In the days leading up to his June 13 arraignment and in a speech several hours afterward, former President Donald Trump distorted what the federal indictment against him said and made faulty comparisons to other politicians’ actions.

• Trump claimed the indictment against him contains “fake and fabricated charges.” In fact, Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, called it “very detailed” and “very, very damning.”

• Trump and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham have misleadingly objected to Trump being charged under the Espionage Act, saying he wasn’t a “spy.” He was charged under a section of the act concerning willful retention of national defense documents.

• Trump wrongly claimed the Presidential Records Act was “really the ruling act,” not the Espionage Act.

• The former president mischaracterized the lengthy effort by the National Archives and Records Administration and the Department of Justice to retrieve presidential records and classified materials from him — claiming that he was “negotiating” with NARA and “the next thing I knew, Mar-a-Lago was raided by gun-toting FBI agents.”

• Trump compared his situation to what he called the Bill Clinton “socks case.” But Clinton’s case was not about classified documents. It involved audiotapes of Clinton’s conversations with a historian documenting his presidency; the National Archives said the tapes were Clinton’s personal records, and a federal judge dismissed the case.

• He claimed a photo in the indictment showed only “newspapers, personal pictures” spilling out of a box onto the floor. But some information is redacted in the photo, and the indictment says the spilled records included a classified document available only to a five-country intelligence alliance.

• Trump claimed Hillary Clinton deleted “33,000 emails in defiance of a congressional subpoena.” He’s referring to personal emails, not government records, and there is no evidence she knew when they were deleted.

• He falsely suggested that Biden is “obstructing” a federal review of more than a thousand boxes of Biden’s records. The FBI searched the Senate records that Biden had donated to the University of Delaware, and Biden’s attorneys gave federal officials the classified documents that were found at Biden’s home and former office.

• Trump promoted a misleading claim that Biden “had to sign off” on the FBI’s criminal investigation of Trump. The investigation was already underway when the White House, following federal law, requested that the FBI be allowed to review 15 boxes containing classified documents that Trump gave to the National Archives in January 2022.

Trump made these claims in remarks from Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, after his arraignment and in speeches and social media posts over several days beforehand, including a June 10 speech in Columbus, Georgia. On June 13 in a Miami courthouse, Trump was booked on 37 felony counts, including willfully retaining national defense information, conspiring to obstruct justice, withholding and concealing documents, and making false statements.

Not a ‘Baseless’ Indictment

In his post-arraignment speech in New Jersey, Trump claimed the indictment against him contains “fake and fabricated charges.” In Georgia, he called the charging document “ridiculous and baseless.” He added, “Many people have said that. Democrats have even said it.”

We are not aware of any Democrats who have said that. In fact, there are some allies — including those who worked in his administration — who have said the indictment is “very detailed … and it’s very, very damning,” as Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, put it.

“This idea of presenting Trump as a victim here — a victim of witch hunt is ridiculous,” Barr said on “Fox News Sunday” on June 11. “Yes, he’s been a victim in the past. Yes, his adversaries have obsessively pursued him with phony claims. And I’ve — and I’ve been by his side defending against them when he is a victim. But this is much different. He’s not a victim here. He was totally wrong that he had the right to have those documents.”

Law professor Jonathan Turley, a Fox News contributor who was a Republican witness during Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, described the indictment as “devastating” and “breathtaking.”

“Every indictment ever used against any of my clients has tended to diminish with time, but there are still some very damaging things in this indictment, not just the photographs, but an audio tape that the president is going to have to deal with,” Turley said June 9 on Fox News, referring to an audiotape of Trump meeting with four individuals at his New Jersey golf club and sharing with them what the former president described as a “highly confidential” and “secret” plan to attack a foreign country, reportedly Iran.

Asked what’s the most damning part of the indictment, former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb told CNN, “I think it’s very hard to triage what’s the most damning part because they do appear to have a document, a tape, a picture, a witness for virtually every phrase and allegation in here.” Having said that, he said one particularly damning part is Trump aide Walt Nauta moving boxes of documents at Trump’s direction to allegedly conceal classified documents not only from the FBI but from Trump’s attorney, Evan Corcoran.

No ‘Spy’ Charges

Trump and some of his defenders have scoffed at him being charged under the Espionage Act, saying there is no evidence he ever acted as a spy or shared sensitive information with a foreign adversary. But experts say that’s simply a mischaracterization or misunderstanding of the charges.

“Espionage charges are absolutely ridiculous,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said on ABC’s “This Week” on June 11. “Whether you like Trump or not, he did not commit espionage. He did not disseminate, leak or provide information to a foreign power or to a news organization to damage this country. He is not a spy. He’s overcharged.”

In his speech in Bedminster, New Jersey, following his arraignment in Miami, Trump said, “The Espionage Act has been used to go after traitors and spies and has nothing to do with a former president legally keeping his own documents.”

Trump also raised the “spy” straw man in his speech in Georgia. Trump noted that when he left office, there were photos taken of boxes of documents stacked on the sidewalk outside the White House prior to their transport to Florida.

“If that’s a spy operation or if that’s something bad, we did a very poor job, I will tell you,” Trump said.

“No one is suggesting that it was a crime for Trump to have boxes moved from the White House to Florida,” David Alan Sklansky, a professor who teaches criminal law at Stanford University, told us via email. “The problem was what was in some of those boxes–namely, highly sensitive documents relating to the national defense–and how Trump reacted when the government told him to return those documents. That’s what was criminal, not having boxes shipped to Florida.”

The indictment alleged that Trump was “personally involved” in having boxes, “containing hundreds of classified documents,” shipped to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his term, and then failed to return those documents to the federal government. The indictment does not accuse Trump of acting as a spy.

Rather, Trump was charged with 31 alleged violations of 18 U.S.C. 793 (e), a section of the Espionage Act concerning the willful retention of national defense information. That part of the law makes it a crime to have “unauthorized possession” of documents “relating to the national defense.” It is not only unlawful if someone “willfully communicates, delivers, transmits” such documents to “any person not entitled to receive it” — which the indictment alleges Trump did twice, once to an author and once to a staffer at his political action committee — but the law also says it is illegal if a person “willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.”

“Trump is not accused of committing espionage, or being a spy,” Sklansky said. “He is accused of illegally holding onto documents with sensitive information about the national defense, lying to federal investigators, obstructing justice.” The Espionage Act “contains a bunch of different criminal prohibitions related to national defense and national security; one of them applies to anyone who, without authorization, holds onto documents with sensitive national defense information. That’s one of the crimes that Trump is accused of having committed. But he is not charged with ‘espionage’ or with being a ‘spy.’ Those words do not even appear in the indictment.”

Presidential Records Act Not ‘Ruling’ Over Espionage Act

In his speech in Georgia, Trump argued that prosecutors improperly ignored the “ruling” Presidential Records Act to charge him under the Espionage Act.

“And as president, all of my documents fell under what is known as the Presidential Records Act, which is not at all a criminal act, everything,” Trump said. “It’s all judged by the Presidential Records Act. In this whole fake indictment, they don’t even once mention the Presidential Records Act, which is really the ruling act, which this case falls under 100% because they want to use something called the Espionage Act. Doesn’t that sound terrible? Oh, espionage. We got a box. I got a box.”

Trump echoed that argument in his post-arraignment remarks in Bedminster, saying, “As president, the law that applies to this case is not the Espionage Act, but very simply the Presidential Records Act, which is not even mentioned in this ridiculous 44-page indictment. Under the Presidential Records Act, which is civil, not criminal, I had every right to have these documents. The crucial legal precedent is laid out in the most important case ever of this subject known as the Clinton socks case.”

We’ll get to the “Clinton socks case” later, but Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told us, “The former president is simply confused on the law when he says that the Presidential Records Act ‘rules’ over the Espionage Act or other provisions of the criminal code set out in the Indictment. The criminal acts charged in the Indictment stand independently of the former President’s separate failure to follow the requirements of the Presidential Records Act.”

“Under the Presidential Records Act, no boxes of presidential records should ever have been transferred to Mar-A-Lago,” said Baron, who is currently a professor at the University of Maryland. “President Trump has, however, been charged under the Espionage Act, in part because his unauthorized removal of records in those boxes related to the national defense, coupled with his willful retention of those documents at Mar-A-Lago, constitutes a crime.”

But Trump is also wrong to suggest the Presidential Records Act somehow shields him from prosecution, Sklansky told us.

“Neither the Presidential Records Act nor any other federal statute allows a former president to continue to hold onto documents with sensitive information relating to the national defense,” Sklansky said. “If Trump and his lawyers think differently, they can and should argue the point in court. But they’ll lose.”

The PRA and the National Archives

As Trump has done before, he wrongly claimed he was “negotiating” with the National Archives and Records Administration “just as every other president has done” and “the next thing I knew, Mar-a-Lago was raided by gun-toting FBI agents.”

That’s a distortion of the more-than-yearlong effort by the federal government to retrieve classified material and presidential records Trump had at his Mar-a-Lago home.

The former president made those comments in Georgia on June 10 and made similar remarks from his New Jersey golf club. At other times, he has said the Presidential Records Act allowed him to negotiate with NARA for the return of presidential materials. He invoked the PRA in a June 9 Truth Social post, claiming: “Under the Presidential Records Act, I’m allowed to do all this.”

He is not. While a president can keep personal materials, he or she cannot keep presidential documents — per the Presidential Records Act.

The PRA says that after a president’s term, the archivist “shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.” The materials a president can keep are “personal records,” or those “of a purely private or nonpublic character which do not relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President,” the act says.

Baron, the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told us for a previous article on this topic that “presidential records are owned by the American people, not the president himself. … When President Trump’s term in office ended on January 20, 2021, all of his presidential records were required to be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration.” 

As we’ve explained, NARA first asked Trump for missing presidential records on May 6, 2021, and continued asking for months, before getting 15 boxes of records on Jan. 18, 2022, according to the Department of Justice’s affidavit. When NARA then discovered classified documents among those records, it notified the DOJ.

On May 11, 2022, Trump’s office received a grand jury subpoena seeking additional classified documents. In response, Trump’s lawyers the following month handed over an envelope with 38 classified documents.

But that still wasn’t all of the classified documents Trump had in his possession. And the indictment describes how Trump had directed Nauta “to move boxes of documents to conceal them from Trump’s attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury.”

In August, the FBI obtained a court-approved search warrant  — contrary to Trump’s claim in New Jersey that the FBI search was “a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution which protects the right against unreasonable search and seizure.” The FBI retrieved “over one hundred unique documents with classification markings,” according to a court filing.

‘Clinton Socks Case’

Trump has suggested that his situation is similar to what he has referred to as the “Clinton socks case,” which was not about classified documents.

“They also don’t mention the defining lawsuit that was brought against Bill Clinton and it was lost by the government, the famous ‘socks case’ that says he can keep his documents,” Trump said in his Georgia remarks.

He was wrongly describing a court case about taped conversations between Clinton and historian Taylor Branch that were recorded over several years. Clinton kept the audiotapes, an oral history of his presidency, in a sock drawer, and the interviews were the basis of Branch’s 2009 book, “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President.”

In 2010, Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group — not the government — filed a lawsuit to get the National Archives to take custody of the tapes, which Judicial Watch argued were official presidential records that belonged to the government. However, NARA countered that the tapes were Clinton’s “personal records” under the Presidential Records Act, and a federal judge granted NARA’s motion to dismiss the suit in 2012.

“NARA does not have the authority to designate materials as ‘Presidential records,’ NARA does not have the tapes in question, and NARA lacks any right, duty, or means to seize control of them,” District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in the ruling. She wrote, “Since plaintiff is completely unable to identify anything the Court could order the agency to do that the agency has any power, much less, a mandatory duty, to do, the case must be dismissed.”

Photo of Spilled Documents

The indictment included a photo of a box of documents at Mar-a-Lago that had been spilled onto the floor — one of two photos taken by Trump employee Nauta in December 2021, the indictment says, when Nauta found the spilled contents, including a classified intelligence document, on the storage room floor at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s “unlawful retention of this document” is count 8 of the indictment.

The document was marked “’SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY,’ which denoted that the information in the document was releasable only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States,” the indictment says.

But Trump wrongly claimed on Truth Social that the photo “clearly shows there was no ‘documents,’ but rather newspapers, personal pictures, etc.” He referred to this photo again in New Jersey, saying it shows that the boxes were “full of newspapers, press clippings, thousands of pictures.” There are newspapers and pictures visible in the photo, along with “visible classified information redacted,” the indictment says, which we can see as a black redaction mark at the top of one page.

In his Georgia speech, Trump also baselessly suggested the FBI might have turned over that box: “Somehow somebody turned over one of the boxes. … I said, ‘I wonder who did that? Did the FBI do that?’” The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August, several months after Nauta reportedly took that photo — and texted it to another Trump employee.

Revisiting Clinton’s Emails

In arguing that he is being unfairly prosecuted, Trump has returned to distorting the facts about the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information while secretary of state. His allies have done the same.

A quick refresher: Clinton, who lost to Trump in the 2016 presidential election, used a private server to conduct government business. After an initial review, the inspectors general for the State Department and Intelligence Community referred the matter to the FBI to investigate a “potential compromise of classified information.”

The FBI investigation ended about a year later without any charges.

As we have written, the FBI reviewed about 45,000 of Clinton’s emails and found more than 100 that contained classified information at the time they were sent or received. Only three emails were marked with the letter “C” in the body of the email to indicate they were classified, according to then-FBI Director James Comey.

Comey described Clinton’s actions as careless — not criminal — when he announced on July 5, 2016, that he would not file charges.

“In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts,” Comey said. “All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.”

By contrast, the FBI investigation of Trump resulted in a 37-count indictment that alleges the former president did exactly what Comey described as actions that would justify criminal charges.

