The latest ad from the anti-Trump Lincoln Project promotes the same mistaken argument that Donald Trump himself has made — that the former president has been charged with spying or espionage. Trump was charged under a part of the Espionage Act concerning the willful retention of national defense information. That’s different from spying.

The ad likens Trump to some of the country’s worst traitors, all charged under different portions of the Espionage Act related to passing classified information to U.S. adversaries, either the former Soviet Union or Cuba. That’s not what Trump is accused of in the June 8 federal indictment.

The Lincoln Project, a group of mostly former and current Republicans who regularly produce biting ads targeting Trump, often runs those ads where Trump lives, specifically to get under the former president’s skin. The 60-second “Espionage” ad, for example, was aired this week on Fox News in the Palm Beach area, which includes Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home and club; in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers; and in Washington, D.C.

But in this case, the group is making the same argument Trump himself has been making — implying that he has been charged as a spy — though for very different reasons. Trump has wrongly said he is being charged as a spy to make the argument that the Department of Justice is overreaching. The Lincoln Project, on the other hand, simply makes the argument that Trump is accused of “one of the worst crimes imaginable” and therefore belongs in prison.

The ad’s narrator says, “Indicted again, this time for violating the Espionage Act. One of the worst crimes imaginable, but he joins a select list of Americans also indicted for this crime. Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, Ana Montes, John Walker, Ronald William Pelton, all indicted for violating the Espionage Act with the prison terms that traitors and spies against America deserve. … There’s no excuse for espionage.”

These are the people listed in the ad, all spies who provided classified information to U.S. adversaries:

• Robert Hanssen. A former FBI agent, Hanssen was arrested in 2001 “and charged with committing espionage on behalf of Russia and the former Soviet Union … in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, bank funds, and diamonds,” according to the FBI, which called him “the most damaging spy in Bureau history.” He pleaded guilty to espionage, attempted espionage and conspiracy to commit espionage. Hanssen died in prison earlier this month.
• Aldrich Ames. Ames was a 31-year employee of the CIA who was accused by the FBI in 1994 of spying for the Russians. The FBI said Ames “passed classified information about CIA and FBI human sources, as well as technical operations targeting the Soviet Union” to Russian KGB agents in exchange for payments of nearly $2 million. The FBI said some of Aldrich’s disclosures compromised “the identities of CIA and FBI human sources, some of whom were executed by Soviet authorities.” He pleaded guilty to espionage and is serving a life sentence in prison.
• Ana Montes. Montes was a senior analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency who acted as a spy for Cuba, sharing classified information with the U.S. adversary, according to the FBI. She was charged in 2001 with conspiracy to deliver U.S. national defense information to Cuba. The FBI says Montes’ motivation for spying for Cuba was not greed — she was not paid for providing Cuba classified information — but rather “[p]ure ideology—she disagreed with U.S. foreign policy.” Montes was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and was released earlier this year. She lives in Puerto Rico.
• John Anthony Walker Jr. Walker is a former U.S. Navy warrant officer who was charged in 1985 with “selling U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union,” the FBI said. Walker provided the Soviets with classified information, including naval cryptographic technology, and, the FBI said, recruited a friend and family members to spy for the Soviet Union as well. He pleaded guilty to espionage. He was sentenced to life and died in federal prison in 2014.
• Ronald William Pelton. A former communications specialist for the National Security Agency, Pelton was convicted in 1986 of selling classified information to the Soviets for five years, the FBI said, “including details on U.S. collection programs targeting the Soviets.” During his trial, Bob Woodward and Patrick E. Tyler wrote for the Washington Post that “Pelton’s betrayal represented one of the gravest American intelligence losses to the Soviet Union.” He was sentenced to life in prison but was released after serving nearly three decades behind bars. He died in September.

As we have written, Trump was charged with 31 alleged violations of a section of the Espionage Act. But he is not accused of being a spy.

Rather, Trump is charged with violating 18 U.S.C. 793 (e), a section of the 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.”

Like the ad does, Trump and some of his defenders have also misleadingly claimed that Trump was charged with espionage.

“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 New Jersey following his June 13 arraignment in Miami, Trump said, “The Espionage Act has been used to go after traitors and spies. It has nothing to do with a former president legally keeping his own documents.”

Trump also raised the “spy” straw man in a speech in Georgia on June 12. 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.

But, again, those are a mischaracterization of the charges.

“Trump is not accused of committing espionage, or being a spy,” David Alan Sklansky, a professor who teaches criminal law at Stanford University, told us via email. “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,” Sklansky added. “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.”

Now, Trump’s detractors are misleadingly using the charges against Trump to tie him to spies convicted of passing classified information to U.S. adversaries. 

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Quick Take 

A privately owned company called the White House Gift Shop is selling a coin commemorating the second indictment of former President Donald Trump. But, contrary to a misleading tweet from Sen. Bill Cassidy, the online sales company is not affiliated with the White House in Washington, D.C.

Full Story

Donald Trump is the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges. Twice.

He was first charged in a New York state court in April for crimes related to hush money payments he allegedly made to a porn actor. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

On June 13, he was charged in federal court in Florida for alleged crimes related to mishandling classified documents and obstructing federal officials who tried to retrieve the files after he left office. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

The day before Trump’s second arraignment, Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, posted a video to his Twitter account admonishing a company called the White House Gift Shop for selling a coin commemorating Trump’s second indictment.

The video was an installment in Cassidy’s recurring Twitter segment called “Outrage of the Week.”

In this installment, Cassidy said: “Outrage of the week — the White House Gift Shop is putting out a commemorative coin for Donald Trump’s indictment. Now, whatever you think about it, whatever party you are, you’ve got to admit it’s poor taste, that it’s capitalizing upon something without his permission, I’m sure. It’s the wrong thing to do. Have a sense of decency, White House Gift Shop.”

Cassidy’s tweet fails to say that the shop is not affiliated with the White House in Washington, D.C., or the federal government, leaving the false impression that the Biden White House is involved.

But the White House Gift Shop is a privately run, web-based retail sales company not affiliated with the White House. We’ve explained this before, when online posts in 2020 criticized the company’s sale of coins commemorating the COVID-19 pandemic and falsely suggested that the shop was affiliated with the White House.

The shop also sold a coin commemorating Trump’s first indictment which, like the coin at the center of the current controversy, sold for $100.

The website describes the coins as “Our Newest Narrative Great Moments in Presidential History in Narrative Coin Art.” It goes on to say, “Epilogue Coin #2 in the Series of the Administration of Presidential Donald J. Trump is a Continuation of the White House Gift Shop’s Historic Moments Original & Unique Global Coin Collection that Chronicles Pivotal Moments in American Presidential & Political History.”

Although Cassidy didn’t explicitly claim that the shop was connected to the executive branch, some social media users understood it that way. “Truly, a politicized White House,” one comment read.

Some other accounts on various platforms have also picked up the claim and repeated it without explaining that the gift shop is not affiliated with the White House. One post on Truth Social, for example, says that Republicans should “insist that the White House Gift shop be closed down immediately under the Biden Cabal.”

We reached out to Cassidy’s Senate office and were referred to his campaign for comment because the video appeared on his campaign Twitter account. We asked his campaign by email if the senator knew that the website isn’t affiliated with the White House and, if so, why he chose to highlight that company’s merchandise. We didn’t get a response.

It’s worth noting that Cassidy, who is not up for reelection until 2026, was one of seven Republicans who voted to find Trump guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors following the former president’s second impeachment after the deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Cassidy has also said he doesn’t think Trump could win the general election in 2024.

So, Cassidy hasn’t always supported the former president, but his suggestion that the executive branch is unfairly targeting Trump with commemorative coins is misleading.

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

Waxman, Olivia. “Donald Trump Is the First President Ever Criminally Charged. Others Have Come Close Though.” Time. Updated 30 Mar 2023.

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

Farley, Robert, D’Angelo Gore and Eugene Kiely. “Q&A on Trump’s Federal Indictment.” FactCheck.org. 9 Jun 2023.

