trump appointed Berman to the New York’s southern district in 2018. Berman’s office prosecuted Cohen although Berman recused himself. 

    Berman’s office also investigated Trump lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. News reports said there were tensions between the prosecutor’s office and the White House in 2020. In June 2020, Attorney General Bill Barr asked Berman to resign and Berman refused, leading Trump to fire him.

    Berman wrote that before Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court to charges connected to the Trump hush money case, a Justice Department official “badgered” Berman’s office “without success to remove all references to Individual 1, President Trump, from the charging document.”

    When Bill Barr took over as attorney general in February 2019, “he not only tried to kill the ongoing investigations, but — incredibly — suggested that Cohen’s conviction on campaign finance charges be reversed,” Berman wrote.

    Barr summoned a deputy in Berman’s office to challenge the basis of Cohen’s plea and “the reason behind pursuing similar campaign finance charges against other individuals,” Berman wrote.

    Instructions from Barr and his administration were explicit, Berman wrote: “Not a single investigative step could be taken, not a single document in our possession could be reviewed until the issue was resolved. … It certainly seemed clear that Barr did not want the Cohen case spiraling in new directions.”

    Another deputy in Berman’s office later persuaded Barr to continue the investigation. It did not result in charges. The New York Times’ article about the book in September 2022 said that spokespersons for Barr and Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    We asked a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign if he had any evidence for us to consider related to the allegations in Berman’s book about pressure from Barr and did not receive a response. 

    New York investigation into Trump has roots during his presidency

    Although Trump criticizes his trial’s timing, he omits numerous factors that caused the case to take years to reach the charging stage.

    The Manhattan investigation into Trump began in 2018, during Trump’s presidency. It was subject to many twists, turns and delays amid the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 presidential election and prosecutorial turnover. 

    After Cohen pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2018, then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. began investigating the payments, Politico reported.

    Federal prosecutors could not charge Trump then because Justice Department policy bars bringing criminal charges against a sitting president, Politico reported.

    After federal prosecutors concluded their investigation, Vance in August 2019 subpoenaed Trump’s personal and corporate tax records. Trump’s lawyers fought the subpoena, and the U.S. Supreme Court in July 2020 ruled in Vance’s favor.

    By the time Vance obtained the records, it was February 2021, early in Joe Biden’s presidency. Bragg was elected to replace Vance and took office in January 2022.  

    The next month, Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, 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 Pomerantz’s resignation letter, in which he told Bragg that 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. The grand jury indicted Trump in March 2023 and Bragg announced the charges in April 2023.

    PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this article.

    CORRECTION, May 8, 2024: The Federal Election Commission’s general counsel reviewed complaints, issued a report and recommended the commission find reason to believe that Trump engaged in wrongdoing. An earlier version of this fact-check used less precise terms to describe this process. The story has been updated.

    RELATED: Trump says business records case about hush money is a “Biden trial.” It’s a Manhattan trial

    RELATED: A fact-checker’s guide to Trump’s first criminal trial: business records, hush money and a gag order

    RELATED: Read all of PolitiFact’s coverage on Donald Trump indictments

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  • Were more bills signed into law, vetoed this year?

    Were more bills signed into law, vetoed this year?

    Lawmakers in the state Capitol have wrapped up their legislative work and are now in campaign mode. 

    As you hear from politicians who are seeking your support, they may highlight the work they did to pass bills into law — that is the primary purpose of state lawmakers, after all. 

    The end of a legislative session — a two-year period — is often the time when legislators highlight how many bills were signed and how many were vetoed, major proposals that passed and ones that failed. 

    In April, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who is responsible for signing or vetoing the bills that lawmakers send to him, said he was “proud to have signed 185 bills” since the start of the year.

    That may seem like a fairly large number, especially after PolitiFact Wisconsin just found that Congress passed only 27 bills last year, the fewest since the Great Depression. However, onlookers of state government have pointed out that fewer bills now become law, especially with a Democratic governor and a Republican-led Legislature. 

    The Badger Institute, a conservative advocacy group, wrote a piece on that trend, adding that Evers has “vetoed more legislation than any governor in the last two decades.”

    Rather than fact-checking one specific claim from a politician or group, we decided to provide some historical analysis for how many bills were signed or vetoed in the last few years.

    This also provides context for a key issue voters care about: How productive is state government?

    This session had more bills signed into law, Evers has vetoed more than other governors

    PolitiFact Wisconsin reached out to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau, which keeps track of what bills are introduced and how they fare. 

    During the 2023-24 legislative session, they said, Evers signed 272 bills into law and vetoed 73.

    But those numbers don’t mean a lot unless we put them in the context of previous years. To do that, we referenced the Blue Book, which has a running list of enacted laws and vetoes each year since Wisconsin became a state in 1848. 

    One point of clarification: These tallies include bills from special sessions, which is when the governor calls on the Legislature to take up a specific proposal. 

    Let’s begin with the session starting in 2021, which included special sessions held in 2022. In all, 267 bills were signed into law, and 126 were vetoed. Comparing those numbers: In the last two years, about 79% of bills sent by the Republican-led Legislature to the Democratic governor were signed into law. In 2021-22, it was about 68%. 

    Now let’s look at 2019-20. In that period, 186 bills were signed into law and 20 were vetoed. While that reflects a much less eventful session due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s still about a 90% signing rate. 

    In 2017-18, it was a much different story: 370 bills were signed into law, and none were vetoed. 

    Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker was governor through the end of 2018, so it’s not surprising that he and the GOP-led Legislature agreed on more bills and rejected fewer.

    It was a similar case in 2015-16: 392 bills were signed into law, and only two were vetoed.

    All in all: Many more bills were approved than vetoed under Walker, when the Legislature was also Republican.

    Still, looking farther back in the Blue Book shows Evers has typically vetoed a higher number of bills than most governors, even ones who had a different party in the Legislature. 

    When former Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, was opposite a Republican majority in both chambers in 2003 and 2004, he signed 327 bills into law and vetoed 57. 

    And no governor appears to have vetoed more than 100 bills in one session, like Evers did in 2021-22. 

    That higher veto trend isn’t solely Evers’ responsibility, however. Republicans sometimes send him bills that Democrats call “veto bait” — ones known to have virtually no chance of getting his approval. 

    A small percentage of bills introduced in the Capitol make it to the governor’s desk

    There’s another number worth looking at, the one the Badger Institute was referencing. That’s the number of bills that are introduced, or “proposed” by lawmakers.

    Not all bills in the Capitol are sent to the governor. Many bills introduced by Democrats aren’t approved by the Republican majority, and sometimes Republican leaders don’t advance bills from their own colleagues. 

    So, if you’re hearing from candidates about their work, know that there’s a distinction between introducing or sponsoring a bill — and whether it was signed into law. 

    In 2023-24, 2,343 bills were introduced in the state Legislature. In the two years prior, it was 2,307. That is quite a bit higher than the 1,986 bills introduced in 2019-20, the 2,010 in 2017-18, and the 1,830 in 2015-16.

    The Legislative Reference Bureau did note, however, that it’s now more common for companion bills to be introduced in both chambers. That means it’s the exact same bill, just duplicated for the Assembly and Senate.

    So, although it might not be a perfect method to compare years, the bigger takeaway is that the percentage of bills that actually get sent to the governor for a chance at his signature or veto is pretty slim.

    A look back at major bills that passed, ones that were vetoed

    As we look back on the past session, Evers and Republicans came to more significant compromises than they have historically.

    That included a deal to boost shared revenue for local governments, a plan to keep Major League Baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers in Wisconsin and an overhaul of the state’s alcohol regulations. 

    And, Republicans passed Evers’ plans for new legislative districts into law — though that was because they saw his maps as the best option compared to others that could further reduce their party’s control. 

    Still, Republicans were upset that Evers vetoed some of their large initiatives this year, including tax cuts. And he’s vetoed bipartisan proposals, too, such as expanding the authority of some nurses and allowing out-of-state providers to provide telehealth mental health care to Wisconsin patients. 

    But if you hear from politicians this summer who celebrate more bipartisanship and productivity in state government than in years prior, there were major compromises to back up those claims. 

    Our conclusion

    To summarize: Evers signed more bills into law this past session than in his previous years as governor. He vetoed fewer in 2023-24 than in 2021-22, but he’s also vetoed more than previous governors overall. 

    Lawmakers also introduced more bills — 2,343 — than in recent memory. A small percentage of those bills actually reach the governor, which is an important distinction when candidates talk up their work. 

    Although Evers and the Republican-led Legislature have often butted heads, they reached significant compromises this year, such as the shared revenue deal. 

    All of this creates a complicated picture of how productive state government was last session. But it’s important context to keep in mind when state lawmakers talk about it this summer on the campaign trail.

     

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  • Trump falsely calls Manhattan case a ‘Biden trial’

    Trump falsely calls Manhattan case a ‘Biden trial’

    Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought the charges against former President Donald Trump over falsifying business records to pay off adult film actor Stormy Daniels. But Trump says President Joe Biden is really the person behind the case.

    Trump has made the claim many times in many places.

    “This trial that I have now, that’s a Biden trial,” Trump said April 16 in front of a New York City bodega on the second day of jury selection.

    “Two days from now, the entire world will witness the commencement of the very first Biden trial,” he said at an April 13 rally in Pennsylvania.

    “As you witness this Biden trial, I ask all Americans to remember that this is not just about me, this is about our country and this is about you,” Trump said in an April 15 video.

    These statements are wrong. There is no evidence that Biden orchestrated the charges against Trump. 

    Bragg said in April 2023 that Trump was 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.) 