Trump has been charged with the “willful retention of national defense information” after he left office, including “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries.” He also has been charged with counts of “conspiracy to obstruct justice,” “withholding a document or record,” “corruptly concealing a document or record,” and “concealing a document in a federal investigation.”

In speaking to supporters at his club in New Jersey after the arraignment, Trump accused Clinton of obstructing justice — even though federal agents found no evidence of it in her case.

“When caught, Hillary then deleted and acid-washed … 33,000 emails in defiance of a congressional subpoena,” Trump said. “The subpoena was there, and she decided to delete, acid wash and then smash and destroy her cell phones with a hammer,” Trump said. “And then they say I participated in obstruction?”

Trump said something similar in his June 10 speech in Georgia. “Hillary deleted and acid-washed 33,000 emails in defiance of a congressional subpoena. She already had the subpoena,” Trump said in Georgia. “And her aide smashed and destroyed iPhones with a hammer.”

Trump is referring to personal — not work-related — emails, and there is no evidence Clinton knew when or how they were deleted.

Here’s what happened: In response to a State Department request for work-related emails, Clinton’s lawyers conducted a review and gave the department 30,490 work emails in December 2014. There were another 31,830 private emails that Clinton said she no longer needed, and her attorneys asked a contractor managing Clinton’s server to dispose of them. But the contractor did not delete the personal emails until late March 2015 — according to the FBI’s two-part summary of its investigation — roughly three weeks after a GOP-led House committee served Clinton with a subpoena to produce emails related to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi in 2012. (For more, see “A Guide to Clinton’s Emails.”)

The FBI did recover nearly 15,000 of Clinton’s emails that had been deleted — including “several thousand” that were work-related, according to Comey. But the FBI “found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them,” he added.

As for Trump’s remark about Clinton’s aide using a hammer to destroy mobile phones, the FBI found (see page 9) that on two occasions a Clinton aide transferred data from old phones to new phones and then “destroyed Clinton’s old mobile devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer.” This occurred while she was still in office – not during the FBI and congressional investigations. And, as we wrote, security experts interviewed by the technology website Wired said “physical destruction” is the “best way” to remove old data.

While the FBI found no evidence that Clinton tried to intentionally conceal evidence, that’s not the case with Trump. After being served a grand jury subpoena for classified documents in his possession, Trump allegedly conspired with a personal aide to conceal classified documents not only from the government but his own attorney who was charged with responding to the subpoena, according to his indictment.

Biden’s Boxes of Documents

In Georgia, Trump falsely suggested that Biden is “obstructing” a federal review of more than a thousand boxes of Biden’s U.S. Senate records, which the FBI has searched.

“And by the way, Biden’s got 1,850 boxes,” Trump said in Georgia. “He’s got boxes all over the place. He doesn’t know what the hell to do with them, and he’s fighting them on the boxes. He doesn’t want to give the boxes. And then they say, ‘Trump is obstructioning.’ He’s obstructing.”

In New Jersey, Trump similarly said Biden “refuses to give them up and he refuses to let people even look at them.”

In 2012, Biden donated over 1,850 boxes of records from his years as a senator to the University of Delaware, as we’ve explained before. At the time of the donation, Biden and his alma mater agreed that the materials would be publicly available “no sooner than the later date of December 31, 2019, or two years after the donor retires from public life.” 

But when Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller sought to gain access to Biden’s Senate records through Freedom of Information Act requests, a Delaware Superior Court judge ruled in October that the university did not have to comply with the requests. (Another hearing, before the Supreme Court of Delaware, is scheduled for June 14.)

However, the FBI, with Biden’s consent, did search the boxes of documents in January and February. Agents took “multiple boxes” of papers for further review, but none of them appeared to have classified markings, CBS News reported. 

Biden also consented to FBI searches of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and his former Washington, D.C., office space, where documents with classified markings were discovered by Biden’s attorneys in the fall and winter. Biden’s vacation home in Rehoboth Beach also was searched, but the FBI found no classified documents.

As we’ve written, the documents found at Biden’s old office were turned over to NARA and then reported to DOJ, while DOJ investigators took possession of the documents found at Biden’s Wilmington home, including in storage space in his garage.

Biden’s FBI Access Request

On Truth Social on June 9, Trump shared a video clip of Fox News radio personality Mark Levin questioning Biden’s role in Trump’s documents case and misleadingly claiming that Biden had to “sign off” on the investigation.

“Is this some kind of a sick joke on the American people?” Levin asked on his June 8 show. “Joe Biden says he never told them what to do. Joe Biden had to sign off on this becoming a National Archives case, to have it go to the Department of Justice. Who does he think he’s lying to, the American people?”

In New Jersey, Trump went further, claiming without evidence that Biden “had his top political opponent arrested.”

As we’ve written, the Justice Department first became involved in February 2022 — not because of Biden, but because the NARA inspector general notified DOJ that hundreds of pages of classified documents were in the 15 boxes of documents that Trump’s team returned to NARA in January. “After an initial review of the NARA Referral, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened a criminal investigation,” according to the FBI affidavit that was used to get the warrant, authorized by a federal judge, which allowed agents to search Mar-a-Lago for unreturned documents on Aug. 8.

The FBI’s investigation began March 30, Trump’s federal indictment says.

So that the FBI and other intelligence officials could review the boxes of documents that NARA reported, DOJ, by federal law, asked the White House to submit a “special access request” to NARA. That’s because, under the Presidential Records Act, executive branch departments and agencies, under certain conditions, can request access to records in NARA custody through the sitting president, not through NARA.

NARA said the White House, via its counsel’s office, submitted the request on April 11, 2022, which was 12 days after the FBI’s criminal investigation began. Trump’s legal team then proceeded to block the FBI from gaining access by claiming the documents were covered by executive privilege, so Biden and the White House deferred a final decision to Debra Steidel Wall, NARA’s acting archivist at the time. She notified Trump’s team on May 10, 2022, that NARA would grant the FBI access to the 15 boxes of documents.

None of that means Biden signed off on “this becoming a National Archives case, to have it go to the Department of Justice,” as Levin claimed. The FBI already had started investigating how classified documents ended up at Trump’s property and whether any additional classified documents remained there in unauthorized locations.

There also is no evidence that Biden had Trump arrested, as Trump claimed.

Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury, based on evidence presented by Jack Smith, the special counsel that Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned to the investigation in November.

Biden told reporters on June 9 that he has not, and will not, talk to Garland about Trump’s indictment.

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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden brokered a two-year agreement to suspend the debt ceiling and got quick congressional approval before the federal government runs out of money.

The deal would suspend the debt limit until Jan. 1, 2025, at which point the Treasury Department would reset the limit at whatever amount the government’s spending would be then. The deal also would come just days before June 5, the date when the federal government wouldn’t be able to pay its bills without an increase in or suspension of the nation’s borrowing cap, Treasury has said.

The House passed the bill, called the Fiscal Responsibility Act, by a vote of 314 to 117 on May 31, and the Senate approved it a day later 63 to 36. The president is expected to sign it.

Update, June 4: The president signed the bill on June 3.

We’ll explain the main provisions of the bill that would cut, and increase, federal spending.

The legislation is a compromise between Republicans, who wanted larger spending reductions, and the White House, which wanted no spending cuts in a debt limit bill. House Republicans had passed legislation in late April that would have reduced projected budget deficits by $4.8 trillion over 11 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The bipartisan deal would reduce deficits by $1.5 trillion over 11 years, but that also assumes that Congress follows through on nonbinding spending caps after 2025, CBO said.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated that the legislation would reduce federal spending, not including interest spending, by about $1.3 trillion over 10 years. But the reduction could be $234 billion or as high as $1.8 trillion, depending on whether Congress enforces discretionary spending caps in the last eight years of that budget window.

Discretionary Funding Caps

The legislation would impose limits on certain defense and nondefense discretionary spending — which is the funding Congress appropriates each year for federal agencies and programs. (Emphasis is ours. More on that later.)

Under the bill, there would be a $1.59 trillion discretionary spending cap in fiscal year 2024 — $886 billion for defense and $704 billion for nondefense. That would represent an overall cut of $12 billion, or about 1%, compared with the current budget, according to a House Budget Committee summary. Defense spending would increase $28 billion, or 3.3%, while nondefense spending would be cut by $40 billion, or 5.4%, the committee summary said.

The overall cap would rise to $1.606 trillion in fiscal year 2025 — $895 billion for defense and $711 billion for nondefense — for an overall increase of 1% compared with FY2024.

However, as the CBO explained, not all discretionary spending would be subject to the funding limits. For example, “funding designated as an emergency requirement or for overseas contingency operations would not be constrained, and certain other funding would not be subject to the caps,” including funding for the 21st Century Cures Act and the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund. (The term “overseas contingency operations” refers to a defense budget line item.)

After factoring in those and other adjustments, CBO said it “projects that total discretionary funding under the bill would amount to $1.795 trillion in 2024 and $1.818 trillion in 2025.” For fiscal year 2024, that would be a total reduction of $31.2 billion in budget authority compared with this year. (See table 3.)

“It keeps nondefense spending roughly flat with the 2023 levels in 2024, when you factor in agreed-upon appropriations adjustments,” a White House official said in a May 28 background briefing on the agreement. “In 2025, it increases the nondefense spending levels and the defense spending levels by 1%.”

If Congress does not pass the 12 appropriation bills this year and next year by Dec. 31, then discretionary spending for defense and nondefense would be cut by 1% in each fiscal year, the House summary said.

After 2025, the legislation sets nonbinding limits that would be subject to the regular appropriations process. The White House official at the background briefing said “beyond 2025, there are no budget caps, only nonenforceable appropriations targets that were referenced in the legislation.”

IRS Funding Cuts

The bill would rescind $1.4 billion in funding for IRS “enforcement and related activities,” CBO said, part of the money that was provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, a Democratic bill that passed with zero Republican votes and became law in August.

Republicans have repeatedly objected to funding to increase tax compliance enforcement efforts, misleadingly claiming that the legislation would fund “87,000 IRS agents” who would come after the “middle class.” That’s the number of employees the IRS could hire with the Inflation Reduction Act funding, which altogether totaled $79.6 billion over 10 years. But the Treasury Department said most of the hires would be in customer service or to replace retiring or departing workers. And the tax enforcement hires would focus on high-income earners, the IRS commissioner said.

Cutting the $1.4 billion for enforcement doesn’t save the federal government money – less enforcement means a drop in revenue collected of $2.3 billion, CBO said. So the move would increase the deficit by a net $900 million over the 2023-2033 period.

The debt ceiling agreement also would repurpose $10 billion in appropriated IRS funding for fiscal 2024 and another $10 billion for 2025, according to White House officials. In the May 28 press call, the officials said the IRS might need to ask for more funding six or so years down the road, but “we don’t think it’ll fundamentally change what the IRS does over the course of the next few years.”

SNAP Work Requirements

The proposal would increase the age limit for work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as food stamps, but would exempt other groups from such requirements. Altogether, the changes would increase federal spending by $2.1 billion through 2033, CBO said.

Under SNAP, able-bodied adults age 18 to 49 without dependent children living with them must either work or participate in a training program for at least 80 hours per month in order to get benefits for more than three months in a three-year period. The debt limit agreement raises that age limit to 52 in fiscal 2024 and to 54 the following year, and it reduces the number of exemptions states can issue for these work requirements.

But other groups won’t be subject to work requirements under the agreement, including veterans and homeless people, and, up until age 24, those who were in foster care at age 18. The work requirement adjustments, however, sunset on Oct. 1, 2030.

White House officials said the president insisted on an expiration date for the changes, “which will give Congress an opportunity to reevaluate them.”

CBO estimated that when the changes are fully in effect, starting in 2025, about 78,000 more people would get SNAP benefits per month on average. (There were 42.5 million people getting benefits as of February.)

TANF Work Requirements

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is a block grant program that annually provides about $16.5 billion to states for their cash assistance programs for low-income families. TANF was created by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, replacing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which was better known as “welfare.”

The so-called welfare-to-work law — signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1996 — was controversial because it imposed time limits on cash assistance and required nearly all TANF recipients to work or engage in work-related activities in order to continue receiving funds.

Under the law, “a state must have 50% of all families and 90% of two-parent families receiving assistance engaged in either work or activities,” as explained in a recent report by the Congressional Research Service. Those percentages are lower for states that reduced the number of families on assistance by 50% or more since 2005, according to the CRS report.

The debt ceiling legislation would tweak the performance standards that states must meet: The benchmark year for reducing TANF caseloads would be changed from 2005 to 2015, and families receiving less than $35 per month would not count toward satisfying the state’s work standard.

The CBO estimated that the provisions “would reduce state grants slightly,” saving only $5 million over 11 years.

Rescind Unused COVID-19 Funds

The bill’s section on rescinding unobligated funds also would reclaim some of the money that was authorized in response to the coronavirus pandemic from 2020 to 2022. The federal public health emergency for COVID-19 ended May 11.

CBO estimated this part of the bill would shrink related budget authority by an estimated $27.1 billion, while reducing federal spending by $11 billion over the 2023–2033 period, compared with CBO’s baseline projections. “A majority of the reductions would come from the Public Health and Social Service Emergency Fund and from certain infrastructure and disaster relief programs,” CBO said.

Commerce Department Funding

The bill would appropriate $22 billion for the Department of Commerce Nonrecurring Expenses Fund, which is used to improve the department’s information and business technology systems and infrastructure.

The money funds department activities in fiscal years 2024 and 2025, and increases spending by an estimated $100 million over 10 years, CBO said.

Update, June 2: We updated this story to reflect House and Senate passage of the legislation.

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Quick Take 

President Joe Biden has said he will seek a second term, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson have said they will challenge him for the 2024 Democratic nomination. But social media posts falsely claim that the party “just confirmed Michelle Obama will be its nominee.” There is no evidence that the former first lady is a candidate.