Cassidy, Bill (@BillCassidy). “The White House Gift Shop should not be selling a commemorative coin marking Donald Trump’s indictment. This is totally outrageous.” Twitter. 12 Jun 2023.

The White House Gift Shop, Inc. “APPLICATION FOR CERTIFICATE OF AUTHORITY TO TRANSACT BUSINESS IN MICHIGAN.” Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. 7 Nov 2022.

Fichera, Angelo. “The White House Isn’t Selling Coronavirus Coins.” FactCheck.org. Updated 5 Oct 2020.

Farley, Robert. “How Many Died as a Result of Capitol Riot?” FactCheck.org. Updated 21 Mar 2022.

Kiely, Eugene, et al. “Trump’s Falsehood-Filled ‘Save America’ Rally.” FactCheck.org. 6 Jan 2021.

The post Online Posts Misrepresent Coin Commemorating Trump’s Second Indictment appeared first on FactCheck.org.

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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The post Trump’s Distortions of Federal Indictment appeared first on FactCheck.org.

On June 9, the Department of Justice unsealed a 44-page indictment against former President Donald Trump detailing allegations not only of mishandling sensitive classified documents after he left office, but of obstructing federal officials who tried to get them back.

In a brief public statement, Jack Smith, the special counsel who is bringing the case, said the indictment charges Trump “with felony violations of our national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.”

“Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced,” Smith said. “Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”

Trump now becomes the first former president to face federal criminal charges. A summons compels him to surrender to authorities in Miami on June 13 for his arraignment.

“We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone,” Smith added.

Smith said his office would seek a “speedy trial … consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused.” (For more on the investigation, see “Timeline of FBI Investigation of Trump’s Handling of Highly Classified Documents.”)

Here, we answer some questions about the indictment. What’s in it? What’s Trump’s response? And more.

What are the charges against Trump?

The indictment contains 37 felony counts – including violating Section 793(e) of Title 18, which is part of the Espionage Act. That section of the law makes it a crime to have “unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over” documents “relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

The 37 charges include 31 counts of “willful retention of national defense information,” a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Additional 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,” all carry a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment.

For the other two counts, a “scheme to conceal” and making “false statements and representations,” Trump, if found guilty, could be incarcerated for five years.

Each of the charges also carries a maximum fine of $250,000, as well as a maximum of three years of “supervised release,” or parole, after imprisonment.

What details are in the indictment?

According to the indictment, Trump had unauthorized possession of “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries,” including the U.S. nuclear programs.

“The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States,” the indictment says, adding that Trump kept the sensitive documents “in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.”

On two occasions in 2021, Trump allegedly showed the classified documents to others. The government has an audio recording of one such instance, which occurred in July 2021 at his golf course in New Jersey, that involved documents about a planned attack on another country, reportedly Iran.

“Trump showed and described a ‘plan of attack’ that Trump said was prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official,” the indictment says of the July 2021 incident. “Trump told the individuals that the plan was ‘highly confidential’ and ‘secret.’ Trump also said, ‘as president I could have declassified it,’ and, ‘Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

About a month or two later, Trump allegedly showed a staffer at his political action committee “a classified map related to a military operation.”

The indictment also accuses Trump of obstructing justice and providing false statements.

It says Trump suggested that “his attorney hide or destroy documents called for by the grand jury subpoena,” as well as falsely claim that he did not have documents sought by the grand jury.

The indictment also describes how Trump hid boxes of documents from his own attorney after receiving the May 11, 2022, grand jury subpoena seeking documents “bearing classification markings.”

On June 2, in response to the subpoena, an attorney for Trump searched boxes in a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home and club, for classified documents. But, prior to the inspection, Trump directed one of his employees, Walt Nauta, “to move boxes of documents to conceal them from Trump’s attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury,” according to the indictment. From May 23 to June 2, “Nauta — at Trump’s direction — moved approximately 64 boxes from the Storage Room to Trump’s residence” and returned “only approximately 30 boxes” for the attorney’s review.

At Mar-a-Lago on June 3, 2022, another Trump attorney — who wasn’t involved in reviewing the boxes — provided government agents with “38 unique documents bearing classification markings,” and a sworn statement that said a “diligent search was conducted” for “all documents that are responsive to the subpoena.”

But, shortly after the visit, “the FBI uncovered multiple sources of evidence indicating” that Trump’s “response to the May 11 grand jury subpoena was incomplete and that classified documents remained at the Premises,” a court filing said. That evidence — including surveillance video showing Nauta moving boxes — resulted in the FBI obtaining a court-approved search warrant, which was executed on Aug. 8, 2022.

“During the execution of the warrant at The Mar-a-Lago Club, the FBI seized 102 documents with classification markings in Trump’s office and the Storage Room,” including 17 top secret documents, the indictment says.

The indictment also uses Trump’s own words against him. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump frequently attacked Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information. The indictment includes several examples of Trump promising during the campaign to “enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information.”

“No one will be above the law,” Trump said at that time.

Who is Walt Nauta?

Nauta, a member of the U.S. Navy who served as a valet in Trump’s White House and later as Trump’s personal aide, has also been indicted in the documents case.

According to the indictment, Nauta served as Trump’s “body man” starting in August 2021, and he was personally involved in moving around boxes of records at Mar-a-Lago — at Trump’s direction — to avoid their detection by not only the Department of Justice, but also Trump’s own attorneys.

Trump and Nauta “misled” a Trump attorney “by moving boxes that contained documents with classification markings so that [the attorney] would not find the documents and produce them to a federal grand jury,” according to the indictment. As we said, Nauta helped move approximately 64 boxes from a storage room to Trump’s residence, the indictment says.

The indictment says that under questioning by the FBI, Nauta also lied about that.

Nauta has been charged with violating federal codes related to conspiring to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheming to conceal, and making false statements and representations. The first four carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and the last two carry a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

What about Biden?

In a Truth Social post announcing his indictment, Trump quickly turned to whataboutism, lashing out at what he perceives as unequal Department of Justice treatment of Biden for doing what Trump says is the same or worse. But it’s not the same, and Trump’s claims are false and misleading.

Trump said he had been indicted, “even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is ‘secured’ by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time.”

As we have explained, in 2012 Biden donated more than 1,850 boxes of records from his years in the U.S. Senate to the University of Delaware. The documents are not available for public access following an agreement between Biden and the university at the time of the donation not to provide public access to any of the materials until “two years after the donor [Biden] retires from public life.” In October, a Delaware Superior Court judge upheld the University of Delaware’s refusal to provide access to the documents after the nonprofit Judicial Watch sought them through a Freedom of Information Act request.

However, the Justice Department, with Biden’s consent, reviewed the documents in February and did not find any with classified markings, although some were taken for further review, CBS News has reported.

As for the “additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C.,” Trump is referring to the revelation from Biden aide Kathy Chung that the boxes of documents taken from Biden’s vice presidential offices that ended up at the Penn Biden Center — and were later determined to contain classified documents — were previously and temporarily kept at two other locations, including one in Chinatown.

“He had seven or eight boxes in Chinatown in Washington, D.C., where nobody even speaks English in Chinatown,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall on June 1. “Chinatown is very — it’s in favor of China and he has boxes in Chinatown.”

Testifying before the House Oversight Committee in April, Chung said after the materials were initially boxed up at the end of Biden’s term as vice president, they were stored for six months at a space rented by the General Services Administration. The boxes were then moved temporarily — for about a month she said — to a private office space in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The boxes, which she said were unopened at both of the temporary storage locations, were then permanently moved to the Penn Biden Center in D.C. So despite Trump’s post, there are no longer any Biden documents being stored at the location in Chinatown.

It’s also misleading for Trump to say “even more” boxes were stored at the University of Pennsylvania. Those are the same boxes that were stored temporarily in Chinatown.