    “Alvin Bragg is an independently elected state prosecutor who has nothing to do with Biden, the (Justice Department) or the federal government,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a criminal defense attorney who worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office before Bragg took over. “In fact, if Trump were convicted, even if he wanted to, Biden could not pardon him. It is wholly and entirely separate in every way.”

    We contacted a Trump campaign spokesperson for this fact-check and received no reply.  

    Manhattan investigation into Trump began before Biden was president

    The investigation into Trump’s business records is based on New York state law.

    The Justice Department prosecutes only federal crimes in federal courts and cannot control state prosecutions, said Frank O. Bowman III, a University of Missouri law professor and former local prosecutor in Denver and federal prosecutor in Florida. 

    “Local district attorneys prosecute state criminal violations in state criminal courts,” Bowman said. “They are not under the control of the U.S. Department of Justice. Moreover, in my experience, they are fiercely independent and would resent any effort from the U.S. Justice Department to interfere in their decision-making.”

    The Manhattan investigation into Trump began in 2018, before Biden was president. It faced many twists, turns and delays amid the coronavirus pandemic, 2020 presidential election and lead prosecutors quitting. 

    After Cohen pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2018, then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. opened an investigation into the payments, Politico reported.

    Federal prosecutors could not charge Trump then because of the Justice Department’s policy not to bring criminal charges against a sitting president, Politico reported.

    After federal prosecutors concluded their investigation, Vance in August 2019 subpoenaed Trump’s personal and corporate tax records. Trump’s lawyers fought the subpoena, and the U.S. Supreme Court in July 2020 ruled in Vance’s favor.

    By the time Vance obtained the records, it was February 2021, early in Biden’s presidency. Bragg was elected to replace Vance and took office in 2022.  

    Any cooperation between federal and local prosecutors generally is voluntary, said Melissa Redmon, a former local prosecutor in Georgia and University of Georgia law professor.

    When Bragg sought federal records about Cohen’s telephone, federal prosecutors declined, saying “it would be unduly burdensome.” Trump’s attorneys subpoenaed records from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

    “We would have seen much more early information sharing if the offices were acting in concert,” Redmon said.

    Although Trump was implicated in Cohen’s case, federal prosecutors in New York never charged him.

    Bragg hired former DOJ attorney, but that doesn’t prove Biden involvement

    In earlier versions of this statement, Trump highlighted a Biden link in one of the attorneys Bragg hired to work the case. 

    One of Bragg’s prosecutors, Matthew Colangelo, worked for the U.S. Justice Department and the New York attorney general’s office before Bragg said he would join the district attorney’s office in December 2022.

    In March, Trump called Colangelo a “radical left” prosecutor who was “put into the district attorney’s office to run the trial against Trump.” 

    In his two years at the Justice Department, Colangelo helped oversee the antitrust, civil, civil rights, environment and natural resources, and tax divisions. 

    Colangelo served as acting associate attorney general, the department’s third-highest-ranking position, during the Biden administration’s first few months, until Vanita Gupta was confirmed. Colangelo then served as the principal deputy associate attorney general. Colangelo also served in the Obama administration.

    When Colangelo worked for the New York attorney general, he investigated the Trump Foundation and led lawsuits against the Trump administration. The New York Times reported that Bragg and Colangelo overlapped at the attorney general’s office.

    But Colangelo’s presence on Bragg’s team doesn’t prove that Biden, or officials in his White House or campaign, were involved in the case.

    Multiple lawyers told us it’s unsurprising that Bragg would hire Colangelo, a longtime prosecutor with experience investigating Trump. Prosecutors commonly move between jobs at federal, state and high-profile local offices.

    “The more relevant prior position held by Colangelo is not his DOJ jobs, but the NY AG position in which he participated in the Trump Foundation investigation,” Bowman said. “I’d bet that Bragg hired him in part because of his familiarity with the intricacies of Trump’s businesses and financial dealings. But, again, that proves exactly nothing about Biden influence on the Manhattan case.”

    Bill Otis, former head of the Appellate Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and a former special counsel to former President George H.W. Bush, raised questions about Bragg hiring Colangelo.

    “There are about a zillion smart lawyers on the East Coast,” he said. “Why does Alvin Bragg need to use one with high-level links to Biden’s DOJ?”

    Nevertheless, Trump is exaggerating, Otis said. Bragg hiring Colangelo “does not prove Biden’s personal involvement in investigating and/or charging Trump, but it’s another smelly straw in the wind.”

    Our ruling

    Trump said that “this trial that I have now that’s a Biden trial.” 

    The Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of Trump began in 2018, before Biden was his party’s presidential nominee. Bragg filed the charges in 2023. Trump’s fighting a subpoena lengthened this timeline.

    Trump has criticized that Bragg hired Colangelo, a former Justice Department prosecutor who investigated Trump when he worked for the New York attorney general. It’s not uncommon 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 that Biden has directed the Manhattan investigation.

    We rate Trump’s statement False.

    RELATED: Fact-check: Trump misleads on jury selection, request to Judge Merchan for time off

    RELATED: A fact-checker’s guide to Trump’s first criminal trial: business records, hush money and a gag order

    RELATED: Read all of PolitiFact’s coverage on Donald Trump indictments

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  • Arizona’s age of consent is not changed by 1864 abortion law

    Arizona’s age of consent is not changed by 1864 abortion law

    A controversial Arizona Supreme Court judgment reinstated an 1864 law that would ban nearly all abortions in the state. But one online claim painted the effort as being so arcane as to also make sex with children legal. 

    “The 1864 Arizona law forbidding abortions, upheld by the State Supreme Court, also sets the age of consent for females at 10 Years,” multiple Instagram posts say. The posts attribute the statement to horror novelist Stephen King, who made the comment in an April 12 X post. 

    (Screenshot from Instagram)

    We tried contacting King about this claim through his literary agent and an online form on his website but received no response.

    The Facebook and Instagram posts quoting him 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.)

    On April 9, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in favor of bringing back a Civil War-era law that would ban all abortions except when a pregnant woman’s life is in danger. Under the law, abortion providers could face two to five years in prison. Barring other legal or legislative action, the abortion measure could take effect as early as June, according to Axios.

    The law is part of Arizona’s Howell Code, nearly 500 pages of laws that governed the Arizona territory before the state’s official 1912 establishment. The Howell Code also includes provisions on dueling, slavery, interracial marriages, the age of consent and abortion. 

    Although the Howell Code contains a provision in Chapter, 10, Section 47 that characterizes sex with girls younger than 10 years old as rape, the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling reinstated only its abortion provision from Chapter 10, Section 45, which states: 

    “And every person who shall administer or cause to be administered or taken, any medicinal substances, or shall use or cause      to be used any instruments whatever, with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child, and shall be thereof duly convicted, shall be punished by imprisonment in the Territorial prison for a term not less than two years nor more than five years: Provided, that no physician shall be affected by the last clause of this section, who in the discharge of his professional duties deems it necessary to produce the miscarriage of any woman in order to save her life.”

    Jennifer Piatt, the co-director of Arizona State University’s Center for Public Health Law and Policy, told Politifact, “The Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling, while reawakening a Civil War-era abortion ban originally passed in 1864, did not revitalize other centuries old restrictions found in the Howell Code, including provisions setting lower ages of consent.” 

    Arizona law continues to hold that a person can legally consent to having sex at age 18.

    Our ruling

    King claimed that, “The 1864 Arizona law forbidding abortions, upheld by the State Supreme Court, also sets the age of consent for females at 10 years.” 

    Strictly speaking, the code from which the 1864 abortion law was drawn did include a provision that criminalized sex with girls younger than age 10.

    However, the statement is misleading in that the Arizona Supreme Court’s action did not involve the age of consent, which remains 18 under Arizona’s statute. We rate this claim Mostly False. 

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  • Fact-checking Trump’s press conference with Mike Johnson

    Fact-checking Trump’s press conference with Mike Johnson

    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.

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  • GOP seeks to block noncitizen voting, despite federal ban

    GOP seeks to block noncitizen voting, despite federal ban

    Former President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson will host an event at Mar-a-Lago on April 12 in an appearance that is expected to underscore something that PolitiFact has fact-checked repeatedly as false: allegations of rampant election fraud — most recently claims of noncitizen voting.

    Their joint appearance comes as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has called for Johnson’s ouster for working too closely with Democrats, and as Trump continues to make securing the border a key argument for his return to the White House. 

    As he campaigns in 2024, Trump has repeatedly made false and ridiculous statements about the 2020 election. Trump’s election result denial has poisoned many Americans’ views on voting, misleading the public about how elections are run.

    So far this year, Trump, entrepreneur Elon Musk and social media influencers have spread statements that create a false impression that noncitizens’ voting or their voter registration is rampant. It isn’t.

    The rhetoric is fed, partly, by the reality that a minority of cities allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, such as for mayor or city council. This includes some cities in California, Maryland and Vermont, Ron Hayduk, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, previously told PolitiFact. 

    But by law, only American citizens are allowed to vote in elections for Congress and president.

    Noncitizen voting has been a frequent theme of misinformation in 2024

    Trump has made false claims about noncitizens voting stretching back to 2014, and his 2016 presidential race. He made similar statements after his 2020 loss.

    Trump said in January that Democrats are allowing immigrants illegally in the country “to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote.” 

    Trump didn’t directly identify who “they” are, but in his preceding comments, he talked about people who “cheat on an election” — language he often uses to talk about Democrats.

    Our search for evidence turned up sporadic cases of noncitizens registering to vote or casting ballots. But we found no effort by Democrats to register people in the country illegally. Most noncitizens don’t want to risk jail time (or deportation if they are here illegally) by casting a ballot. Election officials take several steps to ensure that only eligible voters cast ballots. 

    We rated Trump’s statement Pants on Fire. 