Full story

As the Democratic and Republican parties gear up for the 2024 presidential race, there have been official announcements from three noteworthy Democrats seeking the party’s nomination and seven announced Republican candidates.

As of May 12, the Democratic candidates for president include President Joe Biden, anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and author Marianne Williamson, who was also a candidate in 2020.

The Republican candidates include former President Donald Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, businessman Perry Johnson, radio host Larry Elder, Texas pastor Ryan Binkley and political commentator Vivek Ramaswamy. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to run for president, but has not yet announced his candidacy.

The full list of candidates who have filed can be found here.

The major parties determine their presidential nominee through a process of state primary elections and caucus meetings. During each national convention — held after the primaries and caucuses are over — delegates select the party’s nominee.

The Democratic Party is scheduled to begin the nominating process with the first primary election in South Carolina on Feb. 3, 2024. South Carolina replaced Iowa — which has been the first state since 1972 — in an effort to give Black voters an early voice in the selection process. 

But posts on social media have spread the false claim that the party “just confirmed Michelle Obama will be its nominee.”

The posts cite a May 3 article published on the conservative Western Journal website under the headline, “TWJ Founder: The Democratic Party Just Confirmed Michelle Obama Will Be Its Nominee and Nobody Noticed.”

A reel on Facebook shared a screenshot of the article’s headline.

Despite the headline, the Western Journal item, which is labeled “commentary,” didn’t confirm that Obama will be the nominee or is even being considered for the Democratic presidential nomination. It quotes the website’s founder, Floyd Brown, as saying that he thinks Obama will be the nominee. The commentary piece even notes that the former first lady “has insisted that she has no interest in running for president.” 

The social media posts do not indicate that the Western Journal article was an opinion piece, not a news story.

We found no evidence that Obama has announced or is considering a run for president, let alone that she will be the Democratic Party’s nominee. 

Even though Michelle Obama has ruled out running for president, the Western Journal is not the only media outlet to speculate about her as a presidential candidate. The Hill, a Capitol Hill news outlet, published a commentary on March 14 saying that the former first lady would be a strong Democratic nominee. 

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources

Associated Press. “Democrats could strip Iowa of opening spot in 2024 campaign.” 5 Aug 2022. 

Ghosh, Sayan. “Michelle Obama provides clear answer on her possible US presidential run.” WION. 17 Nov 2022.

Herlihy, Brianna and Lawrence Richard. “Michelle Obama for president in 2024?” Fox. 7 Mar 2023. 

Huston, Warner Todd. “TWJ Founder: The Democratic Party Just Confirmed Michelle Obama Will Be Its Nominee and Nobody Noticed.” Western Journal. 3 May 2023 

Jacobs, Ben. “The Democratic Party’s completely rewritten primary calendar, explained,” Vox. 25 Apr 2023.

Matthews, Merrill. “Michelle Obama would be Democrats’ best chance to win in 2024.” The Hill. 14 Mar 2023.  

“National conventions.” USA.gov. Accessed 12 May 2023. 

“Presidential primaries and caucuses.” USA.gov. Accessed 12 May 2023. 

“Presidential candidates, 2024.” Ballotpedia. Accessed 12 May 2023. 

Quinn, Melissa. “Who’s running for president in 2024? Meet the candidates — and likely candidates — vying for your vote.” CBS. 9 May 2023. 

Stern, Marlow. “Michelle Obama Tells Oprah She’ll Never, Ever Run for President.” Rolling Stone. 25 Apr 2023. 

The post Michelle Obama Not a 2024 Presidential Candidate, Contrary to Online Posts appeared first on FactCheck.org.

House Republicans narrowly passed a bill late last month that would temporarily suspend or raise the federal debt limit while significantly reducing caps on discretionary spending for the next 10 years. The legislation does not identify which discretionary programs would or would not see future spending cuts under the proposal.  

However, some Democrats have claimed that the bill would lead to deep cuts in several areas, including health benefits for military veterans.

“It makes a series of deeply devastating and unpopular cuts to things like veterans’ health benefits,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on May 2, adding that the Department of Veterans Affairs would be “gutted.”

But some GOP lawmakers have called such Democratic claims a “lie” and argued that congressional Republicans do not intend to scale back spending on services for veterans.

“Joe Biden and the Democrats are yet again shamelessly lying to the American people,” Rep. Elise Stefanik, the chair of the House Republican Conference, wrote in a May 1 tweet. “There are absolutely NO cuts to veterans benefits, or the VA in the Limit, Save, and Grow Act.”

It’s true that the bill does not mention spending cuts for veterans, but it does not exempt them either. The specific cuts would be determined later, during the appropriations process — if the House-passed bill became law, which is unlikely to happen.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the bill is dead on arrival in the Senate, which is controlled by the Democratic caucus. The White House also opposes the bill and has said President Joe Biden would not sign it even if it reached his desk.

Here we’ll explain why Democrats claim that the legislation is a threat to veterans, as well as why Republicans claim that those opposing the bill are simply using fear tactics.

The House Republicans’ Bill

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed Congress in a May 1 letter that the U.S. could default on its $31.4 trillion debt as soon as June 1, if Republicans and Democrats fail to reach an agreement to lift the debt limit before that time.

On April 26, House Republicans passed their proposal — the Limit, Save, Grow Act — by a vote of 217 to 215. It would extend the borrowing limit through March 31, 2024, or until the debt increases by $1.5 trillion, whichever comes first. 

In exchange, starting in fiscal year 2024, the bill would cap discretionary budget authority at about $1.47 trillion — similar to fiscal year 2022 levels — and then restrict future growth in spending to 1% per year for a decade. (Discretionary spending refers to spending that is authorized in annual appropriations legislation and is separate from mandatory spending for programs such as Medicare and Social Security.)

According to summaries of the GOP bill, it also would repeal certain renewable and clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, block Biden’s executive actions canceling student loan debt, reclaim some of the unspent COVID-19 funding, rescind funds designated for the Internal Revenue Service, as well as create new work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries and expand work requirements for those enrolled in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill would reduce budget deficits by a total of about $4.8 trillion through 2033, compared with CBO’s baseline projections under current law. Nearly $3.2 trillion of that amount would come from savings in discretionary spending, the nonpartisan budget analysts said. 

Democratic Claims

The White House budget office has said that if Defense Department funding is exempted from the discretionary spending cuts, as Republicans have indicated, the GOP bill would initially require a 22% cut to funding for all other discretionary programs, assuming the cuts are applied across the board.

“The legislation proposed by Congressional Republicans would set the FY2024 topline at $1.471 trillion, equal to the FY 2022 level,” says an April 20 blog post written by Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget. “Under the assumption that funding for defense in FY 2024 will at least match the baseline level of $885 billion, non-defense funding would total $586 billion, which is 22 percent lower than the currently enacted level of $756 billion.”

Among other things, those cuts would “undermine medical care for veterans,” leading to “30 million fewer veteran outpatient visits, and 81,000 jobs lost across the Veterans Health Administration,” Young’s blog post said.

An April 30 tweet from Biden’s presidential Twitter account similarly claimed that “217 House Republicans Voted to Undermine Veterans’ Health Care,” and other Democratic lawmakers, like Sen. Chris Coons, claimed that the GOP bill “would cut veterans’ health care.”

Veterans groups also have raised concerns about the potential impact of the legislation, and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs has warned that discretionary spending cuts could affect additional benefits for veterans — not just health care.

In responding to these comments, Republicans have said they would not reduce funding for defense or veterans.

Republicans Push Back

On ABC’s “This Week” on April 30, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who was interviewed after Coons, disagreed with the claim about cuts to services for veterans.

“We talk about protecting veterans,” Scalise said. “We’ve heard this lie over and over again. The speaker himself has said we’re protecting veterans. My boss, the chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, is a veteran himself. The only person talking about cutting veterans’ benefits is Joe Biden. And I’ll tell you, as the majority leader, I will not bring a bill to the floor of the House, even if President Biden wants it, I will not bring a bill that cuts our veterans.”

In an April 21 statement released before the vote on the GOP bill, Rep. Mike Bost, the veterans committee chairman whom Scalise mentioned, said Democrats had “spread false claims” about House Republicans trying to cut veterans’ benefits.

“This commonsense bill will grow the economy and save American taxpayers money, all while protecting veterans’ benefits, Social Security, and Medicare,” he said. “Republicans have always prioritized veterans in our spending to ensure veterans have access to the care, benefits, and services they have earned, and as the Chairman of this Committee, that is my number one priority. Anyone who questions our commitment to the men and women who have served should find new talking points.”

In an email to FactCheck.org, Chad Gilmartin, deputy spokesman for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said, “Democrats should point to where in the bill it says any of the claims that they make.”

As we said, the text of the bill does not specify which parts of the discretionary budget would be cut — but it also does not say which parts would be shielded from future cuts, which is a point the White House made to us.

“Congressional Republicans could have protected veterans’ medical care” in the bill “but they chose not to — which is why 24 veterans organizations opposed this bill,” a White House spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

We would note that the bill also does not state that defense spending will be spared. However, Democrats seemingly have accepted Republican assurances that it would be, while now dismissing similar assurances that funding for veterans also would not be cut.

But if Republicans were to exclude defense and veterans’ health care from cuts, as they say they would do, that means other discretionary programs would have to be cut by larger percentages.

“If they protect both defense and veterans’ health care from cuts, then all other non-defense discretionary programs would have to be cut 33 percent in 2024 and 59 percent in 2025,” the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated in an April 24 analysis.

Discretionary funding also pays for programs for homeland security, transportation, education, housing, social services and more.

Ultimately, specific spending cuts, or exemptions from those cuts, would be addressed during the regular appropriations process — if the GOP bill somehow became law.

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It’s increasingly likely that the planet will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming, probably within the next two decades. But while that level of warming comes with a variety of dangerous effects, it’s not a point of no return, scientists say, and it doesn’t mean “we’re done,” as President Joe Biden has claimed. 

Carbon dioxide and other gasses that trap heat, known as greenhouse gases, emitted by human activity have “unequivocally caused global warming,” according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The average global temperature has already increased by 1.1 C, or 2 F, since 1850-1900, the latest IPCC report published in March says. And even in a very low greenhouse gas emission scenario “global warming is more likely than not” to reach 1.5 C between now and 2040, the report says.

Every increment of global warming intensifies the adverse impacts of climate change. Effective climate action, however, can limit and reduce losses and damages, scientists agree. Warming also “could gradually be reduced again by achieving and sustaining net negative global CO2 emissions,” the IPCC report says.

But in urging people to support his climate policies, Biden has been overly pessimistic. In an interview with “The Daily Show” that aired on March 13, for example, Biden said crossing the 1.5 C threshold would mean that a “whole generation is damned. I mean, that’s not hyperbole.”

That same day, in remarks at a Democratic National Committee reception, he said if global warming goes above 1.5 C “we’re done; there’s no way to turn it around, according to the scientists that tell us.” 

The White House did not explain what he meant by an entire generation being “damned” after 1.5 C of warming, nor did it give us any indication of which studies suggest “we’re done.” 

“I think passing 1.5 C means social and economic ‘chaos,’ but ‘done’ sounds like nothing we do afterwards matters,” Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson told us in an email. “That’s wrong. Every tenth of a degree matters, before and after 1.5 C,” he wrote.

Climate scientist Michael Mann said Biden’s statements contribute to the climate “doomerism” narrative, which he has said could be dangerous and paralyzing, since it implies that it’s already too late to cut back on emissions. 

“Biden said ‘we lose it all’ if we warm beyond 1.5C,” Mann, a professor and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, said on Twitter, referring to language Biden used in July. “Unhelpful rhetoric, unsupported by the science. It’s a continuum not a cliff. We’ve lost much already, and lose more with each fraction of a degree. If we miss the 1.5C exit ramp, we still go for 1.6C exit rather than give up,” Mann said.

The president also has been overly confident at times when talking about American progress in limiting warming to 1.5 C. While the White House typically refers to the U.S. goal in reducing emissions as “within reach,” Biden sometimes says the country is “on track” to achieving the goal.

“With these actions, the United States is on track to achieve a 1.5 degree-aligned goal cutting emissions 50 to 52% by 2030,” he said on April 20, while referring to the Inflation Reduction Act and other actions.

But studies have found that although the IRA — which includes investments in clean energy and is projected to lower emissions 40% below 2005 levels by 2030 — will make significant progress toward achieving the goal, it’s not enough, even with other existing policies.

“Based on Congressional action and currently finalized regulations, we are not on track to meet 50-52% below 2005 by 2030,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization Laboratory, told us in an email. It’s possible, Jenkins said, that once certain rules are finalized and others are proposed, that “the gap could be closed,” but it’s premature to say so now.

Why 1.5 Degrees Celsius

The idea of limiting warming to 1.5 C first emerged in climate talks in 2010. Prior to that time, the goal was to keep global warming below 2 C (3.6 F) above pre-industrial levels to meet the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s objective to “prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system.” But in 2010, experts gathered at the conference decided it was necessary to review “the adequacy” of that target and to consider “strengthening” the goal to 1.5 C.

The IPCC defines global warming as the estimated increase in global mean surface temperature, which is the average temperature of the air near the surface of land and ocean, averaged over a 30-year period, relative to pre-industrial levels.

Over the next several years, the language around the goal shifted, with the recognition that particularly for vulnerable regions, going past 1.5 C could be very risky, and that the 2 C goal should not be thought of as a “guardrail” under which all would be safe.

“While science on the 1.5 °C warming limit is less robust, efforts should be made to push the defence line as low as possible,” a 2015 report concluded.