As we detailed in our Jan. 19 story, “Timeline of Biden’s Classified Documents,” Richard Sauber, special counsel to Biden, said in a Jan. 9 statement that on Nov. 2, while packing files in preparation for vacating office space used by the former vice president at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., personal attorneys for Biden came across “what appear to be Obama-Biden Administration records, including a small number of documents with classified markings.” The University of Pennsylvania-affiliated think tank was established in 2017, after Biden was no longer vice president, and its offices opened in February 2018, about a year before Biden took a leave of absence to run for president. 

The office of the Penn Biden Center “was not authorized for storage of classified documents,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in remarks on Jan. 12. Garland said that on Nov. 9 the FBI began “an assessment, consistent with standard protocols, to understand whether classified information had been mishandled in violation of federal law.” Garland also noted that on Nov. 14, he tapped U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John R. Lausch Jr. to conduct an initial review related to “the possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records” at the Penn Biden Center.

With Biden’s consent, the FBI searched the Penn Biden Center in mid-November. But the existence of even more classified documents came to light a month later when Biden’s personal counsel informed Lausch that additional documents from Biden’s time as vice president bearing classification markings were found in the garage of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. The FBI took possession of the documents.

Still more documents with classified markings were found by Biden attorneys in Biden’s home and garage in mid-January. At various points, the FBI searched the Penn Biden Center, as well as Biden’s homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, all with the consent and cooperation of Biden. According to CBS News’ reporting and what we know from statements by Biden’s lawyers, less than 30 classified documents were found in Biden’s possession at different locations.

On Jan. 12, Garland announced the appointment of Robert Hur as a special counsel “to investigate whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with this matter.” So the Biden mishandling of classified documents is not being ignored. The investigation has not concluded.

As we have written, there are significant differences between Biden’s situation and Trump’s. In Trump’s case, the search warrant was issued after months of negotiations and a grand jury subpoena resulted in only a partial return of classified documents.

We should note that Trump has repeatedly claimed that he is being held to a double standard compared with other past presidents who he says have done the same thing. But as we have written, that’s not accurate.

Do presidents have the authority to declassify documents?

On Truth Social, Trump shared a June 9 post from Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, who wrote: “The former president will be indicted for ‘mishandling’ his own government’s classified info. Yet everyone agrees the president has the authority to declassify anything.”

Yes, the president has the ultimate authority to declassify a document. As we’ve written: “The legal authority for classifying national security information rests in the president’s power afforded as commander-in-chief and is guided by a series of presidential executive orders, beginning with one issued by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. The latest of such orders, Executive Order 13526, issued in late 2009 by then-President Barack Obama, lays out in detail the procedures to declassify information, and the various officials who are to be included in such decisions.”

However, Trump’s representatives have made the dubious claim that he previously declassified all of the Mar-a-Lago documents via a “standing order” that said “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”

Multiple experts on national security and the law surrounding classified documents said that explanation isn’t plausible, and a number of former Trump administration officials said they had no knowledge of the former president issuing such an order when he was in office.

John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told the New York Times in 2022 that the claim is “almost certainly a lie.”

Bolton told the Times he “was never briefed on any such order, procedure, policy” when he worked at the White House or after. “If he [Trump] were to say something like that, you would have to memorialize that, so that people would know it existed,” Bolton said.

In a phone interview, Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel for the National Security Agency during the Obama and Trump administrations, told us the standard procedure for declassifying information is “quite detailed.” He said a determination has to be made that the information is significant and in the public interest, followed by a determination that declassification wouldn’t pose a security threat if the information was revealed. The agency that initiated the classification would also be consulted for input on whether the information should remain classified. The agency’s recommendation would be considered by the president, who would then make a final decision, Gerstell said.

In addition, according to the indictment, Trump, in a July 2021 meeting at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf resort, admitted that he had not declassified at least one classified Pentagon document in his possession about attacking another country, reportedly Iran.

“[A]s president, I could have declassified. … Now I can’t,” a transcript of a recording of the conversation says. At another point, Trump tells those in the room, who did not have security clearances, that the document had been classified by the military. “Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump reportedly said.

Can Trump continue to run for, or legally serve as, president if convicted?

“Yes, someone can run for president while under indictment or even having been convicted and serving prison time,” Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown University law professor, told us in March. “The reason is that the Constitution lays out the qualifications for being president.”

According to Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, there are three qualifications to serve as president: He or she must be at least 35 years old upon taking office, a U.S. resident for at least 14 years and a “natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States.”

“These qualifications are understood to be exclusive,” Chafetz said. “Anyone can be president so long as they meet the constitutional qualifications and do not trigger any constitutional disqualifications.”

The 22nd Amendment states that “[n]o person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” But that wouldn’t apply to Trump, who has been elected only once.

Insider surveyed nine other legal scholars who reached the same conclusion. One of them, Harvard University Professor Laurence Tribe, told the news site: “Some presidents have described the White House as a prison, but the Constitution doesn’t specify that that’s the only prison you could occupy in order to serve as president.”

As an example, Chafetz cited Eugene V. Debs, the late labor leader, who, in 1920, ran for president from prison on the Socialist Party ticket and got almost 1 million votes.

What is the status of other Trump investigations?

In addition to handling the documents investigation on Trump, Garland has said Smith would also oversee the Justice Department’s ongoing probe of “whether any person or entity unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification of the Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021.”

In addition, the Fulton County district attorney’s office is investigating whether Trump’s efforts to reverse the 2020 election outcome in Georgia amounted to a crime. In February, the jury foreperson of a special grand jury empaneled in Atlanta revealed that the grand jury recommended multiple people be indicted related to activities involving criminal interference in Georgia’s 2020 elections. Although the jury forewoman did not name those recommended for indictment, she said, “You’re not going to be shocked” by whom the list might include.

In mid-May, the Hill reported that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis asked judges in her county not to schedule trials and in-person hearings in the early part of August, in what many took as a sign that Willis will bring charges at that time.

And, of course, Trump faces an indictment in New York accusing him of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. In documents filed at Trump’s arraignment on April 4, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleged the falsified business records were meant to conceal hush money payments to three people alleging extramarital affairs by Trump, in furtherance of helping Trump’s presidential campaign.

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The post Q&A on Trump’s Federal Indictment appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Former President Donald Trump misleadingly said that “under Biden’s current policies” children born to parents in the country illegally automatically become citizens. That’s not a Biden policy, but rather it has been the standing interpretation of the 14th Amendment going back more than 100 years, including under Trump.

In a video posted to Truth Social, Trump revived an old promise, saying that on Day 1 of a new term as president, he would issue an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born to parents in the country illegally. But as we wrote when Trump vowed to — but never did — issue such an executive order when he was president, most legal scholars believe such a change would require a constitutional amendment.

Trump said his order would also end the practice of so-called birth tourism, “where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the planet squat in hotels for their last few weeks of pregnancy to illegitimately and illegally obtain U.S. citizenship for the child.” Some experts say this happens far less frequently than Trump claimed.

Ending birthright citizenship has been on Trump’s radar for years. When he was running for president back in 2015, Trump told then Fox News host Bill O’Reilly the issue has been “fully vetted now” and all that would be needed to end birthright citizenship was “an act of Congress.” But as we wrote at the time, most constitutional and immigration scholars said such a change would require a constitutional amendment, which is a higher bar than simple legislation. But, we noted, there were a few who agreed with Trump.

Fast forward three years to 2018 and Trump, then serving as president, said in an interview with Axios that he was told by White House counsel that actually, birthright citizenship wouldn’t even need to be changed with legislation, that he could do it simply with an executive order. We wrote then that most constitutional scholars said he couldn’t do it via executive order, or if he did, it would likely be overturned by the courts.

Nonetheless, Trump said such an order was “in the process” and “it’ll happen.” But it didn’t.

A year later, in August 2019, Trump again told reporters he was “looking … very, very seriously” at issuing an executive order to end birthright citizenship. But again, he never actually did it.

In late November 2020, after Trump had lost the election, members of his administration said the president was considering finally issuing an executive action in the weeks before leaving office that would seek to end birthright citizenship. It didn’t happen.