    Musk has posted about noncitizens and voting dozens of times. His posts claim that Biden is bringing in new migrants to boost votes for Democrats.

    Musk said in a February post on X that Biden’s strategy is to “get as many illegals in the country as possible” and “legalize them to create a permanent majority.” 

    The path to U.S. citizenship, which is required for voting in federal elections, can take a decade, so the current influx of immigrants would not lead to a significant number of new voters for many years, if ever. Even when immigrants become voting citizens, it doesn’t mean the United States will become a one-party nation. We rated Musk’s statement False. 

    If a noncitizen is allowed to vote in a city race, that does not give that person the right to vote for president.

    For example, Takoma Park, Maryland, has allowed noncitizen voting for mayor and city council since 1993. About 200 noncitizens are registered to vote in elections compared with 11,200 registered citizen voters in Takoma Park. 

    Voting for local elections is held on a separate ballot and location from state and federal elections. Jessie Carpenter, Takoma Park clerk, said if a noncitizen showed up at a polling precinct site to vote in a state or federal election, that person would not be on the roll of eligible voters.

    “There is no basis for thinking these folks would be voting in state elections,” Carpenter said.

    Trump continues to spread falsehoods about 2020

    Trump has made other statements that distort the outcome of elections. Before his recent rally in Wisconsin, Trump said he won Wisconsin in 2020. He won the state in 2016, but lost in 2020.

    A probe led by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman — who has aligned with Trump and promoted his false claims — turned up no evidence the election was incorrectly called. We rated Trump’s statement Pants on Fire.

    Many of Trump’s falsehoods pertain to voting by mail and its expansion during the pandemic. Trump said in January that Democrats “used COVID to cheat” in the 2020 election.

    Many states made voting easier during the pandemic by mailing a ballot or an application to receive a ballot to registered voters. Some states that previously required voters to have an excuse to vote by mail loosened that rule.

    Trump is free to disagree with these changes, but he is wrong to characterize them as cheating. These changes were made openly, through executive orders, administrative actions or law. And when a state expanded access to voting by mail, that was available to Republican voters, too. 

    In a March speech in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump falsely said, “Eighty-two percent of the country understands that it was a rigged election.” Polls showed a majority of Americans believed the 2020 results were legitimate, although significant numbers of Republicans did not.

    Johnson sought to overturn the 2020 election

    Johnson aligned himself with Trump and congressional Republicans who sought to overturn legitimate results ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

    ​​In December 2020, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to block four battleground states from voting in the Electoral College. Those four states voted for Biden.

    Johnson sent an email to Republican colleagues asking them to join an amicus — or “friend of the court” — brief in support of Paxton’s lawsuit, CNN reported. 

    The majority of the conference, 126 Republicans, signed the brief. Johnson tweeted Dec. 10, 2020, that he was “proud to lead” the effort.

    In interviews after the election, Johnson spread falsehoods about voting machines and a “rigged” election. On Jan. 6, Johnson objected to certification of the election.

    Congressional efforts to ban noncitizen voting

    Republicans in Congress, with a boost from Trump, are pushing for lawmakers to pass a ban on noncitizen voting. 

    “Congress has a role with regard to federal elections,” Johnson said April 12, before his meeting with Trump. “We want to make absolutely certain that anybody who votes is actually an American citizen. In some states, it’s too easy. … So, we need to make sure that federal law is clear on that matter.”

    The proposed legislation is drawing attention because Republicans have made fear of noncitizen voting a frequent talking point as a high number of migrants cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

    There are a few Republican-backed legislative efforts to curb noncitizen voting.

    The broadest bill, the American Confidence in Elections Act, is sponsored by Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis. It currently has 131 co-sponsors, all Republicans. One provision in this bill states it will ensure “only eligible American citizens may participate in federal elections. It draws from previous legislation including the “NO VOTE for Non-Citizens Act of 2023” filed by Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va.

    The bill acknowledges that this requirement is duplicative of existing law and constitutional requirements: Noncitizens are already not allowed to vote in federal elections.

    Steil’s bill also has the following elements targeting noncitizen voting:

    • A provision that requires ballots given to noncitizen voters in local elections to include only the offices for which they are eligible to vote, rather than federal offices for which they may not vote.

    These measures would fall short of banning local noncitizen voting entirely, because federalism prevents Congress from infringing on local powers over their own jurisdictions. But because of Congress’ unusual ability to influence governance in the District of Columbia, the bill would block the district directly from allowing noncitizens to vote. The district’s provisions have attracted intense opposition from voting rights groups.

    This bill has passed the House Administration Committee, which Steil chairs, over Democratic opposition. But it has not received a floor vote yet.

    Amid Republican concerns that the full bill will have trouble getting through the chamber, the committee has also approved six pieces of Steil’s bill as stand-alone legislation. Three of these smaller bills touch on noncitizen voting.

    One measure would ban the District of Columbia from allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections. Another spinoff bill would let states include on vote-by-mail registration applications a requirement that the applicant provide proof of U.S. citizenship.

    And a third bill would require the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to respond to requests from election officials who seek to verify the citizenship of voters in their state.

    It’s unclear when, or if, any of these measures will come to a vote in the House. If they do pass the House, the ones that receive widespread Democratic opposition are likely to be dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

    Opponents of such measures argue that there are already election law safeguards in place that address these concerns. Those protections include that current law already bans noncitizen voting in federal elections and penalties can include jail time, deportation or denial of citizenship applications. Also, when people register to vote they swear under oath that they are citizens.

    RELATED: Trump’s claim that millions of immigrants are signing up to vote illegally is Pants on Fire!

    RELATED: ‘An environment of distrust’: How Elon Musk amplifies falsehoods about immigration, 2024 voting

     

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  • Trump’s lawyer didn’t accuse judge of taking bribe

    Trump’s lawyer didn’t accuse judge of taking bribe

    After a New York judge ordered former President Donald Trump to pay a $454 million penalty in a civil fraud case, social media users claimed one of Trump’s lawyers accused the judge of corruption.

    A March 19 TikTok video showed still images of Alina Habba, an attorney representing Trump, and Arthur Engoron, the New York Supreme Court justice presiding over Trump’s civil business fraud case.

    Text above the images read, “Awake yet? Donald Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, just exposed Judge Arthur Engoron on her Telegram! He took a $10,000,000 BRIBE from Joe Biden’s shell companies to convict Donald Trump!”

    TikTok identified this video as part of its efforts to counter inauthentic, misleading or false content. (Read more about PolitiFact’s partnership with TikTok.)

    (Screengrab from TikTok)

    This claim was also reshared multiple times on X.

    In February, Engoron ruled that Trump and the Trump Organization must pay $454 million for fraudulently inflating Trump’s net worth. An appeals court lowered the bond to $175 million and Trump posted a bond in that amount April 1. New York Attorney General Letitia James has questioned the validity of Trump’s bond; Engoron scheduled a hearing April 22 to discuss it.

    Although Habba has criticized Engoron’s ruling, there is no evidence she’s accused the judge of taking a bribe from Biden. Erica Knight, Habba’s spokesperson, told PolitiFact Habba made no such assertion. We also found no posts on Habba’s social media accounts or credible news coverage of her supposed bribery accusation.

    We searched “Alina Habba” on Telegram and found at least 10 accounts — some with thousands of followers — using her name and likeness. None of these accounts are authentic because Habba doesn’t have a Telegram account, her spokesperson said.

    (Screengrabs from Telegram)

    The social media posts also wrongly claim that Engoron convicted Trump. Civil court cases, such as the one Trump lost in New York, can involve disputes about money and debts, property, injuries, marriage or children. Civil cases result in monetary damages or court orders, not convictions, which occur when people are found guilty in criminal cases.

    We rate the claim that Habba said on Telegram that Engoron took a “$10 million bribe from Joe Biden’s shell companies to convict Donald Trump” False.

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  • Donald Trump wasn’t sued for paying back loans with interest

    Donald Trump wasn’t sued for paying back loans with interest

    Was former President Donald Trump prosecuted for something that is ordinarily not considered unlawful? That’s what a viral Facebook post says.

    “When Trump takes out a loan and pays it back with interest, it is a crime,” the March 26 post claimed. The post is then critical of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, parts of which have been blocked by the Supreme Court.

    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.)

    The post appears to be referring to the New York attorney general’s fraud case, which accused the former president of manipulating the value of properties to obtain favorable loan terms from banks. 

    That was a civil case, not a criminal matter. He was not accused of taking a loan out and paying it back with interest.

    In February, New York judge Arthur Engoron ruled in the state’s favor, saying that “in order to borrow more and at lower rates, defendants submitted blatantly false financial data to the accountants, resulting in fraudulent financial statements.” 

    Engoron ordered Trump to pay more than $450 million and barred him from being an executive for any New York businesses for three years. His sons and other co-defendants were also barred from executive roles.

    Trump has appealed the ruling and he posted a $175 million bond, which will prevent his assets from being seized while the case is under appeal.

    We rate the claim that Trump was sued for taking a loan and paying it back False.

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  • Fact-checking influencer’s claim about squatters’ rights

    Fact-checking influencer’s claim about squatters’ rights

    On TikTok and Instagram, viral videos show a man telling people that there’s a legal way for them to invade an abandoned house.

    “I found out that there is a law that says that if a house is not inhabited we can expropriate it,” the influencer Leonel Moreno, who goes by “Leito Oficial” says in Spanish on a March 16 Instagram video.

    Moreno is a Venezuelan migrant who came to the U.S. in 2022. His 2023  videos telling people how to “take advantage of the U.S. system” went viral.