The guidance was then considered in the Paris Agreement, the landmark climate agreement adopted by 196 member parties in December 2015. The agreement set the overarching goal of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels,” but also said members of the agreement should pursue “efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

The UNFCCC asked the IPCC, which is made up of scientists, to prepare a report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 C compared with 2 C, and on the pathways to get there. The IPCC published that report in 2018.

“What the IPCC 1.5C report told us, and the more recent reports emphasized, is that every half a degree of warming makes things worse,” Natalie M. Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University and one of the authors of the 2018 IPCC Special Report, told us in an email.

The report found a number of significant impacts could be avoided if setting a threshold at 1.5 C compared with 2 C — fewer deaths and illnesses from heat, hunger and infectious diseases; lower risks of flooding, drought and sea level rise; and fewer impacts to ecosystems and biodiversity. 

But neither 1.5 C nor 2 C are “magic numbers,” as Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at The Nature Conservancy, puts it. More carbon emissions in the atmosphere will result in more global warming, which will result in a greater risk.

“Trying to put a number on exactly how much global temperature change is dangerous, and how much carbon we can put into the atmosphere before we hit that level, is like trying to put a number on exactly how many cigarettes we can smoke before we develop lung cancer,” she explains in a video from her PBS series “Global Weirding.” “Now, of course we know that the more we smoke, the greater the risk, but we also know there’s no magic number.”  

How Close Are We and What Happens If We Reach 1.5 C

According to the last IPCC report published in March, global surface temperature warming reached 1.1 C in the decade of 2011-2020, with a 1.59 C warming over the land and 0.88 C over the ocean. The global temperature has increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over the last 2,000 years, the report said. Human-made greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 were 12% higher than in 2010, with the largest share coming from fossil fuels combustion and industrial processes, according to the report. 

Many adverse impacts, losses and damages related to climate change had already happened, the report said, and every increment of warming will make the risks of more damage intensify. Some future changes are “unavoidable and/or irreversible,” the report said. 

“People are already suffering and dying from climate change,” Kristie L. Ebi, professor of global health and environment at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the IPCC 1.5 C report, told us in an email. “The magnitude and pattern of health risks of 1.5C are projected to be larger than current impacts. Each additional unit of warming is projected to further increase the level of risk.” 

The estimated remaining carbon budget, or the amount of CO2 that could still be emitted, for a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5 C is 380 billion metric tons, according to the latest Global Carbon Project report released in November 2022. At the current rate of emissions, analysts say that would last for about nine years. According to the report, 2022 global carbon emissions remained “at record levels – with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5°C.” It projected total global CO2 emissions of 40.6 million metric tons.

Overshooting, or failing to limit warming to 1.5 C by 2100, “will result in irreversible adverse impacts on certain ecosystems with low resilience,” according to the latest IPCC report. Some of these impacts — mass mortality of trees, drying of peatlands and permafrost thawing — could cause additional warming, the report notes, which would in turn make it harder to return to 1.5 C.

According to the IPCC Special Report, some of the impacts of global warming of 1.5 C include:

• Sea level is projected to rise to a range of 10 to 30 inches relative to 1986-2005 levels. 
• Out of 105,000 species studied, about 6% of insects, 8% of plants and 4% of vertebrates are projected to lose more than half of their habitats.
• About 70% to 90% of tropical coral reefs would disappear.
• Many marine species would shift their range to higher latitudes, and the amount of damage to marine ecosystems will increase, reducing coastal resources. The global annual catch for marine fisheries will decrease by about 1.5 million metric tons, according to projections of a global fishery model. 
• Health risks related to climate, such as heat illnesses and deaths or vector-borne diseases, are projected to increase. 

Limiting warming to 1.5 C is still possible but it would require “rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade,” according to IPCC’s latest report. To achieve that goal, global net carbon dioxide emissions would need to be reduced by about 48% from 2019 levels by 2030, 65% by 2035, 80% by 2040, and reach net-zero emissions, or the balance between emissions produced and removed, around 2050. 

But in the big picture, if warming exceeds 1.5 C, it doesn’t mean “we’re done,” as Biden said. Scientists say there’s no reason to give up.

“We have to remember there’s no expiration on climate action,” Twila Moon, deputy lead scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, told PBS while discussing a study that shows ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than predicted. “Every tenth of a degree that we prevent warming is worthwhile and will benefit us. And we can continue to strengthen our actions,” she said.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

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Summary

Here’s how things have changed in the U.S. so far under President Joe Biden, who announced on April 25 that he is officially running for reelection:

• The economy added 12.6 million jobs under Biden, putting the total 3.2 million higher than before the pandemic.

• The unemployment rate dropped back to 3.5%; unfilled job openings surged, with nearly 1.7 for every unemployed job seeker.

• Inflation roared back to the highest level in over 40 years, then slowed markedly. In all, consumer prices are up nearly 15%. Gasoline is up 54%.

• Weekly earnings rose briskly, by 11.3%. But after adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings went down 3.6%.

• People apprehended for entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico has increased by 342%.

• Domestic crude oil production has increased 5.7%, and crude oil imports are up almost 6.7%.

• The economy grew at 2.1% last year, despite high inflation and concerns about a possible recession.

• The population without health insurance dropped by 1.6 percentage points.

• The number of people receiving federal food assistance has increased by about 1.2%.

• Despite a decline in 2022, the number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities has now gone up by 1.6%.

• The stock markets have underperformed. The S&P 500-stock index is up nearly 7% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up almost 8%, while the NASDAQ composite index is down 10.2%.

Analysis

This is our sixth installment of “Biden’s Numbers,” which we started in January 2022 and have updated since then every three months.

As we have done for former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, we’ve included the latest statistics from the most authoritative sources to provide a sense of how the country is performing. These statistics may or may not reflect the president’s policies. We make no attempt to render any judgments on how much blame or credit a president deserves. Opinions will vary on that.

Our next Biden’s Numbers article will appear in July.

Jobs and Unemployment

The number of people with jobs has increased dramatically since Biden took office, far surpassing pre-pandemic levels.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 12,600,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and March, the latest month for which data are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The March figure is 3,198,000 higher than the February 2020 peak of employment before COVID-19 forced massive shutdowns and layoffs.

One major category of jobs is still lagging, however. Government employment is still 314,000 jobs short of the pre-pandemic peak. That includes 130,000 fewer public school teachers and other local education workers. 

Unemployment — The unemployment rate fell from 6.3% at the time Biden took office to 3.5% in March — a decline of 2.8 percentage points. The current rate is exactly where it was in the months just before the pandemic.

That’s uncommonly low. Since 1948, when BLS began keeping records, the jobless rate has been at or below 3.5% for only 61 months — including five months during Biden’s time and three months during the Trump years, just before the pandemic. Previously, the rate hadn’t been so low since the 1960s.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared, reaching a record of over 12 million in March of last year, but then declined after the Federal Reserve began a steep series of interest rate increases aimed at cooling the economy to bring down price inflation.

The number of unfilled jobs has slipped down to just 9.9 million as of the last business day of February, the most recent month on record. That’s still an increase of over 2.8 million openings — or 38.4% — during Biden’s time.

In February, there was an average of nearly 1.7 jobs for every unemployed job seeker. When Biden took office, there were fewer jobs than unemployed job seekers.

The number of job openings in March is set to be released May 2.

Labor Force Participation — One reason many job openings go unfilled is that millions of Americans left the workforce during the pandemic and haven’t returned. The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has slowly recovered during Biden’s time, from 61.3% in January 2021 to 62.6% in March.

That still leaves the rate well short of the pre-pandemic level of 63.3% for February 2020.

The rate peaked at 67.3% more than two decades ago, during the first four months of 2000. Labor Department economists project that the rate will trend down to 60.1% in 2031, “primarily because of an aging population.”

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — and whether it’s his doing or not, the number is rising briskly.

As of March, the U.S. added 787,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 6.5% increase in the space of 26 months, according to BLS. Furthermore, the March total is 198,000 or 1.5% above the number of manufacturing jobs in February 2020, before the pandemic forced plant closures and layoffs.

During Trump’s four years, the economy lost 182,000 manufacturing jobs, or 1.4%, largely due to the pandemic.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden but has slowed dramatically in recent months.

Overall, during his first 26 months in office the Consumer Price Index rose 14.9%.

It was for a time the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending last June saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

But now inflation is trending down. The CPI rose 5.0% in the most recent 12 months, 1.8% in the most recent six months and only 0.1% in March.

Gasoline Prices — The price of gasoline has gyrated wildly under Biden.

During the first year and a half of his administration, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump soared to a record high of just over $5 per gallon (in the week ending last June 13). The rise was propelled first by motorists resuming travel and the commerce surging back after pandemic lockdowns, and then by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, which disrupted oil markets as the West attempted to punish Russia, the world’s third-largest oil producer. 

Since then, the price drifted down to a low of $3.09 the week ending Dec. 26, and now has gone up again to $3.66 the week ending April 24, the most recent on record.

That’s $1.28 higher than in the week before Biden took office, an increase of 54%.

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 11.3% during Biden’s first 26 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. “Real” weekly earnings, which are adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually declined 3.6% since Biden took office.

That’s despite a recent upturn as inflation has moderated. Since June of last year, real earnings have gone up 1.1%.

Economic Growth

Despite two straight quarters of contraction at the beginning of 2022 and fears of a recession, the U.S. economy expanded for the full year in 2022 and continued to grow in the first quarter of 2023.

The U.S. real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product increased 2.1% in 2022 — buoyed by stronger-than-expected third and fourth quarters.

In a March 30 release, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated that real GDP increased in the third quarter at an annualized rate of 3.2% and in the fourth quarter at a rate of 2.6%.

The growth continued in the first quarter of 2023, but at a slower pace. In its first estimate issued April 27, the BEA said the economy increased at an annual rate of 1.1% in the first quarter.

Still, concerns about a recession remain.

The Conference Board, a nonpartisan business membership and research organization, estimates that the probability of a recession within the next 12 months stands at nearly 99%.

“While US GDP growth defied expectations in late 2022 and early 2023 data has shown unexpected strength, we continue to forecast that GDP growth to contract for three consecutive quarters starting in Q2 2023,” the Conference Board said in an April 12 report on its U.S. recession probability model, citing “the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes and tightening monetary policy.”

In a sustained effort to slow inflation, the Federal Reserve has repeatedly raised interest rates — most recently on March 22, when it raised rates for the ninth time in 12 months.

Corporate Profits

Under Biden, corporate profits continued to set new records — although recent quarters haven’t been as strong.

After-tax corporate profits increased for the seventh consecutive year in 2022, reaching a new high of $2.87 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The record, though, came despite a decline in growth in the last two quarters of the year.

During the third quarter of 2022, corporate profits were estimated at an annual rate of nearly $2.9 trillion — down slightly from the $3 trillion record set in the previous quarter, according to the BEA. That slide continued in the fourth quarter, when profits were running at a yearly rate of $2.7 trillion.

Even with the recent decline in growth, corporate profits were 36% higher than the full-year figure for 2020, the year before Biden took office, as estimated by the BEA. (See line 45.)

Consumer Sentiment

Consumer confidence in the economy remains stubbornly low, even falling a bit since our last report. 

The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its preliminary monthly Index of Consumer Sentiment for April was 63.5. That’s down slightly from our last report – despite a slight easing recently in consumer prices — and 15.5 points lower than it was when Biden took office in January 2021.

“While consumers have noted the easing of inflation among durable goods and cars, they still expect high inflation to persist, at least in the short run,” Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, said. “On net, consumers did not perceive material changes in the economic environment in April.”

Stock Markets

Under the past two presidents, the stock markets rose sharply. But that hasn’t been the case under Biden.

Since Biden took office, the S&P 500 stock index is up about 6.8% as of the close of the market on April 26.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is made up of 30 large corporations, hasn’t done much better, increasing 7.7%.

And the tech-heavy NASDAQ composite index, made up of more than 3,000 companies, is down 10.2% since Biden took office, despite a surprisingly strong first quarter. Year to date, NASDAQ is up 13.3%.

Health Insurance

The latest figures from the National Health Interview Survey show that 8.7% of the population was uninsured in the third quarter of 2022 at the time they were interviewed. That compares with 10.3% of the population that was uninsured in the fourth quarter of 2020, before Biden took office.

That decrease of 1.6 percentage points is similar to the decrease we noted in our last report comparing all of 2020 to the first six months of 2022. Over that time frame, the number of people without health insurance declined by 4.2 million.

The NHIS is a program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the data collection is performed by the Census Bureau in face-to-face interviews.

It’s possible the number, and percentage, of uninsured Americans will start to go up, now that some Medicaid provisions enacted during the coronavirus pandemic are being phased out.

As the Kaiser Family Foundation explains, in March 2020, a pandemic relief law increased the federal Medicaid funding sent to states and required states to keep Medicaid recipients continuously enrolled while the COVID-19 public health emergency was in effect. The Medicaid program is known for “churn,” meaning people lose coverage and reenroll often. This could be due to fluctuations in income that change eligibility or inability to comply with renewal requirements and checks on eligibility.

This continuous enrollment provision was one reason Medicaid enrollment has grown over the last few years, reaching nearly 95 million at the end of March. But this requirement ended on March 31, due to another law Congress passed late last year, and the enhanced federal funding during the pandemic will slowly phase out through the end of this year. KFF estimates that between 5.3 million and 14.2 million people will be disenrolled during this time. The Department of Health and Human Services says the number could be as high as 15 million, 6.8 million of whom would still be eligible for Medicaid.

Some who lose Medicaid coverage could be eligible for subsidized plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges or other insurance, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services required states to come up with plans on how they might mitigate loss of insurance during this so-called “unwinding” period. But KFF says the change in policy could lead to an increase in the number of people who lack health insurance.

Immigration

The number of apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border remains historically high, but since our last report in January, the situation has changed markedly. In part due to seasonal trends and policies implemented by the Biden administration, the number of apprehensions significantly declined in January and February — to numbers not seen since shortly after Biden took office.