In other words, when he had the opportunity as president, Trump spoke multiple times about issuing an executive order to end birthright citizenship, but he never pulled the trigger. Now, in a video posted to Truth Social, Trump said if reelected, he would make such an order a priority on his first day back in the Oval Office.

Trump, May 30: Under Biden’s current policies, even though these millions of illegal border crossers have entered the country unlawfully, all of their future children will become automatic U.S. citizens. Can you imagine? They’ll be eligible for welfare, taxpayer-funded health care, the right to vote, chain migration and countless other government benefits, many of which will also profit the illegal alien parents. This policy is a reward for breaking the laws of the United States and it is obviously a magnet helping draw the flood of illegals across our borders. … As has been laid out by many scholars, this current policy is based on an historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates. …

As part of my plan to secure the border on Day 1 of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.

Trump packed a lot into his statement, so let’s take it in pieces.

Trump said that “under Biden’s current policies” children born to parents in the country illegally automatically become citizens. That’s not a Biden policy, but rather it has been the standing policy going back more than 100 years.

According to the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.”

The idea was to grant citizenship to recently freed slaves. But the 14th Amendment also forms the basis of the country’s longstanding policy of granting birthright citizenship to anyone born on American soil.

Trump went on to say that “millions and millions and millions” of people come into the U.S. illegally, adding, “They come from mental institutions, they come from jails, prisoners.” This echoes comments Trump has made repeatedly on the campaign trail — that South American countries are emptying their prisons and “mental institutions” and sending those people to the U.S. But as we have written, immigration experts say there’s simply no evidence of that, and Trump has offered no backup.

Trump then said the U.S. “is among the only countries in the world” that extend citizenship to babies born in their country when neither parent is a citizen. But as we have written, a 2010 analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates lower immigration, found that 30 of the world’s 194 countries grant automatic birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants in the country illegally. The U.S. and Canada are the only ones among those 30 countries that have advanced economies as defined by the International Monetary Fund. Outside North America, most of the 30 counties that have birthright citizenship policies are in Central and South America. No country in Europe has such a policy. Although Trump has said Mexico doesn’t have a policy like the U.S., it is actually pretty similar.

In his campaign video, Trump argued that the standing interpretation of the 14th Amendment bestowing citizenship to children born in the country even though their parents are in the U.S. illegally is — according to “many scholars” — “based on an historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” Trump said his executive order will make “clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”

Although Trump said “there aren’t that many of them around” who interpret the 14th Amendment to confer birthright citizenship to a child whose parents are in the country illegally, that’s not accurate. As we have written, that’s actually the opinion of most constitutional scholars.

The birthright citizenship portion of the amendment was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898 in the case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which involved a man, Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to parents who were citizens of China but legally living in the United States. (There was no such thing as illegal immigration at the time.) Some argue that while that settles the issue of whether the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to children born to parents in the country legally, it doesn’t necessarily settle the issue regarding children born in the U.S. to parents in the country illegally.

Another Supreme Court involvement on the issue is a footnote in a 1982 decision in the case Plyler v. Doe, which dealt with the issue of whether states must provide education to children not “legally admitted” into the United States. In that case, Justice William Brennan, writing the majority opinion in the 5-4 decision, stated that “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”

In a 2015 op-ed in the New York Times, John Eastman, a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, argued that the longstanding policy of extending citizenship to babies born in the U.S. to parents in the country illegally was based on a misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment and its limitation to people born in the U.S. who are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

In 2018, Eastman told us that phrase precludes granting birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants in the country illegally, and he encouraged Trump to clarify that through an executive order. (Two years later, after the 2020 election, Trump hired Eastman, who was described in the final report from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol as one of the principal planners of an effort to overturn the certified presidential election results.)

But as we have said, most constitutional scholars don’t agree that a president can change the longstanding birthright citizenship policy via executive order. As we wrote in 2015, most constitutional experts think such a change would require a constitutional amendment. To achieve that, the change would have to be proposed by a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate, and then it would need to be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

As we noted then, at least some constitutional scholars think a change could be achieved simply through federal legislation passed by Congress. Some legislators have tried unsuccessfully for years to pass a bill to end birthright citizenship for children of adults in the country illegally, and some of those bills implicitly assume the issue can be solved without a constitutional amendment.

Most recently, Republican Rep. Brian Babin introduced the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2021. The bill sought to redefine what it means to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States so that birthright citizenship would only apply to a child born to a parent who is “(1) a citizen or national of the United States; (2) an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence in the United States whose residence is in the United States; or (3) an alien performing active service in the armed forces.” The bill, which had 31 Republican co-sponsors, never came up for a vote.

In 1995, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that suggests Trump would be on dubious legal ground, as would even an attempt to change the policy through legislation.

According to then-Assistant Attorney General Walter Dellinger, “A bill that would deny citizenship to children born in the United States to certain classes of alien parents is unconstitutional on its face.”

“The phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ was meant to reflect the existing common law exception for discrete sets of persons who were deemed subject to a foreign sovereign and immune from U.S. laws, principally children born in the United States of foreign diplomats, with the single additional exception of children of members of Indian tribes,” Dellinger wrote. “Apart from these extremely limited exceptions, there can be no question that children born in the United States of aliens are subject to the full jurisdiction of the United States.”

Ultimately, though, if Trump were to issue an executive order as president, it would likely be up to the Supreme Court to decide whether it passes constitutional muster.

Birth Tourism

In his campaign announcement, Trump also pledged that he would end the practice of so-called birth tourism via executive order.

Trump had similarly pledged to do this as president, but never did. Rather, his administration issued a rule in 2020 for the State Department, directing staff to deny nonimmigrant visas to women if there is a “reason to believe” they intend to travel to the U.S. for the primary purpose of obtaining citizenship for a child by giving birth in the U.S.

In his campaign announcement, Trump claimed “hundreds of thousands of people” have participated in birth tourism.

“My order will also end their unfair practice known as birth tourism, where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the planet squat in hotels for the last few weeks of pregnancy to illegitimately and illegally obtain U.S. citizenship for the child, often to later exploit chain migration to jump the line and get green cards for themselves and their family members,” Trump said in his campaign video. “It’s a practice that’s so horrible and so egregious, but we let it go forward. At least one parent will have to be a citizen or a legal resident in order to qualify.”

Trump’s campaign website provided a yearly figure, saying that “tens of thousands of foreign nationals fraudulently enter the U.S. each year during the final weeks of their pregnancies for the sole purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for their child.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to our inquiry seeking support for these figures, but it seems likely they come from the Center for Immigration Studies, which estimates there are 20,000 to 26,000 possible birth tourists a year.

If Trump were looking at a period of, say, 10 years, then his estimate of “hundreds of thousands” of birth tourists could be accurate, Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, told us in a phone interview. But Camarota acknowledged the CIS estimate was based on data that was not limited only to women coming to the U.S. “for the last few weeks of pregnancy,” as Trump said.

Jeremy Neufeld, a senior immigration fellow at the Institute for Progress, took issue with the methodology underpinning Camarota’s estimates in a March 2020 blog post.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services does not provide a definitive count on birth tourism. Short of that, Neufeld told us the best estimate of birth tourism numbers comes from data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC reports that there were 5,636 children born to foreign nonresidents in 2021. That annual figure was likely lower due to the pandemic; the CDC data indicate there were 10,042 children born to foreign nonresidents in 2019.

Camarota believes those figures significantly underestimate birth tourism because, he said, most mothers will list an address in the U.S. — rather than their foreign address — and remain in the U.S. until they are able to obtain a Social Security card, birth certificate and passport for their child. And so, he said, they are not captured in the CDC data.

Neufeld believes the CDC numbers are still the best estimate for the magnitude of birth tourism.

“The CDC numbers aren’t perfect — no numbers are — but I’ve never seen any evidence they’re more likely to be too low than too high,” Neufeld said. “Yes, they may miss birth tourists who lie about their residence, but they also include people who never intended to give birth in the US or are in the process of getting residency. Which of these effects is bigger? Nobody really knows.” 