    An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson told PolitiFact that Moreno was placed into an Alternatives to Detention program after he arrived in the U.S. That program required him to report to an Enforcement and Removal Operations Office within 60 days of his U.S. arrival. Because he didn’t report to the office, immigration officers arrested Moreno on March 29 in Gahanna, Ohio. He is  detained pending further immigration proceedings, the ICE spokesperson said on April 4. 

    In the Instagram video, Moreno said taking over houses will help people avoid living on the streets or burdening the public. He added that a law says people can take an abandoned deteriorated house, repair and live in it, and eventually be able to sell it.

    The conservative X account Libs of TikTok, which has about 3 million followers, reposted the video with the caption: “Holy smokes. Tiktoker is advising illegals on how to take over Americans’ homes via progressive squatters’ rights laws. This tiktoker boasts that his friends already took over 7 homes. Unreal.”

    Other Instagram users with thousands of followers also shared the video. 

    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.)

    No federal law allows seizure of abandoned houses, squatter rights vary by state

    There is no U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development authority that lets a person take over an uninhabited house, a department spokesperson told PolitiFact. Experts also told us that there’s no federal law that lets people take over abandoned houses.

    But Moreno appears to be referring to adverse possession laws, commonly called squatters’ rights.

    All 50 states have adverse possession laws. Each state has its own rules on how property owners can remove squatters, and how squatters can take possession of a property.

    These laws apply when a person has illegally occupied a space for a specific amount of time; in some states that’s seven years, in others up to 20 years.

    A squatter can be someone who stops paying rent or who enters a property and occupies it without lawful documentation or permission to be there. However, former tenants cannot apply for adverse possession because they were initially in the property with the owner’s permission.

    Some states, such as Georgia, Illinois and Wisconsin, require showing “good faith” to take adverse possession. In other words, the people claiming the property must demonstrate that they had basis to believe that they own the property, even if they were mistaken. 

    Typically, to obtain adverse possession, people must have lived in a house for a continuous period and have occupied the property without permission. It  must also be obvious to the owner that the occupants are in there. 

    Squatters can make a case for an adverse possession claim if they provide evidence that they’ve paid the property’s taxes or utility bills. A difference between a squatter and a trespasser is that a trespasser  breaks into a property to vandalize it or stays there briefly. 

    How adverse possession rules vary

    PolitiFact examined adverse possession laws in several large states. 

    We found that in most states, squatters can be prosecuted for trespassing, usually a misdemeanor. 

    Some states have criminalized squatting. On March 27, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law H.B. 621, which lets homeowners ask law enforcement to immediately remove squatters from their property. The law, which takes effect July 1, criminalizes causing $1,000 or more in damage to a property unlawfully occupied, using false documentation to stay in or to list the property and making false written statements to obtain property rights.

    Jose Rivas, a criminal defense attorney in Florida, told PolitiFact that the Instagram video misinforms viewers, because in Florida, squatters can be charged with trespassing.

    “In the context of the video, the actual owner will have plenty of opportunity to remove an illegal occupant (‘squatter’) before a squatter would be able to take ownership,” said Shawn Eaton, operations director at Eaton Realty, a Florida real estate company. 

    In Florida, if squatters want to claim a house that isn’t theirs, they can do so after living there seven years (even if they are illegally in the country), but they must pay property taxes and only one person can claim the property, according to World Population Review, an independent organization that publishes and analyzes demographic data.

    In New York City, where many newly arrived migrants have settled, people may claim adverse possession regardless of their immigration status. If someone stays without permission in a property for more than 30 days, the owner must provide a written 10-day eviction notice. If a person has occupied the property without permission for fewer than 30 days, a written notice isn’t required.

    Someone who came illegally to the U.S., or anyone else, can claim adverse possession in New York, but the person will have to “show clear and convincing evidence, which is a very high standard, that you have exclusively occupied the property for 10 or more years, continuously,” said Joshua Price, a New York real estate attorney. 

    “You can’t, you can’t just move into somebody’s house and say, ‘I’m here now, adverse possession, I own this house,’ Price said. “It doesn’t work like that.”

    In Texas, it can take at least three years for a squatter to obtain a property title under adverse possession, depending on how long the property has been occupied. People in the country illegally can also use this law to try to take ownership of a property, said Teri A. Walter, a civil trial lawyer in Texas. 

    “Citizenship is not an element of adverse possession under any statute, so it doesn’t matter,” Walter said.

    One mistake people often make when they file for adverse possession claims is saying they share the property with someone else, Walter said. In Texas, people cannot claim possession if they allow other trespassers or claimants inside the property, she said.

    In California, squatters can claim a property after living in it for five years, making house improvements and paying taxes. The owners have  to know the squatters are there without their consent. In other states, such as Illinois, people must continuously occupy the property for 20 years before claiming legal ownership.

    The Instagram video omits these nuances and details and makes it sound as if legally taking over an abandoned house is as straightforward, and easy, as walking into it.

    Our ruling

    An Instagram post claims that a U.S. law says that “if a house is not inhabited, we can expropriate it.”

    People can try to move into abandoned houses, but property owners would have an opportunity to remove them before they could file for ownership, experts said. People in these houses could also be charged with trespassing, depending on the state.

    Some states’ adverse possession laws pave the way for people to eventually own a house they didn’t buy or legally inherit. But the Instagram post leaves out significant legal context.

    We rate this claim Mostly False. 

     

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  • Sean Diddy’s Disturbing Video: Justin Bieber’s Teen Years Revealed

    Sean Diddy’s Disturbing Video: Justin Bieber’s Teen Years Revealed

    Sean “Diddy” Combs, a notable figure in the music industry and head of Bad Boy Records, is currently facing significant public scrutiny and backlash.

    This comes in the wake of police raids tied to sex trafficking allegations, casting a shadow over his once-dominant presence in the music scene.

    Combs’ relationship with pop sensation Justin Bieber has come under intense scrutiny due to this controversy, especially concerning their past interactions.

    Viral Video of Sean “Diddy” Combs and Justin Bieber Sparks Outrage

    A video featuring a young Justin Bieber and Sean “Diddy” Combs has gone viral, drawing criticism and concern from Bieber’s fans and the wider public.

    The video showcases a disturbing interaction between Combs and Bieber, then just a teenager, embarking on his meteoric rise in the music industry.

    In the video, Combs greets Bieber, commenting on his success and inquiring why Bieber hadn’t been in touch.

    Bieber, appearing visibly uncomfortable and stumbling over his words, responds that Combs had not directly contacted him.

    The video concludes with Bieber giving his phone number to Combs, highlighting the power dynamics at play.

    Social media users have described the video as “creepy” and “disturbing,” expressing sympathy for Bieber’s evident discomfort and criticizing Combs for his behavior.

    The interaction has sparked a broader conversation about Combs’ influence and relationships within the music industry.

    Raids on Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Residences

    Following the controversy, Combs’ properties in Miami and Los Angeles were raided by federal law enforcement. Reports from these raids describe children being handcuffed and staff subjected to extensive questioning. Combs himself was reportedly stopped at an airport, preventing him from traveling to the Bahamas.

    Another video, emerging through these developments, shows Bieber at around 15 years old, spending time with Combs. In this video, Combs remarks on their time together as a “15-year-old’s dream,” involving undisclosed activities. This interaction, too, has raised eyebrows, particularly given Combs’ mention of his connections to Usher, another prominent figure in Bieber’s career.

    These incidents have led to a reevaluation of Combs’ legacy and his relationships with young artists in the industry, amid growing concerns about the welfare and treatment of emerging talents in the entertainment world.

    Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/diddy-house-raided-los-angeles-b2518451.html

    Srdjan Ilic

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  • Trump’s $454 million fraud bond is high, not unprecedented

    Trump’s $454 million fraud bond is high, not unprecedented

    Former President Donald Trump, facing a $454 million judgment in a New York business fraud case, called the amount “unprecedented, and practically impossible for any company.” His attorneys said he has been unable to secure a bond to cover it. 

    “A bond of the size set by the Democrat Club-controlled Judge, in Corrupt, Racist Letitia James’ unlawful Witch Hunt, is unConstitutional, un-American, unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company, including one as successful as mine,” Trump wrote March 18 on his Truth Social platform. “The Bonding Companies have never heard of such a bond, of this size, before, nor do they have the ability to post such a bond, even if they wanted to.”

    Trump is wrong in his characterization of the judgment’s relative size.

    Experts said the judgment is high for a closely held, privately owned company such as the Trump Organization. But larger companies such as multinational corporations have paid for appeals bonds of $1 billion or more.

    PolitiFact contacted Trump’s campaign for comment but didn’t receive a response by publication.

    What is the bond amount based on?

    The judgment was issued in a civil fraud lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who argued that the Trump Organization inflated the value of its assets to obtain more favorable loan and insurance terms.

    When the state won the case in February, Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to pay a nearly half-billion dollar judgment, including about $100 million in interest. (The total judgment comes to about $464 million when including the nearly $10 million Trump’s adult sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., were ordered to pay). Trump has to post the cash or a bond by March 25, 30 days from the judgment entry.

    The judgment calculation stemmed from two things: the court’s estimate of profits lost by lenders if Trump had accurately portrayed his properties’ value; and profits from the sale of two properties — Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and a suburban New York City golf course — that the company might not have been able to develop without the financing it received.

    Securing an appellate bond means a company vouches the penalty will eventually be paid if an appeals court upholds it. Bonds are typically backed with a mix of cash and assets for collateral equal to 110% of the total judgment, and are returned if the defendant wins on appeal.

    In a March 18 court filing, Trump’s attorneys said that Trump had approached 30 companies through four brokers but failed to secure an appeal bond. The lawyers argued that companies are generally unable to guarantee bonds that large, and said the companies told Trump they can’t accept real estate as collateral. 