On March 24, Biden boasted that “the number of migrants arriving on our southern border has dropped precipitously.”

The number of apprehensions rose in March, but still remained well below the number from March 2022. However, an immigration expert cautioned the U.S. may be seeing the “calm before the storm” should the Biden administration end Title 42, a public health law the Trump administration invoked early in the pandemic that allows border officials to immediately return many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally.

Looking at the entirety of Biden’s time in office, and to even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, we compare the most recent 12 months on record with the year prior to him taking office. And for the past 12 months ending in March, the latest figures available, apprehensions totaled 2,246,798, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s 342% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

Apprehensions by the U.S. Border Patrol hit 221,710 in December, the second highest monthly total on record. But in January, that number dropped nearly 42% to 128,936. And it remained about the same in February, at 130,024. (Those figures were 13% and 18% lower than the same months in 2022.) The number rose in March to 162,317, though that’s 23% below the level in March 2022.

According to Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, part of the drop was likely due to seasonal factors. January tends to be a slow month for illegal immigration, because of the holiday season across Latin America.

But Biden administration policies also played a role, he said. In early January, Biden unveiled several border enforcement initiatives that included expanding the “parole” process for Venezuelans to Nicaraguans, Haitians and Cubans, allowing applicants a two-year work permit if they have a sponsor in the U.S. and they pass a background check.

At the same time, the administration expanded Title 42 to include Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti, meaning people from those countries caught illegally crossing into the U.S. could be immediately expelled.

Those changes contributed to the declining number of apprehensions at the border to a more manageable level in January and February, Ruiz Soto said. But that may change dramatically if the Biden administration follows through with its plan to end Title 42 on May 11, when the policy is set to expire, he said.

“That could incentivize increased migration in April,” Ruiz Soto said, and could lead to a “significant surge” in May. If so, he said, the decline in apprehensions in January and February could prove to have been just a temporary lull.

In anticipation of the end of Title 42, the Biden administration has been increasing expedited removals under Title 8, which stipulates that someone caught trying to cross illegally is barred from legal entry for five years. Those caught attempting to cross illegally multiple times can be charged criminally.

In addition, the administration is also pursuing a rule that would mean those attempting to cross into the U.S. illegally would have a “presumption of asylum ineligibility” in the U.S. if they have failed to seek asylum in another country on their travels to the U.S.

Even with the lower numbers in January and February, the number of apprehensions remains historically very high under Biden. Part of that is due to the same people making multiple attempts to cross the border, what is known as the recidivism rate. Title 42 carries no consequences for Mexicans immediately turned around at the border, Ruiz Soto said, and so many of them try again repeatedly.

In addition, he said, there are some “push factors” encouraging migration by Mexicans. One factor is an increase in drug and cartel activity in Mexico, Ruiz Soto said. In addition, he said, “Mexico has really struggled to recover from the pandemic.”

Food Stamps

The number of people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, increased again since our last update.

As of January, nearly 42.7 million people were receiving food assistance, the highest monthly enrollment since Biden has been in office. That figure is up 344,515 people from October, and it’s an increase of about 1.2%, or 504,274 people, from January 2021, when Biden became president. The figures come from Department of Agriculture data published this month.

Under Biden, SNAP enrollment was as low as 40.8 million in August and September 2021. Trump’s lowest month was February 2020, when the program had 36.9 million participants.

Trade Deficit

The international trade deficit has gone up under Biden.

Figures published this month by the Bureau of Economic Analysis show the U.S. imported about $909.8 billion more in goods and services than it exported over the last 12 months through February. That’s an increase of nearly $256 billion, or roughly 39%, compared with 2020.

Through the first two months of 2023, however, the trade gap in goods and services decreased $35.5 billion, or 20.3%, from the same period in 2022, the BEA said. The $945.3 billion trade deficit in 2022 was the largest on record going back to 1960.

Crude Oil Production and Imports

U.S. crude oil production averaged roughly 11.97 million barrels per day during Biden’s most recent 12 months in office (through January), according to Energy Information Administration data released in March. That was 5.7% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2020.

Crude oil production averaged 11.88 million barrels per day throughout 2022, the EIA said. That’s the highest annual average since 2019. According to its Short-Term Energy Outlook published in April, the EIA expects crude oil production to increase to a record 12.54 million barrels per day in 2023.

Meanwhile, imports of crude oil averaged 6.27 million barrels per day in Biden’s last 12 months. That’s up nearly 6.7% from average daily imports in 2020.

The EIA projects crude oil imports will exceed exports by 2.85 million barrels per day in 2023 — which is a 6.7% increase in net imports from 2020 to 2022.

Carbon Emissions

Last year, there were about 4.96 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products, according to the EIA. That total is 1.2% more than in 2021 and 8.4% above 2020.

The EIA currently forecasts that the U.S. will have 4.79 billion metric tons of energy-related emissions in 2023. That would be a decline of 3.4% from 2022 and almost 7% below the 5.15 billion metric tons emitted pre-pandemic in 2019.

Debt and Deficits

Debt — Since our last quarterly update, the public debt, which excludes money the government owes itself, has changed only slightly. It increased $9.1 billion to over $24.6 trillion, as of April 24, bringing the total increase under Biden to $2.97 trillion. That’s 13.7% higher than it was when Biden took office — unchanged from our last report.

Deficits — So far, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the budget deficit for fiscal year 2023 is ahead of where it was at this point in fiscal 2022, when the Treasury Department said the deficit for the full fiscal cycle approached $1.38 trillion.

Through the first six months of the current fiscal year (October to March), the deficit was $1.1 trillion, or “$430 billion more than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year,” the CBO said in its most recent Monthly Budget Review.

In February, the CBO projected that the FY 2023 deficit would increase slightly to $1.41 trillion. That’s $426 billion more than it projected in May 2022, CBO said.

Gun Sales

Gun purchases appeared to decline again during the first quarter of 2023, according to numbers from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group.

The NSSF estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits. We rely on these figures because the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales.

The NSSF-adjusted NICS total for background checks during the first three months of 2023 was about 4.17 million, the group reported. That’s down more than 1% from 4.21 million in the first quarter of 2022 and almost 24% lower than the first quarter of 2021.

The first quarter figure for 2023 is about 26% lower than the almost 5.63 million during Trump’s last quarter in 2020, which was a record year for background checks for firearm sales.

Crime

The number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities went up by 1.6% from 2020 to 2022, according to the latest reports from the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

The small increase reflects a decline in murders last year (down 5.1%) after two straight years of increases — a 33.4% jump from 2019 to 2020, before Biden took office (based on statistics from 67 large cities) and a much smaller 6.2% increase from 2020 to 2021, Biden’s first year in office (based on 70 large cities).

Despite last year’s decrease, the number of murders — 9,138 in 2022 — is not back down to the pre-pandemic 2019 level, which totaled 6,406, though the latter figure is based on three fewer law enforcement agencies.

AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, has found murders are continuing to go down in 2023. Its work, based on publicly available information from 73 large law enforcement agencies nationwide, shows a 10.2% decline in murders as of April 26, compared with the same period last year — with more than half of the agencies’ figures updated as of this month. 

From 2020 to 2022, the Major Cities Chiefs Association also found a 7.5% increase in the number of rapes, a 1.8% rise in robberies and a 14.1% increase in aggravated assaults.

We won’t have nationwide crime figures from the FBI for 2022 until this fall. As we’ve reported in our last two Biden’s Numbers updates, the FBI estimated that “violent and property crime remained consistent between 2020 and 2021.”

There have been several mass murders in the country in the last few years, including the May 2022 killings of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 people in a racially motivated attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and more recently, the killing of three children and three adults at a school in Nashville in March. In response to these mass shootings, Biden has repeatedly called for a ban on semi-automatic weapons and large capacity magazines.

The Gun Violence Archive determined there were 36 mass murders in 2022, compared with 28 in 2021, 21 in 2020 and 31 in 2019. The group defines “mass murder” as a single incident in which at least four people were killed, not including the shooter.

Another gun violence database created by Mother Jones provides a count of “mass shootings,” defined as three or more victims in a shooting in a public place. Unlike in the Gun Violence Archives database, incidents in private homes or stemming from gang activity or robberies are not included. Mother Jones found 12 mass shootings in 2022, six in 2021, two in 2020 and 10 in 2019.

The FBI maintains statistics on what it calls “active shooter” incidents, in which “one or more individuals” is “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” There were 50 active shooter incidents in 2022, 61 in 2021, 40 in 2020 and 28 in 2019.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — Biden’s Supreme Court nominees still stand at one: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was confirmed on April 7, 2022, and replaced retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Trump had won confirmation for two — Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — at the same point during his term.

Court of Appeals — Under Biden, 31 U.S. Court of Appeals judges have been confirmed. At the same point under Trump, 37 had been confirmed.

District Court — Biden has racked up 87 District Court confirmations, while Trump had 58 nominees confirmed at the same time during his presidency.

Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also have been confirmed under Biden.

As of April 19, there were 78 federal court vacancies, with 36 nominees pending.

Home Prices & Homeownership

Home prices — The Fed’s attempts to slow inflation by repeatedly raising interest rates put the brakes on home prices last year. But the median price of existing, single-family homes has started to climb again.

The median price of an existing, single-family home sold in March was $380,000, according to the National Association of Realtors. That’s down from a year ago ($385,400), but it’s also the second consecutive month that home prices had gone up after a seven-month slide, NAR data show.

“While prices have dropped from where they were at their peak this time last year, they are still above 2021 prices in many markets,” Lindsay McLean, the CEO of HomeLister told gobankingrates.com. “Mortgage rates have stabilized a bit and offer activity seems to be resuming, as buyers are slowly coming back to the table.”

The Fed began raising interest rates on March 16, 2022, increasing rates last month for the ninth time in 12 months.

The median price of an existing, single-family home reached a high of $420,900 in June, according to the NAR. But, as mortgage rates continued to climb, prices tumbled for seven consecutive months, dropping to $365,400 in January.

Despite the swing in prices, the March median price was 23.4% higher than it had been in January 2021, when Biden took office. Annual home prices have been rising since 2012, in large part because of a high demand and relatively low inventory, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Homeownership — Homeownership rates have remained virtually unchanged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of “occupied housing units that are owner-occupied,” was 65.9% in the fourth quarter of 2022 — similar to the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office. (Usual word of caution: The bureau warns against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020, because of pandemic-related restrictions on in-person data collection.) 

The rate peaked under Trump in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%. The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.

Refugees

Biden remains far from fulfilling his ambitious campaign goal of accepting up to 125,000 refugees a year.

As president, Biden set the cap on refugee admissions for fiscal year 2023 at 125,000 – just as he did in fiscal year 2022. To achieve that goal, the administration would have to admit an average of 10,417 refugees per month.

However, in fiscal year 2022, the administration accepted only 25,465 refugees, or 2,122 per month, according to State Department data. In the first six months of fiscal year 2023, which began Oct. 1, the administration increased its monthly average, welcoming 18,429 refugees, or 3,072 per month. (See “Refugee Admissions Report” for monthly data from 2000 through 2023.)

Overall, the U.S. has admitted 53,904 refugees in Biden’s first full 26 months in office, or 2,073 refugees per month, the data show. That’s about 12% higher than the 1,845 monthly average during the four years under Trump, who significantly reduced the admission of refugees. (Technical point: For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

In its report to Congress for fiscal year 2023, the State Department said “we are beginning to make progress towards fulfilling President Biden’s ambitious admissions target.” It is true that the average monthly refugee admissions have increased under Biden. The 3,072 monthly average in the first six months of fiscal year 2023 is the highest it has been for the same six-month period since fiscal year 2017, which includes months under both Trump and his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

But if it maintains its current pace, the administration would accept 36,864 refugees in fiscal year 2023 — which is much higher than last fiscal year, but far short of Biden’s campaign goal of 125,000.

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The post Biden’s Numbers, April Update appeared first on FactCheck.org.

President Joe Biden announced on April 25 that he would run for reelection in the 2024 campaign. In his video announcement and a speech later that day to a union group, Biden repeated several claims we’ve fact-checked before:

• The president claimed Republicans would cut Social Security for seniors, but proposals for potential changes haven’t attracted much congressional support.
• Biden was correct in saying the debt had gone up “nearly 40%” under his predecessor, but that leaves a misleading impression. Trillions of it were due to bipartisan pandemic relief legislation, not Republicans acting alone.
• Biden’s boast that more jobs were created in two years of his presidency “than any president created in a four-year term,” is correct in raw numbers, but not when looking at the percentage growth.
• The president said that “in my first two years in office I’ve lowered the deficit by a record $1.7 trillion,” but most of that reduction was expected as a result of expiring emergency pandemic spending.
• Biden said the average tax rate for billionaires is 8%, lower than the rate for schoolteachers or firefighters. That’s based on factoring in gains on unsold stock as income.
• He said the U.S. “fell to number 13 in the international ratings” for infrastructure prior to his signing a bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021, but some experts say the ranking underrated the U.S.

Social Security

In his reelection announcement video, Biden once again raised the possibility that Republicans will cut Social Security retirement benefits, although there seems to be little appetite in Congress for any significant changes.

“MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. “Cutting Social Security that you paid for your entire life, while cutting taxes for the very wealthy.”

Some Republicans have called for changes to Social Security that critics have branded as cuts.

For years, the conservative Republican Study Committee has proposed budgets — including for fiscal year 2023 — that have included gradually increasing the full retirement age to 70 and indexing it after that for life expectancy. (The “full retirement age” — the age at which someone is eligible for full benefit payments — ranges from age 66 to 67, depending on when the beneficiary was born.)

But the RSC proposals have failed over the years to attract enough support.