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Quick Take

CNN was criticized by some for hosting a town hall with Donald Trump and a live audience that expressed strong support for the former president. Online posts now wrongly claim CNN will have “no more live audiences at town halls.” CNN said the claim is “fabricated” and plans a live audience at a town hall with Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley in June.

Full Story 

CNN hosted a live town hall with former President Donald Trump in New Hampshire on May 10, the cable network’s first televised town hall for a 2024 presidential candidate.  

Critics of the town hall say CNN allowed Trump to make too many false and misleading claims without enough correction. CNN also faced backlash for how the audience behaved during the broadcast. 

The audience — made up of Republicans and undeclared voters expected to vote in the New Hampshire Republican primary — gave Trump a standing ovation when he appeared on stage and cheered during his repetition of false claims. 

Following the backlash, social media posts began to spread the false claim that CNN said it won’t have live audiences at future town halls.

“CNN just announced there will be no more live audiences at town halls. So how is it a town hall with no audience? Trump broke CNN,” said a tweet shared on May 11. 

“CNN announces there will be no more live audiences at their town halls….so I guess they decided that they can’t have their sheep cheering for what Trump says, and also, isn’t a live audience the definition of a town hall,” a post on Facebook said.

“CNN announces today there will be no more live audiences at town halls. The [orange emoji] Man broke CNN,” said another Facebook post. 

But the claim is not true.

Responding to the social media posts, CNN spokesperson Sydney Baldwin told USA Today, “This is completely fabricated.”

CNN has announced it will host the next town hall in front of a live audience in Iowa on June 4 with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who is also seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. 

The audience will be made up of “Iowa Republicans and Iowa voters, who say they will pre-register to participate in the Republican caucuses by the deadline set by the Republican Party of Iowa; and pledge to appear in person at the caucuses,” according to CNN.  

At a CNN meeting on May 11, the station’s CEO, Chris Licht, said that he stands by the decision to have Trump’s town hall in front of a crowd that favored the former president, the Association Press reported.

“While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also an important part of the story, because the people in that audience represent a large swath of America,” Licht said.

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

“READ: Transcript of CNN’s town hall with former President Donald Trump.” CNN. 11 May 2023. 

“CNN Republican Town Hall with Donald Trump.” CNN Audio. 11 May 2023. 

Bauder, David and Alexandra Olson. “CNN’s town hall quickly turned chaotic, displaying the tightrope facing journalists covering Trump.” Associated Press. 11 May 2023.  

Farley, Robert, et al. “FactChecking Trump’s CNN Town Hall.” FactCheck.org. 11 May 2023. 

Darcy, Oliver. “Analysis: CNN faces harsh criticism after Trump unleashed a firehose of lies during its live town hall.” CNN. 11 May 2023. 

“CNN to Host Republican Presidential Town Hall with former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.” CNN. 24 May 2023. 

Frank, BrieAnna. “No audience change announced for CNN town halls after Trump event | Fact check.” USA Today. 17 May 2023.

The post CNN Says Future Town Halls Will Include Live Audiences, Contrary to Online Posts appeared first on FactCheck.org.

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.

Former President Donald Trump’s town hall event felt like a lightning round of false and misleading claims — most of which we’ve heard before. Among them:

• He claimed the conservative group True the Vote found Democrats “stuffing ballot boxes” with “millions of votes” and it was caught “on government cameras.” It did not.

• Trump falsely claimed that he “didn’t ask” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “to find” him more votes. In a Jan. 2, 2021, call, Trump told Raffensperger: “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” which was one more than Trump needed to win the state.

• Then-Vice President Mike Pence didn’t have the legal right to send electoral votes back to the states, contrary to Trump’s claim that Pence “did something wrong” by not rejecting the votes in states he lost.

• Trump falsely claimed that “we have open borders,” when each month border officials have apprehended and expelled tens of thousands of people who illegally enter the country.

• He made an unsubstantiated claim that many of the immigrants coming illegally across the southern border are people released from prisons and mental institutions.

• The former president wrongly claimed that the Presidential Records Act allowed him to negotiate the return of presidential materials to the National Archives and Records Administration.

• President Joe Biden donated 1,850 boxes of records from his Senate years to the University of Delaware. There’s no evidence they contain classified information or that Biden refused to give them “back,” as Trump said.

• Trump claimed that “we were energy independent” during his administration, but the U.S. never attained 100% self-sufficiency and still relied on energy imports under Trump.

• He wrongly claimed that U.S. gasoline prices reached $9 under Biden. The highest weekly average price under Biden was about $5 in June 2022.

• Trump claimed that under Roe v. Wade, “They could kill the baby … after the baby was born.” The court opinion allowed states to prohibit abortion after fetal viability, with exceptions for the mother’s life and health.

Trump — the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination, despite a criminal indictment in New York and an ongoing criminal investigation in Georgia — took questions from New Hampshire Republicans and undeclared voters in the May 10 prime time event moderated by CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins.

False Claims of Vote Fraud

Still refusing to accept the results of an election he lost, Trump made numerous false claims about how the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” For example, Trump claimed, “If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where [Democrats] were stuffing ballot boxes.”

Trump is referring to the “2000 Mules” documentary by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, which purported to provide evidence that thousands of so-called “mules” were employed to illegally stuff ballot drop boxes with fraudulent ballots. The film was based on research from the conservative group True the Vote, which used geotracking data of cellphones and noted people who were near numerous ballot drop boxes and liberal nonprofits. We reviewed the film’s claims and found the evidence lacking.

When Georgia investigators looked into a handful of videos showing people depositing multiple ballots, it turned out to be people legally dropping off ballots for eligible voters in their immediate family. The House Jan. 6 committee released video of an interview of former Attorney General Bill Barr, who offered a blistering assessment, calling the cellphone data “singularly unimpressive” and saying the film simply “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting.”

Call to Georgia Secretary of State

Toward the end of the town hall, Collins revisited the topic of Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims.

Collins asked Trump about his Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — which has become the focus of a criminal investigation by the Fulton County district attorney’s office into whether Trump tried to illegally overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election outcome.

Asked if he would still make that call today, knowing that it would lead to a criminal investigation, Trump said there was nothing wrong with the call and that he was merely “questioning the election.”

Collins: You asked him to find you votes.

Trump: I didn’t ask him to find anything.

That’s false. Trump asked Raffensperger to find him enough votes so that he could win the state — after Joe Biden had already been certified and recertified as the winner in Georgia.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state,” Trump told Raffensperger on the call.

Specifically, Trump told Raffensperger to look in Cobb and Fulton counties — which were both won by Biden. “You will find you will be at 11,779 within minutes because Fulton County is totally corrupt,” Trump said on the call.

Pence Didn’t Have Right to Reject Electoral Votes

Trump was asked if he owed his vice president, Mike Pence, an apology over what happened during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s repeated attempts to push Pence to refuse to count electoral votes.

“No, because he did something wrong,” Trump said. “He should have sent the votes back to the state legislatures and I think we would have had a different outcome.”

A constitutional expert told us Pence did not have the legal right to change or reject the electoral votes. The Electoral Count Act, which was signed into law in 1887, says the vice president is simply supposed to hand the tellers the state certifications after he opens them, and the tellers are then to read those documents and make a list of the votes.

According to the Jan. 6 committee report, Pence and his counsel Greg Jacob and others told Trump that Pence did not have the authority to send those electoral votes back to the states. Even Trump’s lawyer John Eastman “admitted” that Trump had been advised that the vice president did not have the unilateral power to refuse to count votes under the Electoral College Act, but Trump “continued to pressure the Vice President to act illegally,” the report said.

Trump said Pence and others were wrong, and that the proof is that “right after the election they all met – the RINOs [Republicans in name only] and the Democrats – and they worked out a plan to make sure that future vice presidents don’t do what I said you could do.” Congress revised the Electoral Count Act in December 2022, but only to “reaffirm” that a vice president’s role in the electoral vote counting process is “ministerial.” It was not an admission that the law previously allowed a vice president to take the steps Trump sought.