    Lawyers for James’ office responded in a court filing that Trump has other options, including dividing the bonds among different companies or letting a court hold some of his real estate during appeal.

    Trump’s attorneys haven’t said why the bond cannot be split between multiple companies, or if Trump has explored that option. James started the process of seizing some of Trump’s assets, filing a judgment March 21 in Westchester County, where his golf course and private estate Seven Springs are.

    How does the scale of this judgment compare?

    This judgment’s size is not unprecedented, according to examples provided by James’ office and an expert we contacted. A judgment that big is more common in cases involving large or multinational corporations than with a privately owned, closely held company such as the Trump Organization.

    Pinning down Trump’s net worth is tricky; he doesn’t have to produce the same financial disclosures as publicly traded companies. In September, Forbes estimated his net worth for all holdings at $2.6 billion.

    James’ office sent PolitiFact examples of companies in civil litigation cases in a variety of jurisdictions posting bonds of $1 billion or more on appeal. They include a $1 billion bond for Samsung in 2014, a $1 billion bond for Cox Communications in 2021, and a $1.3 billion bond for SAP, a German software company, in 2011.

    Each of those companies has annual revenue of at least $10 billion, so they are much larger than Trump’s combined holdings. 

    A closer example is Marvell Semiconductor, a company that manufactures computer circuits. Its parent company has $5.5 billion in annual revenue, and it posted a $1.5 billion bond in 2014 over a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Carnegie Mellon University.

    “Civil and criminal penalties against large publicly traded companies can run in the billions, but the Trump Organization is fairly small” by comparison, 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. 

    Meyer said it’s not surprising Trump is having difficulty finding a company to act as a guarantor, given the judgment’s size and the risk of backing him.

    “Trump does not have the liquid assets to bring the bond amount down, and real estate is rarely used as collateral because it is very difficult to value certain pieces of property — particularly so with Trump, who is in possession of large estates and golf courses,” Meyer said. “Moreover, any company that is willing to extend that kind of bond to Trump would likely demand an extremely large fee percentage to take on that risk.”

    Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor who is now a litigator in private practice in New York, told CNN the judgment against Trump is notably large.

    In a case filing, Senior Assistant Solicitor General Dennis Fan pushed back on Trump’s request to halt the order, writing that there is “nothing unusual” about billion-dollar judgments being fully bonded on appeal. 

    “Defendants object to a possible ‘fire sale’ if they were to sell assets to generate cash to use as collateral for a bond or as a deposit, but the alternative would be to shift the risk of executing on defendants’ illiquid assets to” the attorney general’s office, Fan wrote.

    Our ruling

    Trump said the $454 million bond he’s been assessed is “unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company” to pay. 

    It’s not unprecedented — some large companies have previously posted appellate bonds of $1 billion or more.

    Larger appeal bonds have typically stemmed from cases involving large or multinational conglomerates, rather than closely held, privately owned companies such as Trump’s. 

    The statement contains an element of truth; experts have said the judgment against Trump’s company is notably large. But it ignores critical facts about other companies that have paid even larger judgments. We rate it Mostly False.

    RELATED: New York officials didn’t value Mar-a-Lago at $18 million. A Palm Beach property appraiser did.

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  • Fact-check: Robert Hur classified documents hearing

    Fact-check: Robert Hur classified documents hearing

    Testifying before Congress, former Special Counsel Robert Hur defended his February report detailing Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, saying it neither exonerated nor disparaged the current president. House Judiciary Committee members compared and contrasted Biden’s case with former President Donald Trump’s classified documents investigation.    

    In his report, Hur concluded that criminal charges were not warranted but criticized Biden’s practices in handling sensitive documents. Hur wrote that his investigation found evidence that Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” as a private citizen after serving as vice president.

    During the March 12 hearing in Washington, Democratic lawmakers said Biden cooperated with investigators whereas Trump tried to thwart them. Republican lawmakers countered that Biden was treated differently from Trump. 

    “But then you apply this senile cooperator theory, that because Joe Biden cooperated and the elevator didn’t go to the top floor, you don’t think you get a conviction,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. said.

    Hur defended his report’s characterization of Biden’s faulty memory. “I could not make that determination without assessing the president’s state of mind,” he said. 

    The release of the transcript of interviews between Hur’s team and Biden also shed new light on an exchange about Biden’s deceased son, Beau Biden.

    We fact-checked a few claims made by lawmakers that were missing context or misleading.

    Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif.: “Here’s the problem: Donald Trump is being prosecuted for exactly the same act that you’ve documented that Joe Biden committed.”

    This is misleading. 

    Trump 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. 

    “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. 

    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 Trump’s case had “several material distinctions” from Biden’s, including that Biden cooperated with the investigation while Trump thwarted federal efforts to retrieve documents. 

    Biden “turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview, and in other ways cooperated with the investigation,” Hur wrote. 

    Biden’s lawyers discovered the documents Nov. 2, 2022, and notified the National Archives and Records Administration the same day.

    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.”

    Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.: “The Hur report represents the complete and total exoneration of President Biden.”

    Multiple former prosecutors told us that prosecutors typically recommend for or against prosecution but do not “exonerate.” 

    The Merriam-Webster dictionary says exonerate “implies a complete clearance from an accusation or charge and from any attendant suspicion of blame or guilt.” 

    Hur didn’t use the word “exonerate” in his report, and he pointed that out during his testimony. “That is not a word I use in the report and that’s not part of my task as a prosecutor,” Hur said after U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., repeated the term.   

    “Hur’s report finds insufficient evidence to prosecute President Biden because the evidence he generated is not likely to secure a criminal conviction,” Meyer said. “That is the standard that federal prosecutors use to determine whether to charge. Declining to charge is not the same as exonerating a defendant. Prosecutors only determine if the weight of the evidence supports prosecution and conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

    Kendall Coffey, a former U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, agreed that prosecutors do not typically describe a decision not to bring charges as an “exoneration.”

    He said a prosecutor might use the term “exonerate” when there is a determination of innocence through evidence such as DNA, rather than simply a decision not to prosecute.

    Nadler’s mention of “exoneration” was a reference to Trump, who said Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report “exonerated” Trump of colluding with Russia to tip the 2016 presidential election in his favor. Mueller said the report hadn’t done so.

    Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa.: “Your report on Page 208 says that Mr. Biden couldn’t come up with the date, the year, of his son Beau Biden’s death, when in fact in the transcript it shows that you asked him the month. And you know what he said Mr. Hur? He said, ‘Oh, God, May 30.’ Would you like to correct the record? His memory was pretty firm on the month and the day.”

    The transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden didn’t show Hur asking what month Beau Biden died. But Biden did identify the month and day unprompted.

    Hur asked Biden about where he kept papers related to a book in progress and a cancer research initiative. Biden responded with a story that started with him asking Hur whether the time frame in question was “2017, 2018, that area?”

    Hur said yes. Biden answered, “Remember, in this time frame, my son is — either been deployed or is dying,” and discussed his thinking about running for president. Then Biden said, “And, and so what was happening, though — what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th.”

    Two other people in the room, one named and one unnamed in the transcript, entered the conversation, saying, “2015.”

    Biden: “Was it 2015 he had died?”

    An unidentified male speaker said, “It was May of 2015.” 

    Biden: “It was 2015.”

    Hur wrote in his report that Joe Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” 

    Biden later recounted this conversation at a Feb. 8 press conference and said the special counsel asked him a question about Beau’s death, even though the transcript shows that is not how Beau Biden’s name came up during the interview.

    “I know there’s some attention paid to some language in the report about my recollection of events. There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business,” Biden said.

    Hur’s lawyer, William Burck, said Dean’s “implication was that he had asked Biden when his son died. The transcript speaks for itself. Hur did not ask him that.”

    PolitiFact Staff Writers Maria Ramirez Uribe and Ian McKinney contributed to this report.

    RELATED: President Biden said he didn’t have highly classified documents. The special counsel says otherwise.

    RELATED: Trump says he ‘cooperated far more’ than Biden in classified documents cases. Pants on Fire!

    RELATED: Fact-checking Joe Biden about sharing classified materials, keeping them in lockable cabinets 

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  • Evers correct correctional officer classes largest ever

    Evers correct correctional officer classes largest ever

    Wisconsin’s prisons have been making big headlines over the last year for their lockdowns, rodent infestations and soaring staffing shortages. 

    To improve prison conditions and attract more staff, state lawmakers passed a pay raise for state employees last summer that boosted starting wages for corrections officers to $33 an hour. Wages could be as high as $41 an hour depending on location and shift.

    During a Feb. 11 appearance on WISN-TV’s “Upfront” program, Gov. Tony Evers claimed the pay raise is helping attract more people to the profession and producing record-high officer training classes.

    “We’re having the largest classes of correctional officers we’ve ever had before,” Evers said.

    However, Evers acknowledges that large class sizes haven’t yet solved the staffing shortages, saying, “We’re getting there.”

    The Wisconsin Department of Corrections said its training program for correctional officers has had a spike in graduates over the past six months.

    But is Evers correct that recent classes have been the largest ever? And, since Evers suggested they were making a major dent in shortages, we’ll touch on how the graduates stack up against soaring high vacancy rates.

    Correctional officer training program sees increased graduates

    People interested in becoming correctional officers must undergo a six-week training academy called the Facility Staff Training and Support Program before they can start security work at prisons across the state.

    The program is held at the Department of Corrections’ training center in Madison or at local academies, which currently are held at Green Bay Correctional Institution and Dodge Correctional Institution.

    A Feb. 21 graduation ceremony at Madison College for newly certified corrections officers had 214 graduates, according to the Department of Corrections.

    In a Department of Corrections press release, Secretary Kevin Carr said that was the department’s largest graduating class since at least 1981. The previous graduating class on Dec. 15 had 144 graduates.