In his State of the Union speech in February, Biden referenced a plan by Sen. Rick Scott of Florida that the president said would “sunset” Social Security and Medicare. Prior to the 2022 midterm elections, Scott proposed sunsetting all federal programs after five years — unless Congress voted to extend them. Scott’s plan said: “Force Congress to issue a report every year telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt.”

As we’ve written before, Scott has said he doesn’t want to end those programs, and he doesn’t know any Republican legislators who do. After the plan was released, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said sunsetting Social Security and Medicare “would not be a part of our agenda.”

In February, Scott revised the plan to specifically exclude those two programs. “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years, with specific exceptions of Social Security, Medicare, national security, veterans benefits, and other essential services,” the plan now says.

Former President Donald Trump, who is the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, earlier this year said “under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.” As we recently wrote, Trump did not propose any cuts to Social Security retirement benefits in his four years as president.

Both Parties Share in Debt Increase

In his first speech after his reelection announcement, delivered at North America’s Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference, Biden repeated a misleading claim about the accumulation of debt under Trump. “The last administration alone increased the debt by nearly 40% in four years,” he said. That figure is correct, but trillions of that debt were due to bipartisan actions, namely passing coronavirus relief packages.

The total national debt did go up by about 39% during Trump’s four years, from nearly $20 trillion the day he took office to nearly $27.8 trillion on the day he left. Those figures include money the U.S. owes to itself. We typically use figures for the amount of debt held by the public, which went up by even more — about 50%.

The $7.2 trillion added to the debt held by the public under Trump compares with $8.1 trillion added during the eight years of former President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden.

Trump had promised to reduce the debt, and he did the opposite — with some of the growth directly due to his and Republicans’ actions, such as enacting the 2017 tax cut law. When we wrote about this issue before, Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told us the tax law alone could have added about $1 trillion to the debt.

But other debt-increasing legislation had the support of Democrats, too, including bipartisan budget bills that increased spending and, notably, the pandemic relief. A ProPublica/Washington Post report estimated the COVID-19 relief spending totaled more than $3 trillion to mitigate the economic and public health impacts of the pandemic.

Job Creation

As he did in his State of the Union address, Biden boasted that he had created more than 12 million new jobs — “more jobs in two years than any president created in a four-year term.” But Biden isn’t accounting for population growth; other presidents have seen a greater percentage increase.

First, it is true that 12 million jobs were created in Biden’s first two years (measuring from January 2021 to January 2023), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s an 8.4% increase — which, while impressive, isn’t higher than job growth “in a four-year term” under some past presidents when the job market was a lot smaller.

In Lyndon Johnson’s only full term in office, from January 1965 to January 1969, the U.S. economy added 9.9 million jobs — a 16.5% job growth that is nearly double the rate in Biden’s first two years.

In Jimmy Carter’s only four years in office, from January 1977 to January 1981, the U.S. added 10.3 million jobs. That’s an increase of 12.8%.

Under Bill Clinton, the U.S. also saw job growth exceed 8.4% in each of his two terms.

In Clinton’s first term, from January 1993 through January 1997, the U.S. added 11.6 million jobs, an increase of 10.5%, and then the next four years brought an additional 11.3 million jobs, an increase of 9.3%.

In total, the U.S. added 22.9 million jobs in Clinton’s two terms, an increase of 20.9%, from 109.8 million jobs in January 1993 to 132.7 million in January 2001.

Misleading Deficit Boast

As he has in the past, Biden boasted that in his first two years in office, he “lowered the deficit by a record $1.7 trillion.” But as we have written, most of that was due to expiring emergency pandemic spending and, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, deficits would have dropped even more if not for policies enacted by the Biden administration.

“Matter of fact, in my first two years in office I’ve lowered the deficit by a record $1.7 trillion,” Biden said at the trade unions conference. “Lowered the deficit. The debt.”

Some may have thought that Biden’s last remark was meant to correct that he was talking about the debt, not deficits. If so, that would be very wrong. The public debt, which excludes money the government owes to itself, increased by about $3 trillion in Biden’s first two years in office, from $21.6 trillion to $24.6 trillion.

And debt would continue to grow over the next 10 years if Biden’s proposed fiscal year 2024 budget were enacted. According to a CRFB analysis, if that budget were enacted, debt would rise from $24.6 trillion today to $43.6 trillion by the end of 2033 (and debt as a percentage of GDP would rise from 97% to 110%).

But assuming that Biden was talking about the deficit falling by $1.7 trillion in his first two years in office — as he said initially — that figure is roughly accurate. The FY 2020 deficit was $3.13 trillion and the FY 2022 deficit was $1.375 trillion. But the deficit in FY 2022 is still nearly 41% higher than it was in FY 2019, before the pandemic hit.

Where Biden’s comment is misleading is in claiming the he lowered that deficit.

As we wrote last April, most of the reduction in deficits was expected as a result of expiring emergency pandemic spending. Deficits did fall, but by about $840 billion less than expected in FY 2021 and 2022, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

While Biden attributes the falling deficits to growth in the economy — and commensurate growth in revenues — that resulted from his policies, the CRFB says that doesn’t add up.

“All said, the decline in the deficit over the past fiscal year is more than entirely the result of waning COVID relief and not of historic deficit reduction by President Biden as the White House claims,” CRFB wrote in a blog post on Oct. 21, at the end of the 2022 fiscal year. “In fact, the President’s actions to date have increased deficits by $4.8 trillion through 2031.” 

Billionaire Tax Rate

Biden said that the average tax rate for billionaires is 8%, adding that he wants a “minimum tax for billionaires.” What voters may not know is that Biden’s 8% is calculated by including wealthy families’ gains on unsold stock as income.

“No billionaire should be paying a lower tax rate than a construction worker, a schoolteacher, a firefighter, a cop, a nurse,” Biden said.

As we’ve explained before, Biden is referring to a White House economic analysis that estimated the average federal individual income tax rate for the 400 wealthiest families was 8.2%, if including their earnings on unsold stock. Under the current tax system, earnings on assets, such as stock, are not taxed until that asset is sold. The earnings are considered “unrealized gains” until they’re sold.

If such assets are held and passed on after death, the value is adjusted to the fair market value at the time of the inheritance under what’s called stepped-up basis. That means all of the gains earned up until the inheritance would never be taxed.

Erica York, a senior economist and research manager at the Tax Foundation, told us when we wrote about Biden’s claim in February that one issue with wealthy families is that they could “purchase assets that appreciate (increase in value), and then borrow money against their assets to consume their wealth without paying tax.” Then, the assets can be passed on to heirs through inheritance and the gains up until that point aren’t taxed. She referred to the strategy as “buy, borrow, die.”

Biden aims to change that through a billionaire minimum tax to ensure those worth over $100 million pay at least 20% in federal income taxes, as calculated on both standard income and unrealized gains combined.

So, do many billionaires pay lower tax rates than schoolteachers and other middle-income-sounding jobs? “Yes, if you count the unrealized gains, which we don’t normally count” for federal income tax purposes, Steven M. Rosenthal, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told us.

To be sure, when looking only at income under the current tax system, the top-earning taxpayers, on average, pay higher tax rates than those in the income groups below them.

Voters can make up their own minds about whether they support Biden’s proposal to start taxing unrealized gains for people worth more than $100 million (not just billionaires), but they need a lot more explanation than what’s in the president’s talking point.

U.S. Infrastructure Ranked

Touting the bipartisan infrastructure law he signed in November 2021 — which included $550 billion in new infrastructure spending — Biden once again justified the effort by citing an international infrastructure ranking from a report that some experts have questioned.

“Can you believe we used to have the best infrastructure in the world?” Biden said. “We were rated number one. We fell to number 13 in the international ratings. Thirteen.”

Biden has cited this ranking in each of the last two State of the Union addresses, but as we wrote after both of those speeches, the most recent ranking doesn’t look so bad when comparing the U.S. to other large countries.

His claim is based on a 2019 Global Competitiveness Report by the World Economic Forum, in which the U.S. overall was ranked second among 141 economies, but 13th in infrastructure.

But the Washington Post’s Charles Lane said the countries ranked higher than the U.S. were smaller and not comparable to a country as large as this. When considering the largest countries in the world, both geographically and in terms of population, the U.S. comes first in terms of infrastructure in the list. China, for example, ranked 36th, Canada 26th, India 70th and the Russian Federation 50th. Also, the 13th place is an improvement when compared with the 2011-12 report that ranked U.S. infrastructure in 24th place out of 142 economies.

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The post FactChecking Biden’s Reelection Remarks appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Quick Take

There’s no evidence the White House aided or had prior knowledge of the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. By law, the White House requested access for the FBI to review the classified documents that former President Donald Trump turned over seven months earlier. That doesn’t mean the White House was “involved” in the “raid” that came later and “lied” about it, as a conservative commentator claimed.

Full Story

The National Archives and Records Administration negotiated with representatives for former President Donald Trump throughout 2021 for the return of presidential records that should have been given to NARA when Trump left office. NARA was finally able to get back 15 boxes of materials from Trump’s team in January 2022.

When NARA noticed hundreds of pages of classified documents in the boxes, NARA’s Office of the Inspector General on Feb. 9, 2022, referred the matter to the Department of Justice. The DOJ then launched its criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of the documents, which were taken to Mar-a-Lago – his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Florida — when Trump’s presidency ended.

So that the FBI and other intelligence officials could review the boxes of documents that were transferred to NARA’s custody, the DOJ, as authorized by federal law, asked the White House to submit a “special access request” to NARA, the official custodian of presidential records. NARA said the White House submitted the request in April 2022 and access was subsequently granted to the FBI by NARA’s acting archivist.

The request for access to those particular documents doesn’t have anything to do with other classified documents that were later seized from Trump’s Florida estate on Aug. 8, 2022, when the FBI executed a search warrant that was obtained from a federal judge. FBI officials sought the warrant after Trump and his representatives failed to return additional classified documents and presidential records that were still at Mar-a-Lago.

However, some conservative commentators and groups have falsely claimed or suggested that recently obtained communications discussing the access request from last spring show that the White House was directly involved in, or had prior knowledge of, the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last summer.

“It appears the White House used this special access request, where the White House says, ‘Hey, we need to get access to the prior administration’s stuff to make a decision now.’ They pulled that stunt to get this Mar-a-Lago raid … so that they could go in there,” Dan Bongino, a conservative political commentator, said in a video posted to his website’s Facebook page on April 12. 

Bongino, whose Facebook video had received roughly 99,000 views as of April 18, based his claim on information obtained by the conservative group America First Legal. He said the information “reveals that the Biden White House was involved with the Mar-a-Lago raid, and that the NARA, the National Archives, misled Congress” about its own participation.

America First Legal, which was started by former Trump White House advisers, made the same claim in the headline of an April 10 press release about emails and other records it recently procured from NARA through a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

But the FOIA documents do not show that the White House was behind the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago last year, or that President Joe Biden and other White House officials were “lying” about not having advance notice that Trump’s home would be searched, as Bongino and others also claimed.

The Press Release

America First Legal’s press release highlighted an Aug. 23, 2022, email it obtained from NARA. In the email, NARA’s general counsel, Gary Stern, informed his NARA colleagues that the Washington Post had published a story mentioning an email he sent to Trump’s representatives about a “special access request for the 15 Trump boxes” months earlier.

“On April 12, an Archives official emailed [former White House deputy counsel Pat] Philbin and John Eisenberg, another former deputy White House counsel, to tell them the Justice Department, via the Biden White House, had made the request,” the Post’s Aug. 23 story said. “The email offered the lawyers the opportunity to view the documents as well, but said the documents were too sensitive to be removed from the agency’s secure facility.”

In its press release, America First Legal went on to say, “It appears that the Biden White House and DOJ coordinated to obtain the Trump records and perhaps create a pretext for the law enforcement raid by way of a ‘special access request.’”

But as we said, the White House’s request for access was about allowing the FBI to review the 15 boxes of documents that NARA took possession of in January 2022 – not any classified documents that would later be recovered from Mar-a-Lago.

The ‘Special Access Request’

Once NARA discovered the boxes contained classified national security information, its Office of the Inspector General notified the Justice Department, which launched a criminal investigation.

The DOJ then asked the Biden White House to request that NARA provide the FBI with access to the boxes. That’s because, under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, executive branch departments and agencies, under certain conditions, can request special access to records in NARA custody through the sitting president, not through NARA.

The Presidential Records Act is the same federal law that says presidential records are the property of the government and requires the archivist of the U.S. to take custody of all such records when a president leaves office.

The White House, through its counsel’s office, formally asked NARA on April 11, 2022, to “provide the FBI access to the 15 boxes” that came from Mar-a-Lago, according to Debra Steidel Wall, the acting archivist. The following day, NARA informed Trump’s representatives that the agency would be making the documents available during the week of April 18, 2022.

But Trump’s team then proceeded to block the FBI from gaining access by requesting extensions to review the documents to determine if any were covered by executive privilege.

On April 29, 2022, the DOJ’s national security division explained to Trump’s representatives why it needed access to the documents.

“There are important national security interests in the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community getting access to these materials,” the DOJ’s national security division told the Trump team.

The national security division added: “According to NARA, among the materials in the boxes are over 100 documents with classification markings, comprising more than 700 pages. Some include the highest levels of classification, including Special Access Program (SAP) materials. Access to the materials is not only necessary for purposes of our ongoing criminal investigation, but the Executive Branch must also conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported and take any necessary remedial steps.”

Finally, on May 10, Steidel Wall wrote to Evan Corcoran, one of Trump’s representatives, and said that Biden, given Trump’s executive privilege claims, had deferred a final ruling on the matter to her. Steidel Wall then explained that, after consulting with the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, she determined there was no reason to further delay granting access to the FBI, rejecting the former president’s assertion of executive privilege. 