Illegal Immigration

The U.S. does not “have open borders,” as Trump falsely claimed. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, particularly Border Patrol agents, have continued to apprehend and expel tens of thousands of people who illegally cross the southern border each month, according to the most recent CBP data.

In the Southwest Border Enforcement Report for fiscal year 2021, which was published in August 2022, the Office of Immigration Statistics said preliminary estimates indicated that the model-based apprehension rate in FY 2021 was about the same as the 78% average from FY 2018 to FY 2020, which were the three fiscal years when Trump was president the whole time. In its August 2020 Border Security Metrics Report, the Department of Homeland Security explained that the model-based apprehension rate is “the estimated share of all attempted unlawful border crossers between land [ports of entries] that is apprehended.”

No Evidence for Prisons Claim

As he has numerous times in recent months, Trump made the unsubstantiated claim that many of the immigrants coming illegally across the southern border are people released from prisons and mental institutions.

“Look what is happening at our southern border,” Trump said. “Millions and millions of people are coming in. They’re being released from prisons. They’re being released from mental institutions.”

We wrote about this claim in March when Trump said at a rally in Texas, “Other countries are emptying out their prisons, insane asylums and mental institutions and sending their most heinous criminals to the United States.” When making the claim, Trump has sometimes cited a news story he says he read, about a doctor at a mental institution in South America who said he no longer has people to take care of because all the patients are being sent to the U.S. We could not find any such story, and immigration experts we talked to said there’s simply no evidence that is happening.

“I cannot prove this is false, but I follow migration in Latin America and the Caribbean quite closely and have never ever heard anything like this related to current migration from the region,” Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, told us. “I have never heard any credible claims that any country has been emptying its prisons or mental hospitals so that those released can migrate to the United States.”

Presidential Records Act

The former president wrongly claimed that the Presidential Records Act allowed him to negotiate with the National Archives and Records Administration for the return of presidential materials he took with him after leaving office. A president can keep personal materials, but not presidential documents.

The Presidential Records Act 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.”

Trump claimed, “We were negotiating with them as per, as per the Presidential Records Act,” adding that “all of the sudden, they raided the house.”

“They didn’t raid the house of Joe Biden,” Trump also said. CNN’s Collins correctly noted: “Joe Biden didn’t ignore a subpoena to get those documents back like you did.”

As we’ve written, Trump took eight months to comply with NARA’s requests for the return of presidential documents he had at his Mar-a-Lago home. NARA then discovered classified documents among those records. In responding to a subpoena for more classified material, Trump’s lawyers handed over an envelope with 38 classified documents.

Two months after that, the FBI obtained a court-approved search warrant for Mar-a-Lago and retrieved 13 boxes that contained “over one hundred unique documents with classification markings,” according to a court filing.

Biden Documents at University of Delaware

While talking about the Department of Justice’s investigation into his handling of classified documents, Trump repeated a claim that Biden mishandled and hid 1,850 boxes of classified records. “I have every right to [take classified documents] under the Presidential Records,” Trump said. (He doesn’t. See the section above on that act.) “Biden, on the other hand, he has 1,850 boxes.” Later on, Trump claimed that Biden “won’t give back the 1,850 boxes” and that “nobody even knows where they are.”

But there is no evidence any of the boxes from Biden contain classified information, and their location is known.

As we’ve written, Biden in 2012 donated more than 1,850 boxes of records from his years in the U.S. Senate to the University of Delaware. The documents are not available for public access following an agreement between Biden and the university at the time of the donation not to provide public access to any of the materials until “two years after the donor [Biden] retires from public life.” In October, a Delaware Superior Court judge upheld the University of Delaware’s refusal to provide access to the documents after the nonprofit Judicial Watch sought them through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Justice Department, with Biden’s consent, reviewed the documents and did not find any with classified markings, although some were taken for further review, CBS News has reported.

‘Energy Independent’

“We were energy independent” during his administration, Trump said.

The U.S. never stopped relying on foreign sources of energy under Trump, as his claim suggested. During his presidency, for the first time in decades, the U.S. exported more energy than it imported; produced more energy than it consumed; and again became a net exporter of petroleum, which includes crude oil and refined products from crude oil, such as gasoline and other fuels. Even if “energy independence” was determined by being a net exporter or having more production than consumption, the country’s status has not changed under Biden.

See “Examining U.S. ‘Energy Independence’ Claims” and “FactChecking Trump’s Presidential Bid Announcement“ for more.

Gasoline Prices

Trump falsely claimed that “energy” — a reference to gasoline prices — “went from $1.87 to $5, $6, $7, $8 and even $9.”

The average price of regular gasoline was $2.38 per gallon the week Trump left office in January 2021, up from a low of $1.77 the final week of April 2020, according to Energy Information Administration figures. Under Biden, the average weekly price reached a record of $5.01 in June 2022. Most recently, the price was down to $3.53 the week of May 8.

There was at least one California county where gas prices climbed to almost $10 a gallon in June 2022, but the highest average price for all of California — which usually has the country’s most expensive gas — was about $6.44 that month, according to AAA.

As we have written before, experts have said that U.S. presidents have little influence over gas prices, which are mainly affected by the global price of crude oil, a fossil fuel that is refined into gasoline.

Abortion

Trump claimed that before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, “They could kill the baby in the ninth month or after the baby was born. Now they won’t be able to do that.” As we wrote in 2019 when he made a similar claim, killing a baby is a homicide.

The 1973 Roe opinion said the government can’t interfere with a right to an abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy. Once a fetus is viable outside the womb, the government could restrict or prohibit abortions — but there must be exceptions for the mother’s life and health, which meant both physical and mental health, the court clarified in a companion case.

Trump also said that abortion rights supporters were in favor of abortions very late in a pregnancy or “after the baby is born.” As we wrote recently, in 2021 and 2022, Democrats introduced a bill that, similar to Roe, would set a viability threshold for state restrictions, permitting abortions to be prohibited after viability but with exceptions for risks to the life or health of the mother. The two political parties disagree on what the “health” exception means, with Republicans viewing it as a loophole.

The Supreme Court overturned Roe on June 24, 2022, leaving the issue of regulating abortion to the states.

In 2020, the vast majority of abortions — 93.1% — in the U.S. occurred in the first trimester, at or before 13 weeks of gestation, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Less than 1% were performed at or after 21 weeks. A full-term pregnancy is typically 38 to 42 weeks.

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Quick Take

The three-day National Rifle Association convention in Indianapolis allowed attendees to carry firearms, except for a two-hour period when former President Donald Trump and other leaders spoke in a hall secured by the Secret Service. Yet, social media posts from a Democratic advocacy group misleadingly claimed that “guns were BANNED at the NRA convention.”

Full Story

There have been more than 160 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2023 as of April 21, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines “mass shooting” as any incident that involves at least four victims who were either shot or killed. Such shootings have led to calls for gun control from Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Many Republican leaders oppose restrictions on firearms and some attended the three-day National Rifle Association convention in mid-April in Indianapolis, Indiana, to speak against gun control.  

While GOP leaders advocate for the right to bear arms, guns are not allowed at some political events involving former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is reportedly considering running for the 2024 Republican nomination for president.

But Occupy Democrats, an advocacy group that has previously posted false or misleading claims on social media, posted memes on Facebook misleadingly claiming that guns were not allowed at the NRA convention and an upcoming GOP event in Utah.

A post from Occupy Democrats shared on April 14 said, “Republicans want to turn schools into maximum security prisons, but meanwhile guns are BANNED from today’s NRA conference, because spoiler alert, guns are … DANGEROUS.”

A post from the same group on April 17 claimed: “Guns were just BANNED at the Utah Republican convention where DeSantis is speaking this month. Guns were BANNED at the NRA convention.”

But guns were mostly allowed at the NRA convention held from April 14 to 16 — except at the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum on April 14, where Trump and other leaders spoke. The Secret Service did not permit guns during the forum.