    Graduate numbers have been increasing. In 2023, the state saw 568 graduates from multiple training classes, and in 2022, the total was 285 graduates, according to the Department of Corrections.

    Department of Corrections data shows staffing shortages shrinking

    Staffing vacancies for all state prisons reached a peak of 35% last August and have since been trending down, according to Department of Corrections data.

    Shortages have been especially tight at Waupun and Green Bay Correctional Institutions, where inmates’ movement has been limited since March and June because of low staffing.

    After the pay raise took effect in October, vacancies started trending down and currently sit at 26%. But that is still a relatively high vacancy rate for the prisons. Pre-pandemic rates consistently sat around 15% and didn’t go above 20%.

    In his interview, Evers mentions the pay bump has helped statewide staffing shortages, but places such as Waupun—where the vacancy rate is 56%—are still struggling. 

    Our ruling

    During a TV interview, Evers claimed pay raises for correctional officers had led to “the largest classes of correctional officers we’ve ever had before.”

    The governor acknowledged that conditions aren’t perfect yet and work remains to solve prison and staffing conditions.

    In February, the Department of Corrections graduated its largest training class to date with 214 graduates and the last class had 144 graduates.  

    And as graduating classes increase, staffing shortages at state prisons are trending down after peaking last summer.

    We rate this claim True.

     

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  • PolitiFact – Who is Alexander Smirnov, and what does his indictment mean for the GOP impeachment inquiry?

    PolitiFact – Who is Alexander Smirnov, and what does his indictment mean for the GOP impeachment inquiry?

    With one arrest, some politicians and pundits speculated that the evidence that President Joe Biden accepted a bribe disappeared. But did it?

    Tuning into cable news networks, the answer depended on which channel you consulted. 

    On MSNBC, FBI informant Alexander Smirnov’s indictment was characterized as a “spectacular embarrassment” to Republicans’ continuing effort to impeach Biden. 

    “The special counsel, Republican appointee, leading the case against Hunter Biden, who was appointed by Donald Trump now says that that guy — this informant they hung their entire claim on about the bribe — he lied,” Chris Hayes, host of “All In,” said Feb. 15.

    On Feb. 16, Fox News host Sean Hannity said the informant’s indictment made Democrats “giddy,” with Biden and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., calling for the impeachment inquiry to be dropped. 

    “There’s a lot to unpack here,” Hannity said. He described the FBI informant’s story as “a very, very small part of what is a large body of evidence” supporting the impeachment inquiry and said. “None of this negates the fact that Joe Biden lied about his knowledge of his son’s business dealings.”

    House Republicans have spent years investigating the Biden family’s business dealings and, in 2023, formally launched an impeachment inquiry into Biden. Throughout the investigation, Republicans have characterized Smirnov’s allegations that Biden accepted a $5 million bribe as vice president as central to the impeachment effort. As of Feb. 23, their investigation has produced no evidence that Biden engaged in wrongdoing or accepted a bribe. 

    Who is this informant, and what does it mean for Republicans’ impeachment case? Here’s what we know:

    Who is Alexander Smirnov?

    Alexander Smirnov became an FBI “confidential human source,” or FBI informant, in 2010, according to the indictment. Court filings have revealed little about Smirnov, 43: He previously lived in California and he has lived in Las Vegas since 2022. It is unclear where Smirnov was born. 

    Smirnov was repeatedly told he must provide truthful information to the FBI, but he “provided false derogatory information to the FBI” about Biden and his son Hunter, the indictment said. 

    In June 2020, Smirnov claimed that in 2015 or 2016, executives at Burisma — a Ukrainian energy company that once employed Hunter Biden — said they paid $5 million each to Joe Biden and Hunter when Joe Biden was still vice president so that Joe Biden would remove then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and end a Shokin-led criminal investigation into Burisma.

    In June, Republicans and Democrats reviewed a redacted form with Smirnov’s allegations and said the FBI had described him as “highly credible.” At the time, the FBI made clear the allegations were unverified. 

    These bribery allegations were a central part of House Republicans’ continuing impeachment case against Biden. 

    What does the indictment accuse Smirnov of?

    Smirnov’s bribery claims “were fabrications,” according to the indictment. Smirnov was indicted on one count of making a false statement to a government agent and one count of falsifying records in a federal investigation, when Smirnov knowingly caused the creation of a false entry on an FBI 1023 form used to document his bribery allegations. 

    The indictment said Smirnov had contact with Burisma executives in 2017, after Biden’s vice presidency ended and after Shokin — who was widely considered corrupt and ineffective — was fired in February 2016. 

    “In other words, when (Biden) had no ability to influence U.S. policy and when (Shokin) was no longer in office,” the indictment said. 

    Prosecutors said Smirnov “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business” with Burisma executives “into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.”

    In the indictment, Biden is referred to only as “Public Official 1” and his son Hunter is described as “Business Person 1.” 

    As they asked the court to keep Smirnov detained Feb. 20, prosecutors said Smirnov has “extensive foreign ties, including, most troublingly and by his own account, contact with foreign intelligence services, including Russian intelligence agencies, and has had such contacts recently.”

    Special Counsel David Weiss, a Trump appointee, brought the charges against Smirnov, who, if convicted, could face 25 years in prison. 

    What is Hunter Biden’s link to Burisma? 

    Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board in 2014. At the time, his father, then the vice president, publicly represented U.S. policy in Ukraine. 

    Hunter, a lawyer and businessman, had no particular expertise in energy or Ukraine. His Burisma ties were public knowledge in 2014 and have been scrutinized for years. 

    Hunter left Burisma’s board in 2019, when Biden launched his campaign for president.

    Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, talks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 13, 2023. (AP)

    Were Smirnov’s allegations crucial to impeachment? 

    Smirnov’s allegations that Biden accepted a $5 million bribe while vice president were a key element of Republicans’ Biden investigation. 

    In May, House Republicans subpoenaed the FBI for the record — called an FD-1023 form — that documented Smirnov’s allegations against Biden. FBI agents use FD-1023 forms to record unverified reporting from confidential human sources.

    Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chair of the House Oversight Committee that has been investigating the Biden family’s business dealings, told Fox News’ Jesse Watters that the form was “a very crucial piece of our investigation.”

    House Republicans, from left, Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Jason Smith make a statement to reporters about their impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden at the Capitol in Washington, Dec. 5, 2023. (AP)

    In response, Christopher Dunham, an FBI official, wrote that a 1023 form does not “validate the information, establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information known or developed by the FBI.”

    “The mere existence of such a document would establish little beyond the fact that a confidential human source provided information and the FBI recorded it,” Dunham wrote. 

    After Republicans threatened to hold the FBI director in criminal contempt of Congress, the agency in June allowed lawmakers to privately review Smirnov’s statements in the 1023 form. Smirnov’s identity was then unknown. In July, against the FBI’s wishes, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, obtained and released the form.

    When Republicans announced a formal impeachment inquiry into Biden in September, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy listed Smirnov’s claims among the “serious and credible allegations” against Biden. 

    “Even a trusted FBI informant has alleged a bribe to the Biden family,” McCarthy said. He also said that eyewitnesses have testified that Biden, as vice president, “joined on multiple phone calls and had multiple interactions” that were lucrative for Hunter Biden and Hunter’s associates. McCarthy also cited foreign payments to Biden family members and associates as cause for alarm. 

    The evidence Republicans have provided so far, including during the impeachment inquiry, has not proved Biden engaged in wrongdoing, however.

    A convoluted maze of financial records released by House Republicans shows that Biden family members and associates received $20 million in payments from sources with ties to foreign countries. About $5 million of that went to Hunter Biden and other Biden family members, with the rest going to Biden family business associates. 

    The bank records show no evidence that any payments went to Joe Biden, who was vice president when some of the payments occurred. 

    In January, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, an Oversight Committee member, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the 1023 form documenting Smirnov’s statements was the “most corroborating evidence” Republicans had supporting allegations that Biden accepted a multimillion-dollar bribe.

    (Internet Archive)

    The response to Smirnov’s indictment

    After Smirnov’s indictment, Comer said in a statement to PolitiFact that the impeachment inquiry “is not reliant” on Smirnov’s claims. Jordan also walked back his earlier statement. 

    “Bank records don’t lie,” Comer said, adding that the records show millions of dollars in payments to the Bidens, from people or businesses linked to Russia, China, Romania, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. 

    The committee’s four memos of bank records neither claim nor prove that Biden accepted a bribe. 

    Comer said witness testimony shows that “the Bidens were selling Joe Biden as the brand” and that “Biden knew about and participated in his family’s business schemes.”

    PolitiFact and other news outlets reported that Republicans misconstrued, oversold or misrepresented what they learned from testimony provided by Devon Archer, one of Hunter’s former business associates. Another witness, Tony Bobulinski, has made unproved allegations that Biden was involved in one of his family’s business ventures.

    Protesters in the audience wear T-shirts with the face of House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., and the words, “No Evidence,” on them as the committee begins an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, Sept. 28, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP)

    An October poll found that 35% of adults said they believe Biden has acted illegally regarding Hunter’s overseas business dealings, and 33% said he acted unethically, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research reported.

    The White House pointed PolitiFact to Biden’s Feb. 16 response to Smirnov’s indictment: “He is lying,” Biden said of Smirnov. 

    The impeachment inquiry, “should be dropped,” Biden said. “It’s been an outrageous effort from the beginning.” 

    Raskin and Oversight Committee Democrats called for Republicans to end the inquiry. Raskin said the indictment “demonstrated how key evidence at the heart of House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry is based on a lie.”