She informed Corcoran that the FBI would be able to review the boxes within days.

America First Legal has argued that the special access request may have been used illegally in this case.

“The special access statute authorizes special access requests to an incumbent president only when the records in question are needed for ‘the conduct of current business’ of the White House,” its press release said. “Providing documents to the DOJ for purposes of a criminal investigation is not the ‘current business’ of the White House.”

In addition, Bongino’s video featured a clip of Jeff Clark, director of litigation for the conservative Center for Renewing America, who argued that the DOJ should have requested access to the documents via a subpoena, which is another option for gaining special access to presidential records.

However, in her letter, Steidel Wall said that the conditions for granting access via a request from the White House were “satisfied here” because, as the DOJ’s security division explained to Trump’s team, access also was necessary to “conduct an assessment of the potential damage” to national security “and take any necessary remedial steps.”

When they examined the contents in mid-May, FBI agents identified “184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.”

Steidel Wall’s letter detailing the access request is not new information, as some have suggested. For example, the Bongino Report’s Facebook post had the headline: “EXPLOSIVE FOIA Request Exposes Biden Lie About Mar-a-Lago Raid.”

The request for FBI access has been public information for more than seven months.

John Solomon, a conservative writer and another one of Trump’s representatives to NARA, obtained the text of Steidel Wall’s letter and published it on his Just The News website on Aug. 22, 2022. NARA published the letter on its own website the next day, and the letter received press coverage at the time — including the Washington Post story mentioned in the email that America First Legal featured in its press release.

The Search of Mar-a-Lago

Furthermore, the White House’s request also was not the reason the Justice Department launched its investigation of Trump that led to the FBI searching Mar-a-Lago.

“Until the White House did this, this was an administrative dispute between the Archives and Trump,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative nonprofit organization, said in an April 12 interview with Glenn Beck. A clip of the exchange between Fitton and Beck has been viewed about 32,000 times on Facebook and over 49,000 times on Twitter.

“The Biden White House intervened to allow a criminal investigation of Trump by the Justice Department. It wouldn’t have happened but for White House intervention,” Fitton said.

But the access request came after the DOJ’s investigation had already begun.

That was made clear in the affidavit that the FBI filed to convince a federal judge to issue the warrant that allowed agents to search Trump’s property. A redacted version of the affidavit, which was unsealed weeks after the search, says:

FBI affidavit, Aug. 5, 2022: After an initial review of the NARA Referral, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened a criminal investigation to, among other things, determine how the documents with classification markings and records were removed from the White House (or any other authorized location(s) for the storage of classified materials) and came to be stored at the PREMISES; determine whether the storage location(s) at the PREMISES were authorized locations for the storage of classified information; determine whether any additional classified documents or records may have been stored in an unauthorized location at the PREMISES or another unknown location, and whether they remain at any such location; and identify any person(s) who may have removed or retained classified information without authorization and/or in an unauthorized space.

In fact, on May 11, 2022, as part of the FBI’s investigation, Trump’s office received a separate grand jury subpoena for additional classified records that the government believed were still stored at Trump’s Florida residence. That happened before the FBI was finally able to review the first 15 boxes of documents about a week later.

After requesting and being granted additional time to comply with the subpoena, a lawyer for Trump met with a DOJ lawyer and FBI agents who traveled to Mar-a-Lago on June 3. Trump’s representatives gave the officials an envelope containing dozens of additional classified documents that were found by Trump’s team in a storage room. 

According to a DOJ court filing, Trump’s representatives, in a certification letter, told the agents that a “diligent search was conducted” for “all documents that are responsive to the subpoena.” Counsel for Trump also told the agents “there were no other records stored in any private office space or other location” inside Mar-a-Lago, the DOJ recounted in the court filing.

Following the meeting, however, government authorities “developed evidence” that more classified documents remained at the Florida property, according to a subsequent DOJ court filing. The FBI eventually requested the warrant to conduct its own search, and the search warrant was signed and approved by a federal judge in Florida on Aug. 5.

According to the redacted affidavit, the FBI argued there was probable cause to believe classified documents and other presidential records remained at Mar-a-Lago, and that a search would yield evidence of multiple crimes, including obstruction. 

FBI agents executed the search warrant on Aug. 8, seizing 13 additional boxes that “contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings … more than twice the amount produced on June 3, 2022, in response to the grand jury subpoena,” according to another DOJ court filing.

White House Denials

On Aug. 9, the day after the FBI’s search, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a press briefing that White House officials learned of the search from news reports and that “no one at the White House was given a heads up,” including the president. “No, that did not happen,” she said.

Biden later said himself that he did not have advance notice of the FBI’s plans. “None. Zero. Not one single bit,” he said while taking questions from White House reporters on Aug. 25.

But in the video from his show, Bongino said the information America First Legal got through a FOIA request showed that Jean-Pierre and the White House were caught “lying” about being “stunned by the “Mar-a-Lago raid.” 

That information is not evidence that the White House knew the FBI search was going to happen.

As Jean-Pierre said in an Aug. 29, 2022, press briefing, the access request for the FBI, which was mentioned in Steidel Wall’s letter and Stern’s email, is “completely different” from the search that happened later.

The request was for the review of a separate set of documents than those recovered from Mar-a-Lago by FBI agents in August, and the request came after the Justice Department had already opened its criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of presidential records after leaving office.

None of that means the White House used the special access request “to get this Mar-a-Lago raid,” as Bongino said, or that the FBI search “wouldn’t have happened” otherwise, as Fitton claimed. The FBI was merely following the law when it requested special access to records in NARA custody through the White House.

Other fact-checkers have previously written about similar false social media claims.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources

Kiely, Eugene. “Timeline of FBI Investigation of Trump’s Handling of Highly Classified Documents.” FactCheck.org. 30 Aug 2022.

Kiely, Eugene, et al. “Q&A on the FBI’s Search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Home.” FactCheck.org. 9 Aug 2022, updated 13 Aug 2022.

Steidel Wall, Debra, acting archivist, National Archives and Records Administration. Letter to Evan Corcorcan. 10 May 2022.

United States District Court, Southern District of Florida. “Affidavit in Support of an Application Under Rule 41 for a Warrant to Search and Seize.” Redacted copy. 5 Aug 2022, filed 9 Sep 2022.

United States District Court for the District of Columbia. “Emergency Application for Order Pursuant to FED.R.CRIM.P.6(E)(3)(e)(i) for Disclosure of Matter Occurring Before a Grand Jury.” Redacted copy. 29 Aug 2022, filed 2 Sep 2022.

United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, West Palm Beach Division. Trump v United States of America. Case No. 22-CV-81294-CANNON. “United States’ Response to Motion for Judicial Oversight and Additional Relief.” 30 Aug 2022.

National Archives and Records Administration. “April 12, 2023, statement.” 12 Apr 2023.

National Archives and Records Administration. Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978. Accessed 14 Apr 2023.

Stuessy, Meghan. “The Presidential Records Act: An Overview.” Congressional Research Service. 17 Dec 2019.

Solomon, John. “Biden White House facilitated DOJ’s criminal probe against Trump, scuttled privilege claims: memos.” Just the News. 22 Aug 2022.

Whedon, Ben. “Full text of National Archives letter to Trump on classified documents.” Just the News. 22 Aug 2022.

Dawsey, Josh, et al. “FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search followed months of resistance, delay by Trump.” Washington Post. 23 Aug 2022.

Cheney, Kyle, et al. “Documents recovered at Mar-a-Lago were among government’s most classified, letter shows.” Politico. 23 Aug 2022.

White House. “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.” Transcript. 9 Aug 2022.

White House. “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.” Transcript. 29 Aug 2022.

White House. “Remarks by President Biden Announcing Student Loan Debt Relief Plan.” Transcript. 25 Aug 2022.

Cercone, Jeff. “Document doesn’t prove Biden ‘lied’ about Mar-a-Lago probe.” PolitiFact. 31 Aug 2022.

Marcelo, Philip. “Judge’s order doesn’t show Biden ordered FBI search.” Associated Press. 6 Sep 2022.

America First Legal. “America First Legal’s Investigation Reveals the Biden White House Was Involved With the Mar-a-Lago Raid and that NARA Misled Congress; AFL Launches Additional Investigation.” Press release. 10 April 2022.

Bongino Report. “EXPLOSIVE FOIA Request Exposes Biden Lie About Mar-a-Lago Raid.” Video. Facebook. 12 Apr 2023.

Judicial Watch. “Biden White House IMPLICATED In Trump Raid!” Video. Facebook. 14 Apr 2023.

Glenn Beck (@glennbeck). “Judicial Watch’s @TomFitton  tells me the FBI would nave NEVER raided Mar-A-Lago if it wasn’t for the Biden White House: ”Special access’ means we want the feds to go after Trump.'” Twitter. 12 Apr 2023.

The post FBI Access Request Is Not Evidence White House ‘Lied’ About Not Being ‘Involved’ in ‘Mar-a-Lago Raid’ appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Quick Take  

Social media posts and former President Donald Trump are sharing an edited video of President Joe Biden to make the unfounded claim that Biden “is coordinating these Trump indictments.” Biden’s comments, made in 2022, were related to international concerns about American democracy, not Trump’s legal battles.

Full Story

Following the 2022 midterm elections, President Joe Biden spent about an hour speaking to and answering questions from reporters at the White House.

Now, a 16-second clip from that Nov. 9 press conference is being used to support former President Donald Trump’s claim that the criminal charges brought against him in New York amount to “election interference” orchestrated by top Democrats.

Rogan O’Handley, a conservative influencer who goes by the online moniker “DC_Draino,” posted the clip to Truth Social on April 3 with text that said, “Biden all but confirmed that his team is coordinating these Trump indictments to ‘stop Trump from taking power again.'”

Trump then amplified the post, sharing it with his 5 million followers.

Social media users on mainstream platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, have been sharing copies of the claim, too.

O’Handley’s post went viral a day before the indictment against Trump was unsealed, revealing that Manhattan prosecutors have accused Trump of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to alleged hush-money payments during his 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump is also facing several other potential legal actions, including an investigation into his handling of classified documents, a criminal inquiry into his attempted interference with the 2020 election results in Georgia, a civil inquiry in New York into his family’s business practices, and the continuing investigation into his role in instigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Trump has continued to dismiss his mounting legal troubles as a conspiracy among Democrats to botch his run for president in 2024. “It’s a new way of cheating on elections,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in a March 27 interview. “It’s called election interference.”

But Biden’s November remarks aren’t a confirmation that “his team is coordinating these Trump indictments.”

Here’s what the original video showed:

CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Phil Mattingly, asked Biden a multipart question over the course of about five minutes. The question centered on how world leaders should view the potential of Trump running again for office.

In his answer, Biden referred to the first G7 meeting he attended after taking office, where he told world leaders, “America is back.”

“One of them turned to me and said, ‘For how long,'” Biden said at the press conference, explaining that other leaders had expressed concern about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, in which Trump’s supporters tried to stop the certification of Biden’s presidential victory.

“They want to know: Is the United States stable,” Biden said.

“They’re very concerned that we are still the open democracy we’ve been and that we have rules and the institutions matter. And that’s the context in which I think that they’re looking at: Are we back to a place where we are going to accept decisions made by the court, by the Congress, by the government, et cetera,” he said.

Biden was referring to Trump’s failed attempt to remain in power by trying to carry out what the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol described as an “unconstitutional and illegal theory.”

Trump had pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence — who had a ministerial role in the official congressional counting of the electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021 — to reject certified electors from some states that Trump lost and allow Republican-controlled legislatures in those states to send Congress new slates of Trump electors. “If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency,” Trump tweeted on Jan. 6, 2021.

After Biden answered his question, Mattingly followed up by asking about Trump’s future: “The entire genesis of that G7 conversation was tied to your predecessor, who is about to launch another campaign. So how do you reassure them, if that is the reason for their questioning, that the former president will not return or that his political movement, which is still very strong, will not once again take power in the United States?”

To which Biden responded: “Well, we just have to demonstrate that he will not take power by — if we — if he does run. I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next President again.”

Those last two sentences from Biden are the only part of his answer that’s included in the clip circulating on social media.

As we said, the clip doesn’t show that Biden “all but confirmed” his team is coordinating the various investigations facing Trump. It shows that Biden responded to a reporter’s question in 2022 about international views on the former president’s political future and suggested that, unlike Trump, he wouldn’t attempt to use unconstitutional means to remain in power.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources

“President Biden News Conference on Midterm Election Results.” C-SPAN. 9 Nov 2022.

Farley, Robert and D’Angelo Gore. “What’s in Trump’s Indictment?” FactCheck.org. 4 Apr 2023.

Farley, Robert and Eugene Kiely. “Q&A on Stormy Daniels’ Payment.” FactCheck.org. Updated 27 Feb 2019.

Bragg, Alvin. Manhattan District Attorney. Press release. “District Attorney Bragg Announces 34-Count Felony Indictment of Former President Donald J. Trump.” 4 Apr 2023.

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With the recent failure of two midsize banks, some Democrats have blamed deregulation championed by then-President Donald Trump in 2018. While the law did reduce oversight of small and midsize banks, experts are divided over whether deregulation in 2018 ultimately caused Signature and Silicon Valley Bank to collapse.

Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest bank in the U.S. by assets, specialized in meeting the credit needs of technology startup companies and venture capital firms. Experts say it got into trouble because of large unrealized losses on government securities, which became a problem when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and the value of securities dropped.

“When people started asking for their funds last week, SVB faced a liquidity crisis,” Liz Peek wrote for Fox News. “Their holdings had shrunk in value, so they tried to raise new capital by selling stock and preferred shares to tide them over. Going to public markets instead of private lenders was a mistake. Depositors were spooked and rushed to claim their funds, causing a bank run and the shuttering of SVB.”