Guidelines for the NRA convention state that “[d]uring the 152nd NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits, personal firearms may be carried in the Indiana Convention Center. When carrying your firearm, always adhere to all federal, state, and local laws.”

Indiana gun laws generally allow individuals 18 years or older to carry a handgun without a license.

“Special Note for those attending the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum (Friday April 14th 2:00pm):  Please check the events page at NRAAM.org for a list of restricted items mandated by the United States Secret Service. This only applies to those attending the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum,” the NRA guidelines added.

Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and other elected officials — including Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson — spoke at the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum on April 14 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. The Secret Service controlled security for the room during that time and did not allow guns at that location. 

“U.S. Secret Service will control security within Hall A of the Indiana Convention Center and require attendees of the forum to be screened through magnetometers before entry. You will be subject to a search of your person and belongings,” the NRA noted on its website.

“Per the U.S. SECRET SERVICE, firearms, firearm accessories, knives, and other items WILL NOT BE PERMITTED in Hall A. For a full list of prohibited items, please click here. Read the list of prohibited items carefully before traveling to the event. You will not be allowed in Hall A with any of the items on this list,” the NRA added. 

Guns were allowed in the other areas of the convention. In addition, an exhibit hall featured a variety of weapons at the convention, which was expected to attract more than 70,000 people.

Guns were also not allowed during Trump’s speech at the 2022 NRA Convention in Houston — which was held just days after the May 24 shooting of 19 children and two adults at a school in Uvalde, Texas. Guns were permitted at other events during the convention.

Utah GOP Convention Will Allow Guns

The Utah Republican Party’s 2023 Organizing Convention on April 22 is scheduled to feature DeSantis as the keynote speaker — as noted in the post by Occupy Democrats.

While it is true that some rallies and events with scheduled appearances by DeSantis have not allowed guns, the Occupy Democrats post wrongly said that guns are banned at the Utah convention. 

The Utah Republican Party said in an April 4 Facebook post that the convention will follow state law, which permits guns at such events.

Utah gun laws allow anyone 21 and older who can lawfully possess a firearm to carry a loaded firearm in public — whether it is concealed or not. Individuals 18 and up are allowed to open carry a “statutorily ‘unloaded’ (two mechanisms to fire)” firearm if they don’t have a concealed weapons license.

“We wish to clarify some rumors floating around. We will have some increased security for [the] convention, no doubt. As far as firearms are concerned, all state laws will be followed. Utah is an amazing second amendment state and we will keep it that way!! So anyone claiming firearms will not be allowed at the UTGOP convention is either lying to you or they are misinformed,” the Utah GOP said. 

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

Allen, Greg. “Eyeing a run for president, Ron DeSantis wants to ‘Make America Florida‘.” NPR. 6 Mar 2023. 

Allen, Jonathan. “Trump says mass shootings are not ‘a gun problem’ as 2024 GOP hopefuls pledge loyalty to the NRA.” NBC News. 14 Apr 2023.

Cathey, Libby. “After Nashville shooting, Republican lawmakers again call gun action ‘premature‘.” ABC News. 28 Mar 2023. 

Davis, Charles R. “Firearms banned at events with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has argued ‘gun-free’ zones are less safe.” Business Insider. 8 Aug 2022. 

Gaudiano, Nicole. “NRA says it plans to ‘showcase over 14 acres of the latest guns and gear’ at its convention days after the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting.” Business Insider. 27 May 2022.

Gregorian, Dareh. “Gun owners, protesters and Donald Trump converge on Houston for NRA event.” NBC News. 27 May 2022.

Hernandez, Joe. “Guns are banned during Trump’s upcoming speech at the NRA conference.” NPR. 25 May 2022.

National Rifle Association. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Accessed 18 Apr 2023. 

National Rifle Association. “JOIN US FOR THE 152ND NRA ANNUAL MEETINGS & EXHIBITS IN INDIANAPOLIS, IN!.” Accessed 18 Apr 2023. 

Joshi, Saumya. “US President Joe Biden Urges Congress To Pass Stricter Gun Control Laws.” Republic World. 17 Apr 2023. 

Magdaleno, Johnny. “Not everyone can carry a firearm starting July 1 in Indiana. Here’s what remains illegal.” IndyStar. Updated 18 Jul 2022.

National Rifle Association. “NRA-ILA Leadership Forum.” Accessed 18 Apr 2023. 

National Constitution Center. “Right to Bear Arms.” Accessed 18 Apr 2022. 

FactCheck.org. “Tag: Occupy Democrats.” Accessed 18 Apr 2023. 

ABC News. “Trump, Pence speak at NRA convention.” 14 Apr 2023. 

U.S. Concealed Carry Association. “Indiana Concealed Carry Reciprocity Map & Gun Laws.” Updated 22 Mar 2022. 

Utah Carry Laws. “Utah Firearm Laws.” Accessed 18 Apr 2023. 

Ward, Myah. “‘We need you all’: Harris takes White House message on guns to Nashville.” Politico. 7 Apr 2023.

Wolfe, Elizabeth and Raja Razek. “Tennessee House GOP expels 2 Democrats in retaliation over gun control protest, on ‘sad day for democracy’.” CNN. 7 Apr 2023.

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Former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis both say they do not support cuts to Social Security. But dueling ads from super PACs supporting their presidential bids say past statements or actions suggest they once did, and therefore seniors should not trust them.

Both Trump and DeSantis have, in the past, supported plans that sought to rein in future spending on both Social Security and Medicare. None of those proposed changes would have cut current benefits for seniors or those nearing retirement age, but the plans DeSantis supported, while in Congress, would have done far more to restructure the programs than Trump ever proposed, or did, as president.

We should note that few politicians say they would “cut” Social Security or Medicare, even if their proposals could result in fewer benefits for seniors. Often they frame their proposed changes as preserving or saving the popular programs. So proposals such as raising the retirement age or changing the way future benefits are calculated are presented as ways to preserve the long-term health of the programs, while opponents call them cuts to the existing programs.

As House Republicans earlier this year began to debate among themselves how to reduce government spending, Trump issued a warning not to include any cuts to Social Security or Medicare.

“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security to help pay for Joe Biden’s reckless spending spree,” Trump said in a video posted to Truth Social on Jan. 20, adding that “the pain” of paying for Biden’s programs “should be borne by Washington bureaucrats, not by hard-working American families and American seniors.”

Trump listed several potential areas to cut in the budget — including aid to “corrupt” foreign countries, money spent on “climate extremism” and “waste fraud and abuse.” He added, “But do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security. Don’t destroy it.”

Although DeSantis has voted numerous times in the past for changes such as raising the age of eligibility for both programs, the Florida governor seemed to acknowledge during an interview on Fox News on March 2 that his position had shifted. DeSantis was asked about a bipartisan group — led by Sens. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, and Republican Bill Cassidy — that is discussing an overhaul of Social Security that would include gradually raising the full retirement age to 70, and changing the formula for benefits for future retirees. Update, April 21: Molly Block, a Cassidy spokesperson, told us that, despite news reports at the time of the Fox News interview, the bipartisan group is not considering raising the full retirement age to 70, “[n]or has that figure ever been under consideration.”

“Look, I have more seniors here [in Florida] than – than just about anyone as a percentage,” DeSantis responded. “You know, we’re not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans. I think that that’s pretty clear.”

So, Trump and DeSantis are now in the same place, saying they don’t want to make any changes to the program. But dueling ads suggest their records tell a different story.

The Attack on DeSantis

An ad from the pro-Trump Make America Great Again Inc. PAC accuses DeSantis of supporting cuts to both Social Security and Medicare. In 2022, the PAC received more than $60 million from Trump’s leadership PAC Save America – which was more than 80% of the $73 million the MAGA PAC raised in 2022, according to Federal Election Commission documents.

“Ron DeSantis loves sticking his fingers where they don’t belong,” the ad’s narrator says. “DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements. Like cutting Medicare, slashing Social Security. Even raising our retirement age.”