    With a narrow House majority, Republicans would need nearly all party members to impeach Biden, and GOP lawmakers say they do not have the votes. Even then, to remove Biden, the Democratic-majority Senate would have to vote to convict. 

    PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

    RELATED: Largest share of foreign payments went to Biden associates, not kin, House GOP memos show

    RELATED: Transcript of Devon Archer testimony doesn’t back key claims about Joe and Hunter Biden

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  • PolitiFact – Fact-check: Trump calls his fraud case ‘a form of Navalny.’ That distorts the cases.

    PolitiFact – Fact-check: Trump calls his fraud case ‘a form of Navalny.’ That distorts the cases.

    Former President Donald Trump compared his civil fraud fine with the punishment of Russian opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny, who died Feb. 16 in a Russian prison.

    In a Feb. 20 Fox News town hall, host Laura Ingraham asked how Trump will put up the money for the almost half-billion-dollar fine. 

    “It is a form of Navalny, it is a form of communism or fascism,” Trump replied.  

    Earlier in the show, Trump also called Navalny’s death a “very sad situation” and described him as “brave.” Then he pivoted to his legal cases, describing himself as a similar target of political persecution.

    “It’s a horrible thing. It’s happening in our country, too,” said Trump. “I’m the leading candidate. I never heard of being indicted before. I got indicted four times. I have eight or nine trials. All because of the fact that I’m — and you know, this all because of the fact that I’m in politics.”

    Trump made similar comments days earlier, on his Truth Social platform, comparing his legal woes with what happened to Navalny and likening President Joe Biden to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” he said on Truth Social Feb. 19, describing “unfair courtroom decisions.”  

    A few other Republicans have made similar points, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former U.S. Rep.Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., and conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza.

    We considered not rating Trump’s statement comparing his civil case with Navalny’s situation; we recognize that in speechmaking and political rhetoric, there is license for hyperbole. 

    But after examining the foundation of Trump’s comparison between his legal troubles and the prosecution of a Putin dissident under an authoritarian regime, and after speaking to six experts in Russian history, politics and the U.S. legal system, we determined there were enough factual elements at play to rate his statement on the Truth-O-Meter.

    We emailed Trump’s spokespeople to ask for his evidence and got no reply by our deadline.

    The evidence comes down to this: Navalny led protests against an authoritarian regime and returned to his country knowing he was a target and landed in prison. Trump was found by a judge to have inflated his real estate assets and has the legal right to appeal.

    “If Biden’s staff oversaw an effort to poison Trump on a campaign trip, and then when he recovered arranged for him to be sent to a prison camp in northern Alaska, and then when he died told (his wife) Melania she would be arrested if she tried to enter the U.S., his complaint might be more convincing,” said Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

    Navalny lacked due process protections afforded to Trump

    Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny stands in a cage Feb. 20, 2021, in the Babuskinsky District Court in Moscow. (AP)

    Navalny, 47, was an attorney, an anti-corruption activist and a critic of Putin’s. In 2011, he led thousands of Russians in protesting falsified elections. In 2017, he was barred from running for president after a Russian court convicted him of fraud, charges that were condemned by the European Union, European Parliament and Amnesty International.

    In 2020, while flying, Navalny became ill and was taken to Germany for treatment; the German government said he was poisoned by a chemical weapon developed by the Soviet Union. Months after he was poisoned, he flew back to Russia, where he was arrested and was sentenced to two years in prison after authorities said he repeatedly violated parole. Amnesty International designated him a “prisoner of conscience,” stating “has not been imprisoned for any recognizable crime, but for demanding the right to equal participation in public life for himself and his supporters, and for demanding a government that is free from corruption.”

    In 2023, Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison for the charge of “extremism.” Human Rights Watch called it “totally unfounded” and said that “the Russian authorities have abandoned any pretense of justice in dealing with dissenters.”

    On Feb. 16, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said Navalny died. The next day, a spokesperson for him confirmed his death. Observers believe Navalny died as a result of his incarceration although the specific reasons are not yet known.

    Meanwhile, after a trial, Judge Arthur Engoron ruled Feb. 16 that Trump had inflated the value of many of his real estate assets to “make more money.” One example: The judge found that Trump had claimed the Trump Tower penthouse was three times the size.

    Trump and his companies and others involved in his business empire owe about $450 million including interest. New York Attorney General Letitia James filed the case.

    Some differences between Trump’s civil case and the cases against Navalny, according to experts we interviewed: 

    • Trump has not been barred from political office and is running for the U.S. presidency, on track to win the Republican nomination. Navalny was barred from running. Several cases have been filed seeking to remove Trump from the ballot as a result of his actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump has had due process to fight those efforts, and the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Feb. 8.

    • Trump has not been poisoned or imprisoned, although he faces charges that carry potential prison time. His penalty in the civil case involves paying money and he is banned from serving as an officer or director of a New York corporation for three years.

    • Trump has been allowed access to a full legal defense team to challenge the judge’s motions, bring forward expert testimony and file an appeal.

    • The “extremism” charge on which Navalny was convicted doesn’t exist in the United States.  

    • Internationally, the U.S. justice system has checks and balances and has rules that require it operate independently from the executive branch. Putin has power and control over Russia’s justice system.

    Navalny was not afforded the due process protections that Trump has had in the New York fraud case.

    “Navalny was repeatedly poisoned and then imprisoned for exposing corruption,” said Harley Balzer, an expert on Russian and Soviet social history at Georgetown University. “He had documents, interviews with insiders and photos to prove his allegations. He even had a tape of a conversation with one of the people who ordered one of the poisonings. None of the evidence used in the trials where Navalny was convicted was substantive.”

    Navalny in 2020 released the phone call he said he made to a security operative. The man in the recording said he was involved in cleaning up Navalny’s clothes “so that there wouldn’t be any traces.”

    Engoron found that Trump committed fraud. The four criminal cases against Trump remain pending trial: two pertain to election interference, while one relates to his possession of classified documents post-presidency and the other case alleges he paid off a porn star.

    “He has remained a free man with the right to full access to counsel, the right to travel across the country and campaign for political office, and has remained protected by his Secret Service detail,” said Erik Herron, a political scientist specializing in Russia at West Virginia University. 

    “These are rights that were not extended to Navalny.”

    The United States has an independent judiciary to rule on the cases and a jury to ensure impartiality whereas Navalny was prosecuted in a country without the rule of law or independent courts, said Ric Simmons, Ohio State University law professor.

    “Trump has also stated that the criminal cases against him are politically motivated — as the case against Navalny was — but given the procedural protections in this country (which do not exist in Russia), political prosecutions are very rare,” Simmons said. “There will be no way of convicting Trump of any of these crimes unless the prosecutors can prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt using admissible evidence that is found to be credible by an impartial jury, regardless of the political motivations of any of the prosecutors.”

    University of Chicago political science professor Scott Gehlbach said that given the conditions under which Navalny died, lacking due process and enduring isolation and torture for what he called “trumped-up charges,” Trump’s citation of his civil fraud case “is an insult to Alexei Navalny, to his family, and to the millions of Russians who mourn his passing.” 

    Putin has used the courts to target his critics and arrest political dissidents. Authorities have introduced restrictions on peaceful assembly and freedom of expression. Torture of prisoners is common. In 2022, Navalny was placed in a punishment cell multiple times in degrading conditions for “violations” of prison rules, such as “wearing the wrong clothes,” according to Amnesty International.

    “In a communist or fascist regime the top political leadership tells the judge what verdict it wants,” Sestanovich said.

    In the U.S. system, the judges are independent and the proceedings are public, Balzer said.

    Kathryn Hendley, a professor of comparative politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Wall Street Journal of Russia’s system “when they really care about something they have no trouble using the law as a blunt instrument,” she said, forbidding criticism of the war or public gatherings. “The Russian criminal justice system is incredibly sticky — once you are in, it’s very, very hard to get out.”

    Even if Trump’s fraud fine stands, or if he is convicted in any of the criminal cases, his case bears no legal similarities to Navalny’s.

    “Trump may end up poorer, or subjected to probation or a short prison sentence — but he won’t be sent to the Arctic and killed,” said Mark Osler, University of St. Thomas law professor.

    Our ruling

    Trump said the fine in his New York fraud case “is a form of Navalny, it is a form of communism or fascism.”

    Although Trump is embroiled in numerous legal battles, his civil case involved a fine, not imprisonment, not poisoning, not subjugation to a legal system dominated by an authoritarian regime.

    Trump is free to express outrage about the fine and a New York judge’s ruling against him. He is free to speak against the government. He is free to hire lawyers. He is free to appeal his cases. He is free to travel the country while he campaigns for president.

    Navalny was blocked from running for public office. He was poisoned by a chemical weapon that the German government said was developed by the Soviet Union. He was convicted in Russia and sentenced to prison largely on the charge of “extremism” which does not exist in the United States. Numerous human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said the cases against Navalny were unjust and that Russia was crushing dissent. Navalny died in prison under conditions that have not been fully explained.

    Trump has been given due process in the fraud case and has the legal right to appeal. The federal government has not tried to kill Trump, who is running for president of the United States.

    We rate this statement Pants on Fire!

    RELATED: Fact-check: Trump’s baseless claim that Biden directed the New York civil fraud investigation

    RELATED: Lie of the Year 2022: Putin’s lies to wage war and conceal horror in Ukraine

    PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this fact-check.

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  • PolitiFact – Fact-check: Trump’s baseless claim that Biden directed the New York civil fraud investigation

    PolitiFact – Fact-check: Trump’s baseless claim that Biden directed the New York civil fraud investigation

    Following a $355 million court ruling against his business empire, former President Donald Trump lashed out, blaming President Joe Biden, his likely opponent in November.