On March 10, federal regulators took control of SVB’s assets, making it the second-largest bank failure since at least 2001. Two days later, regulators took control of another failing bank, Signature Bank, which was heavily involved in the cryptocurrency sector.

In remarks from the White House on March 13, President Joe Biden assured that the federal government would protect the money customers had deposited with the banks. Any money lost would not be borne by taxpayers, he said, but rather would be covered by fees banks pay into the federal Deposit Insurance Fund. (William Luther, director of the American Institute for Economic Research’s Sound Money Project, told the New York Post that while banks pay the fees, “they pass along some of the cost to their customers in the form of higher fees and lower-quality services.”)

However, Biden said, “investors in the banks will not be protected. They knowingly took a risk and when the risk didn’t pay off, investors lose their money. That’s how capitalism works.”

Biden then criticized Trump for loosening oversight of the banks.

“During the Obama-Biden administration, we put in place tough requirements on banks like Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, including the Dodd-Frank Law, to make sure the crisis we saw in 2008 would not happen again,” Biden said. “Unfortunately, the last administration rolled back some of these requirements. I’m going to ask Congress and the banking regulators to strengthen the rules for banks to make it less likely that this kind of bank failure will happen again and to protect American jobs and small businesses.”

Others were more direct in blaming the Trump-era deregulation for the bank failures.

“Let’s be clear. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020.

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren was equally unequivocal in an opinion piece for the New York Times.

“No one should be mistaken about what unfolded over the past few days in the U.S. banking system: These recent bank failures are the direct result of leaders in Washington weakening the financial rules,” Warren wrote.

“In 2018, the big banks won,” Warren wrote. “With support from both parties, President Donald Trump signed a law to roll back critical parts of Dodd-Frank. Regulators, including the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, then made a bad situation worse, ‌‌letting financial institutions load up on risk.”

“Had Congress and the Federal Reserve not rolled back the stricter oversight, S.V.B. and Signature would have been subject to stronger liquidity and capital requirements to withstand financial shocks,” Warren said. “They would have been required to conduct regular stress tests to expose their vulnerabilities and shore up their businesses. But because those requirements were repealed, when an old-fashioned bank run hit S.V.B‌., the‌ bank couldn’t withstand the pressure — and Signature’s collapse was close behind.”

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung released a statement saying Democrats were employing “desperate lies” in an attempt to blame Trump for the collapse of SVB.

“This is nothing more than a sad attempt to gaslight the public to evade responsibility,” Cheung said. “The fact is that Biden has presided over a catastrophic economy that has devastated everyday Americans and has caused misery across the country due to his anti-America policies.”

Deregulation in 2018

In response to the 2008 financial crisis, a Democratic-controlled Congress in 2010 passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act — a bill that then-President Barack Obama called “the toughest financial reform since the aftermath of the Great Depression.” The Senate passed the bill 59-39 with the support of just four Republicans. 

After Trump won the White House, Republicans sought to undo some of those regulations for small and midsize banks by passing the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act in 2018.

Among other things, the 2018 law reduced the number of banks that were subject to stronger federal oversight. Under Dodd-Frank, banks with assets of more than $50 billion were subject to stress tests, higher capital requirements and other “enhanced prudential standards” designed to reduce risk. 

Specifically, section 401 of the law largely eliminated enhanced regulation for banks with assets between $50 billion and $100 billion, and gave the Fed discretion to apply the enhanced standards on financial institutions with assets between $100 billion and $250 billion, including how frequently to conduct required supervisory stress tests.

At the time, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office wrote that the 2018 legislation “would result in fewer assets being subject to enhanced prudential regulation and would thus increase the likelihood that a large financial firm with assets of between $100 billion and $250 billion would fail.”

In a March 14 floor speech, Warren called for the repeal of section 401.

“The bank failures our nation experienced this weekend were entirely avoidable if Congress and the Fed had done their jobs and kept strong oversight of big banks in place,” Warren said. “And now we must act quickly to prevent the next crisis by repealing the dangerous Trump-era provisions that made banks weaker.”

The Republican-controlled Congress passed the 2018 legislation with some Democratic support. It passed the House 258-159, with 33 Democratic votes. And it passed the Senate 67-31, with 16 Democrats joining Republicans.

When Trump signed the bill in May 2018, he said, “The legislation I’m signing today rolls back the crippling Dodd-Frank regulations that are crushing community banks and credit unions nationwide. They were in such trouble. One-size-fits-all — those rules just don’t work, and community banks and credit unions should be regulated the same way … with proviso for safety, as in the past when they were vibrant and strong. But they shouldn’t be regulated the same way as the large, complex financial institutions. And that’s what happened. And they were being put out of business one by one. And they weren’t lending.”

In its March 2019 annual report, Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers said the new law “recognizes the vital importance of small and midsized banks, as well as the high costs and negligible benefits of subjecting them to regulatory requirements better suited for the largest financial institutions.”

Greg Becker, CEO of the parent company of SVB, was among those who lobbied Congress to raise the $50 billion threshold for enhanced oversight. In a statement provided to the Senate Banking Committee in 2015, Becker argued, “Given the low risk profile of our activities and business model, such a result [failure to raise the $50 billion threshold for enhanced regulation] would stifle our ability to provide credit to our clients without any meaningful corresponding reduction in risk.”

Becker repeatedly stated that SVB and other midsize banks did not “present systemic risk” and therefore enhanced regulatory oversight was not warranted.

Systemically important financial institutions are those that regulators deem would pose a serious risk to the economy if they were to collapse. According to Bloomberg, “There was a feeling that if any bank one-17th the size of JPMorgan went down, it wouldn’t be catastrophic. But the [current] turmoil in the tech industry and fears of contagion are questioning that logic.”

According to the OpenSecrets, SVB spent $670,000 lobbying Congress between 2015 and 2018, when the new law was signed. Also worth noting is that Becker isn’t just the CEO of SVB; he served on the board of directors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco until federal regulators took control of SVB on March 10.

SVB had assets of $209 billion at the end of the year, while Signature, the 29th largest bank in the U.S, had assets of $110 billion — both falling under the threshold that requires the most intense federal oversight.

But was the 2018 deregulation to blame for the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank? That’s a matter of dispute.

Did 2018 Deregulation Lead to Bank Failures?

Although some Democrats have directly blamed the 2018 law for the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank, banking experts we spoke to were divided on that.

“I agree that the 2018 deregulation contributed to the problem,” Michael Ohlrogge, associate professor at the New York University School of Law, told us via email. “Basically, the deregulation made it more likely that we would have a crisis such as this, and more likely that it would be worse in the event that it did happen. One of the key reasons for this is that the 2018 deregulation reduced the amount of shareholder money that banks need to use to finance their asset acquisitions. Banks are required to have minimum amounts of shareholder money funding their assets so that if those assets drop in value, there is enough of a ‘cushion’ of shareholder value to take losses, before those losses take a hit out of depositor recoveries. So, without the 2018 deregulation, it is likely that SVB would have had a larger buffer of shareholder money to absorb losses, making it less likely that there would have been a panic in the first place, and given that there was a panic, the losses to depositors likely would have been less.

“That being said, it would not be accurate to say that there is no chance this crisis would have occurred were it not for the 2018 deregulation,” Ohlrogge said. “The 2018 changes just made it more likely to occur.”

Although the 2018 banking law increased the asset threshold at which a bank would be automatically subject to enhanced regulation, Aaron Klein, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote at the time the change came “with an important caveat that the Federal Reserve retains the discretion to apply enhanced regulatory standards to any specific bank greater than $100 billion, if the Fed feels that is warranted.”

“I think SVB shows that the Fed was given discretion that it promised to use wisely and in fact failed miserably,” Klein told us in an email.

Klein believes the Federal Reserve missed several “classic red flags in basic banking supervision” of SVB.

First, he said, was the bank’s “explosive asset growth.” SVB had nearly quadrupled its assets in four years.

Second, he said, SVB also had a “hyper reliance on uninsured deposits,” referring to deposits above the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s limit of $250,000. “Uninsured depositors are more likely to run, making the bank inherently less stable,” Klein said.

Third, he said, SVB assumed “huge interest rate risk.” During its period of rapid growth from 2019 to 2021, “SVB bought over $100 billion of mortgage backed securities issued at low interest rates. They failed to buy hedges to protect their value if interest rates rose.”

Finally, he said, as SVB needed cash, it tapped the Federal Home Loan Bank system. “The FHLB is called the lender of next to last resort and when a bank fails the FHLB is the only entity that gets paid out ahead of the FDIC.” Klein said. “Thus, the more in debt a bank is to the FHLB, the greater the losses born by the taxpayer if the bank fails.”

Ohlrogge agrees there were missed warning signs.

“Regulators probably didn’t pay careful enough attention to unrealized losses on SVB’s balance sheet,” he said. “SVB said that they planned to hold many of their assets to maturity, and thus took advantage of accounting and regulatory rules that allowed them not to book losses on those securities. But, this just papered over the problem. Regardless of whether SVB planned to sell its securities, if those securities were paying out a much lower interest rate than SVB had to pay its depositors, then that creates a pretty big problem for SVB.”

But Ohlrogge said SVB’s most recent public financial statements from the third quarter suggested SVB “was managing things moderately well, at least from a superficial perspective.” It was still showing good profitability, “even given the interest rate increases that had occurred.”

“So, while I think it would be good to introduce new rules going forward that do a better job at looking at unrealized losses, I think it’s hard to make the case that SVB was obviously a ‘dead bank walking,'” Ohlrogge said. “Indeed, had that been the case, then there would have been a lot of money to be made shorting the stock, and overall, not that many people did so.”

Klein said there was other relevant deregulation beyond the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act.

“The FDIC changed its definition of brokered deposits, particularly as it relates to accounts that tech firms had of other customer’s money,” Klein said. “The Fed changed its LCR [liquidity coverage ratio] standards in ways not required by the law.” Looking at just the 2018 law “as all of the regulation is too narrow,” Klein said.

Also, the Fed finalized a rule in October 2019 that subjected certain banks with assets between $100 billion and $250 billion to stress tests every two years, instead of every year. SVB grew so fast that it collapsed before it was eligible for its first stress test, as explained by Todd Phillips of the Roosevelt Institute.

However, Kent Smetters, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told us “there is considerable doubt whether the enhanced stress tests would have found anything particular for SVB relative to other large banks, which also hold very large unrealized losses due to asset duration mismatched.”

“The key difference is that SVB has a lot of business deposits that are ‘hot money’ while many other big banks with more retail clients have ‘slow money’ deposits,” Smetters explained. “Hot money quickly moves to take advantage of differences in interest rates across banks. However, the regulatory [stress] tests (known as DFAST) places less emphasize on how the elasticity of money flows might vary across banks.”

The sharp increase in interest rates by the Fed doomed SVB, Smetters told us in an email, and “there is very little that they could have done to avoid it.”

“The recent sharp increases of the interest rates pretty much dooms banks with predominately ‘hot money’ deposits,” Smetters said. “If ‘hot money’ banks previously tried to shorten their asset durations to reduce risk, those banks would have been unable to have competed against banks with ‘slow money’ who can afford to take on duration risk and pay higher yields. If the ‘hot money’ banks previously tried to reduce their duration mismatch by buying interest rate swaps, the ‘hot money’ banks would have again been unable to pay a yield that was competitive with ‘slow money’ banks who don’t face these same costs. Either way, the ‘hot money’ banks would have lost deposits and — combined with the FDIC insurance limit of $250K per account — would have led to a bank run.”

Former Rep. Barney Frank, who chaired the House Financial Services Committee and was one of the authors of the 2010 Wall Street regulations that bear his name, was serving on the board of New York’s Signature Bank, which regulators shut down and placed under the control of the FDIC on March 12.

Frank, who pushed for some of the 2018 changes, doesn’t agree that deregulation of small and midsize banks championed by Trump in 2018 was responsible for the downfall of Signature Bank.

“I don’t think that had any impact,” Frank told Politico. “They hadn’t stopped examining banks.”

According to Politico, Frank “blames Signature’s failure on a panic that began with last year’s cryptocurrency collapse — his bank was one of few that served the industry — compounded by a run triggered by the failure of tech-focused Silicon Valley Bank late last week.”

But some Democratic legislators aren’t giving the 2018 law a pass.

“I have no doubt that if this bank had been subject to the much tougher regulation that they would not have been allowed to buy long-term Treasuries and long-term debt instruments insured by the federal government — basically, mortgage-backed securities,” Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman of California, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, told Bloomberg. “They would have been pushed to buy short-term instruments and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Further scrutiny is already underway, including what caused the banks to fail, whether regulators should have done something about it and whether laws need to be changed to prevent such failures in the future.

CNN reports that the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission have opened investigations into the collapse of SVB. And on March 13, the Federal Reserve Board announced that Vice Chair for Supervision Michael S. Barr will lead “a review of the supervision and regulation of Silicon Valley Bank, in light of its failure,” and that it will release his findings on May 1.

“We need to have humility, and conduct a careful and thorough review of how we supervised and regulated this firm, and what we should learn from this experience,” Barr said.

Eugene Kiely contributed to this article.

Update, April 28: A review conducted by the Federal Reserve and released on April 28 blamed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on management mistakes by the lender, but it also pointed a finger at failed supervision of the bank by the Federal Reserve itself.

According to Barr, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, SVB “failed because of a textbook case of mismanagement by the bank. Its senior leadership failed to manage basic interest rate and liquidity risk. Its board of directors failed to oversee senior leadership and hold them accountable. And Federal Reserve supervisors failed to take forceful enough action.”

Barr also concluded that, “Regulatory standards for SVB were too low, the supervision of SVB did not work with sufficient force and urgency, and contagion from the firm’s failure posed systemic consequences not contemplated by the Federal Reserve’s tailoring framework.”

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