It’s one of three ads the PAC has released attacking DeSantis on Social Security and Medicare. Trump himself has also repeatedly attacked DeSantis on this front, as he did during a speech in Iowa on March 13 in which he claimed DeSantis “fought against Social Security.”

DeSantis “wanted to decimate it and voted against it three times,” Trump said. “Voted against Social Security, that’s a bad one. … And on Social Security, while we’re at it, he wanted the minimum retirement age to be lifted to people that are 70 years old, a substantial increase over what it is right now. That’s a big increase. And he also voted to severely cut Medicare. I will not be cutting Medicare and I will not be cutting Social Security. We’ll leave the age where it is.”

DeSantis has, in the past, supported proposals that would reduce Social Security and Medicare spending, including raising the age for full eligibility. But Trump is wrong to to say that DeSantis supported the “minimum retirement age” being raised to 70. DeSantis had supported raising the “full retirement age,” also known as “normal retirement age,” to 70 years old. Currently, people are eligible for early retirement benefits at a reduced level beginning at age 62. But 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.

When DeSantis first ran for Congress in 2012, he supported then-Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget, which included an overhaul of Social Security and Medicare. Among the changes Ryan proposed was to allow Americans to invest more than one-third of their Social Security payroll taxes in personal retirement accounts, and future Medicare beneficiaries would be given a voucher to purchase their health insurance in lieu of the current fee-for-service program.

As we wrote back then, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that under Ryan’s plan, future Social Security beneficiaries might see lower benefits than currently scheduled, but that payments to seniors and those nearing Social Security eligibility would not change.

“I would embrace proposals, you know, like Paul Ryan offered, and other people have offered, that are going to, you know, provide some market forces in there, more consumer choice, and make it so that it’s not just basically a system that’s going to be bankrupt when you have new people coming into it,” DeSantis told the St. Augustine Record in August 2012.

In that interview, DeSantis — who was 33 years old at the time — said that while he wouldn’t make changes for people over 55, “What I think what we need to do for people in my generation particularly is start to restructure the program in a way that’s going to be financially sustainable, both Social Security and Medicare.”

With regard to Social Security, DeSantis said it was “probably not sustainable” to keep the full retirement age for Social Security at 67.

As for Medicare, DeSantis said, “The cost issue with Medicare is that there’s no sensitivity to price,” referring to it as “kind of an open-ended entitlement.” He said that younger people need to know in advance that “you’re going to have … Medicare,” but suggested that for “a really grand policy” they should be “contributing to that and over and above, you know, what Medicare has” paid for in the past.

“So, I think if we reformed it for people in my generation, you know, you wouldn’t see any, probably any savings immediately in the budget, but I think the long-term picture would then improve dramatically,” he said.

As a member of Congress, DeSantis voted for three nonbinding budget proposals from the conservative Republican Study Committee in 2013, 2014 and 2015. The plans, which sought to balance the budget in four to six years instead of the 10 years proposed by Ryan, recommended transitioning Medicare to a premium support system for new beneficiaries and gradually raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67. On Social Security, it proposed similarly increasing the full retirement age to 70 and indexing it for life expectancy. And it sought to move to an alternative cost-of-living formula for Social Security called the “chained CPI,” which was expected to grow at a slower rate than the traditional Consumer Price Index (former President Barack Obama once proposed to do that as well).

The Trump campaign has cited those votes, as well as subsequent ones DeSantis cast, that would have given those under age 55 a choice of traditional Medicare or premium-support payments to help pay for private health insurance once they are eligible for Medicare. As we have written, whether it would be beneficial or more/less expensive for future retirees is a matter of debate.

Whether that amounts to “cutting” or “slashing” the programs — as the Make America Great Again Inc. ad says — is a matter of opinion. But in 2013, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated the proposals in the RSC budget plan would reduce spending on Medicare by $129 billion over 10 years, and Social Security by another $126 billion. And, as DeSantis described it, the plans he supported would require future seniors to pay more out of pocket if they want health care services that were part of the “open-ended entitlement” program that is Medicare.

The Response to Trump

DeSantis has not declared his candidacy for president. But the Never Back Down PAC, founded by Ken Cuccinelli, who served as acting deputy Homeland Security secretary under Trump, seeks to persuade DeSantis to enter the presidential race.

An ad from Never Back Down pushes back on the MAGA PAC ad and Trump’s numerous attacks on DeSantis’ past positions on Social Security and Medicare.

“Trump is being attacked by a Democrat prosecutor in New York,” the narrator in the ad begins. “So why is he spending millions attacking the Republican governor of Florida? Trump’s stealing pages from the Biden-Pelosi playbook, repeating lies about Social Security. Here’s the truth from Gov. Ron DeSantis.”

It then plays a clip of DeSantis telling Fox News on March 2, “You know, we’re not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans.”

The narrator then pivots to Trump’s position and plays a clip from a CNBC interview on Jan. 22, 2020, in which Trump, then still president and running for reelection, was asked whether “entitlements [will] ever be on your plate.”

“At some point, they will be, we will take a look at that,” Trump responded.

“Trump should fight Democrats, not lie about Gov. DeSantis,” the narrator says.

Although the New York Times wrote about Trump’s comments in the CNBC interview under the headline, “Trump Opens Door to Cuts to Medicare and Other Entitlement Programs,” they were not quite that definitive.

Even though Trump said entitlement programs “at some point” would be on the table, it is not clear that he meant cuts would be on the table, or whether he thought economic growth would ultimately fortify the programs.

“We have tremendous growth,” Trump continued. “We’re going to have tremendous growth this next year. It’ll be toward the end of the year. The growth is going to be incredible. And at the right time, we will take a look at that. You know, that’s actually the easiest of all things, if you look, because it’s such a big percentage.”

Trump was then asked if he was “willing to do some of the things that you said you wouldn’t do in the past, though, in terms of Medicare.”

“Well, we’re going — we’re going to look,” Trump said. “We also have — assets that we’ve never had. I mean we’ve never had growth like this. We never had a consumer that was taking in, through — different means, over $10,000 a family. We never had the kind of — the kind of things that we have. Look, our country is the hottest in the world. We have the hottest economy in the world. We have the best unemployment numbers we’ve ever had.”

That position — that he would stabilize entitlement program funds through economic growth, and not though cuts to the programs — is similar to the one Trump espoused when he announced his candidacy for president on June 16, 2015.

“We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country,” Trump said. “All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”

As president, Trump proposed several budgets that sought to reduce Social Security and Medicare spending over time. (We should note that any president’s budget proposal is largely a symbolic statement of priorities, not legislation on which Congress would vote.)

For example, in his fiscal year 2021 proposed budget, despite his claim that he would “not be touching your Social Security or Medicare,” Trump did include several proposals to reduce the growth in Medicare spending over the next 10 years by about $600 billion, as the watchdog group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated. At the time, then-presidential candidate Biden claimed Trump’s proposal “eviscerates Medicare.” However, CRFB said the Medicare proposals “represent reductions in costs not cuts to benefits.”

As we wrote then, Trump’s proposal for Medicare included:

• Making one payment to post-acute care providers, instead of different payments based on the site of care ($105 billion in savings over 10 years);
• Equalizing “site-of-service payments,” meaning paying the same amount whether services are performed at hospital facilities or doctors’ offices ($175 billion);
• Cutting payments to providers for bad debt, meaning unpaid copays/deductibles from beneficiaries ($35 billion).

CRFB said in a footnote to its analysis of the Medicare proposals that lower payments to providers “could impact quality and access in some select cases.” But it said “there is little evidence of any significant effect,” particularly for proposals that “largely focus on reducing excessive payments and spending more efficiently.” And, as we’ve noted, some of those changes were also proposed by Obama when he served as president.

Trump’s FY 2021 budget, his last as president, also proposed reductions to the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs, but not reductions to Social Security retirement benefits.

Trump didn’t propose increasing the eligibility ages for Medicare or Social Security in any of his budgets. Nor did he propose overhauls that included premium-support programs or changes to cost-of-living adjustments.

But now both Trump and DeSantis say they don’t want to change Social Security.

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