    In a Feb. 16 statement posted to his Truth Social platform, Trump’s campaign referred to the case as the “Crooked Joe Biden-directed New York AG Witch Hunt,” vowing to “fight Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized persecution at every step.”

    Trump often describes cases against him as “election interference” or “political,” including the federal prosecution in the election interference case headed by Special Counsel Jack Smith. But this specific attack by Trump directed at New York Attorney General Letitia James is particularly misleading because she is a state elected official who does not take direction from federal leaders.

    We interviewed four former state attorneys general. They told us that, in that role, it’s not uncommon to communicate with federal officials, but that such contacts hardly amount to an official from one level of government “directing” what an official from another level of government does in an investigation or prosecution.  

    We contacted the Trump campaign to ask for his evidence but received no reply. 

    In the civil fraud case Trump referred to, New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur F. Engoron ruled against Trump, concluding that Trump, Trump’s business and affiliated people had committed fraud by falsely inflating the value of his assets. Engoron ordered them to pay more than $450 million including interest. Trump is appealing the ruling. 

    James signaled she would investigate Trump in 2018

    During her 2018 campaign for attorney general, James made several public statements announcing her intent to investigate Trump, though she didn’t specify the type of case she would file. 

    During a September 2018 debate, James was asked, “What is your view of the proper basis required to start an investigation?” And how, a moderator asked, would she guard against a rush to judgment “against someone, whether it’s an average, unknown New Yorker or Donald Trump and his associates?”

    In her answer, James replied, “We need to follow his money.”

    In November 2018, after James won, she said, “Oh, we’re going to definitely sue him. We’re going to be a real pain in the ass. He’s going to know my name personally.”

    In March 2019, James opened an investigation into Trump after his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified before Congress that Trump’s annual financial statements had inflated the values of Trump’s assets. James filed the lawsuit against Trump in 2022.

    James’ investigation started before Biden became the Democratic presidential front-runner in spring 2020 and well before he became president Jan. 20, 2021. In 2018, Biden was a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania; he announced his candidacy in April 2019. 

    So, from the timeline alone, Trump’s assertion that Biden “directed” James’ case is nonsensical.

    James visited the White House for events

    In our search for Trump’s evidence, we noted that Trump has linked James to Biden in previous remarks, saying she had visited Biden at the White House. 

    “Letitia James visited Joe Biden in the White House numerous times during the Trump witch hunt,” Trump said in January as the civil fraud trial was wrapping up. Trump called it a “conspiracy” to help Biden politically.

    She did make three visits, but they were hardly a secret.

    In each case, James went to the White House for widely attended events in her official capacity, according to White House visitor logs:

    • An April 8, 2022, event saluting the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. The visitor log shows 448 people attended the event, including five Democrats serving as state attorneys general. James posed for a photo with attorneys general from Illinois and Nevada. Although the visitor logs said James met with Biden, the president made public remarks on the lawn and the White House told PolitiFact that he did not meet with attendees individually. This video shows after Biden’s remarks he walked away from the crowd.

    • A July 18, 2023, meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris on fentanyl policy. A statement released by the White House after that event said Harris convened attorneys general from seven states and the District of Columbia for a conversation on efforts to disrupt the supply chain for the deadly drug and improve responses to overdoses. Twenty-six people attended the event, the log shows; Biden was not among them.

    • An Aug. 31, 2023, event with Harris honoring Black women holding elected office across the country. The National Organization of Black Elected Legislative Women and the Higher Heights Leadership Fund co-hosted the event, at Harris’ home. The visitor log showed 243 people attended the event, including James, who is Black. Biden did not attend.

    Would a state attorney general and a president coordinate?

    Bob Butterworth, who was a Democratic attorney general in Florida from 1987 to 2002, said in a telephone interview that attorneys general may coordinate joint investigations with officials in other states or from federal agencies such as the FBI.

    However, Butterworth said, “I can’t ever recall being directed by a president. I think they have better things to do.”

    Bill McCollum, a Republican attorney general in Florida from 2007 to 2011, said there are occasions when state attorneys general coordinate with federal regulators or the U.S. Justice Department on investigations. But he added that he had no way to know whether that happened in this case.

    “No state AG can be directed to do anything by any federal official other than a federal judge,” McCollum told PolitiFact in an email. “Of course, the president could ask a state AG to do something, but states are sovereign and cannot be mandated to do things by the federal government, which only has the powers delegated to it by the Constitution and amendments thereto.”

     James Tierney, a Democratic former Maine attorney general who has taught about state attorneys general at Columbia University, Harvard University and New York University, said state and federal governments do coordinate enforcement actions, for everything from prosecuting a drug cartel to challenging a corporate merger.

    But both Tierney and Scott Harshbarger, a Democrat who served as attorney general in Massachusetts, agreed that Trump’s suggestion that Biden directed James was entirely unsupported. The notion is “absurd,” Harshbarger said.

    Our ruling 

    Trump said Biden “directed New York AG Witch Hunt” into Donald Trump’s real estate.

    The timeline of James’ actions conflict with Trump’s statement. James said several times on the campaign trail in 2018 that she would investigate Trump; once she took office in March 2019, she launched the investigation. Biden was not the Democratic front-runner until spring 2020 and was not sworn in as president until January 2021.

    Past attorneys general said state attorneys general do sometimes coordinate with federal officials, but they said they see no evidence that Biden “directed” James’ investigation.

    We rate this statement False.  

    RELATED: More than 1,000 fact-checks of Donald Trump

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  • PolitiFact – Fact-checking claims about what special counsel report said about Biden

    PolitiFact – Fact-checking claims about what special counsel report said about Biden


    Special counsel Robert Hur on Feb. 8 released his long-awaited report into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents. Social media users then parsed Hur’s words from the report to make unfounded claims about the report’s conclusions. 

    Hur said in his report he declined to prosecute Biden, but noted there was evidence Biden willfully retained classified documents. The report’s contents also touched off a primetime news conference in which Biden defended himself from Hur’s many descriptions of Biden’s faulty memory.

    We fact-checked some of the claims. 

    “DOJ says Biden is unfit and (too) incompetent to stand trial.”

    — Feb. 9 Instagram post

    “Federal government declares Biden mentally unfit for office, senile in damning report.”

    — Benny Johnson, Feb. 8 Facebook post

    These characterizations are inaccurate.

    Hur’s report made several references to Biden’s “poor memory,” writing that his memory “was significantly limited” during interviews with the special counsel. Hur cited that as one reason he declined to prosecute the president.

    Hur wrote about Biden’s “diminished faculties and faulty memory” and said Biden couldn’t remember when he was vice president or the year his son Beau died. The president denied these allegations.

    Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor who is now president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, said the report did not declare Biden unfit or incompetent to stand trial.

    “Incompetence is a legal term and means a criminal defendant does not understand the nature of the proceedings and is unable to assist in his or her defense. That is not what Hur said,” Rahmani said. “Nor did Hur address Biden’s suitability to hold public office. It would have been inappropriate for him to do so.”

    Ric Simmons, an Ohio State University law professor, agreed the special counsel never said Biden was incompetent to stand trial or unfit for office.

    “It said that a jury might be sympathetic to him because of his age and that his memory issues might make it harder to prove all the elements of the crime,” Simmons said.

    The report also never said Biden was mentally unfit for office, Simmons said. 

    “The special counsel would have no way of ascertaining this,” he said.

    Simmons said the report also did not use the word “senile,” despite its many references to Biden’s memory.

    “This might fit in with some definitions of ‘senile,’ which is defined as a loss of mental functions due to old age, but it does not fit the usual connotation of senility, which is an inability to perform basic mental tasks,” Simmons said.

    Special Counsel Robert Hur, seen here when he was a U.S. attorney in Baltimore in 2019, released a report Feb. 8, 2024, into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified materials. (AP)

    “Based on findings from his Justice Department, Joe Biden is identified as a criminal not suitable for trial.”

    —  Feb. 9 Instagram post

    The report neither identified Biden as a criminal, nor exonerated him. 

    Hur suggested Biden might have committed a crime, writing, “Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”

    The report referred to documents related to Afghanistan and to handwritten notebooks from Biden’s time as vice president. But Hur declined to prosecute, saying “we conclude that the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

    Simmons said although the report said there was sufficient evidence to charge Biden with a crime, Biden wasn’t identified in the report as a criminal.

    “A prosecutor never ‘identifies’ someone as a criminal. They merely bring charges if they think there is sufficient evidence to convict,” Simmons said.

    Hur wrote that getting a conviction would face several hurdles: 

    • Because the documents in question are almost 15 years old and about Afghanistan, a conflict that has ended, Biden’s defense would strongly question whether they still contained sensitive national security information.

    • Biden was allowed to have the documents in his home while he was vice president through 2016 and again as president. “It may be difficult to convince a jury they should care” about his “brief illicit possession of documents,” Hur wrote.

    • Biden would likely present himself to a jury as “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly mean with a poor memory.” It would not be easy persuading a jury to convict him of a serious felony “that requires a mental state of willfulness,” Hur wrote.

    • Biden’s cooperation with the investigation would likely cause some jurors to think he kept the documents by mistake.

    Because the government was unlikely to get a conviction at trial, “we decline prosecution,” Hur wrote.

    RELATED: Biden won’t be charged in classified documents case, but special counsel report questions his memory 

    RELATED: Biden classified documents: What special counsel report says about ‘willful retention’ 

    RELATED: President Biden said he didn’t have highly classified documents. The special counsel says otherwise. 

    RELATED: Trump says he ‘cooperated far more’ than Biden in classified documents cases. Pants on Fire!

    RELATED: Fact-checking Joe Biden about sharing classified materials, keeping them in lockable cabinets 





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