Q: Does a proposed law in Washington state say that the government can take children away from parents who don’t agree to gender transition surgery?

A: No. Under the bill, licensed youth shelters no longer have to report the location of a runaway child to the child’s parents if the child is seeking gender-affirming or reproductive care. Instead, the shelters must notify the state’s child services department.

FULL QUESTION

Is it true that SB-5599 say[s] that the government can take away minors from parents if they refuse to agree to gender Transition Surgery[?]

FULL ANSWER

A bill in the state of Washington that would allow licensed youth and homeless shelters to notify the state’s child services department in lieu of a parent in cases where a minor has left home in order to pursue gender-affirming or reproductive care is moving toward passage.

Critics say that it would interfere with parental rights, while advocates say it’s a necessary change to keep runaway minors safe and off the streets.

The bill has passed both houses of the legislature and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, has signaled that he is likely to sign the legislation.

“We believe it is better to have a young person in a shelter with some adult supervision than having them out living on the streets — maybe being trafficked, sexually trafficked, maybe being exposed to drugs,” Inslee said at an April 13 press conference.

The proposed law would affect about a dozen minors each year, the office of state Sen. Marko Liias, who sponsored the bill, told us in an email.

“It’s not like kids are coming by the thousands or even by the hundreds,” Jarel Sanders — who is on the board of directors at Equal Rights Washington, which has lobbied for the bill — told FactCheck.org in a phone interview.

As it stands now, licensed shelters in Washington can contact the children’s services department instead of parents if there are “compelling reasons” to do so. The compelling reasons include circumstances in which notifying a parent would subject the minor to abuse or neglect, which is defined as sexual abuse or exploitation, injury, or negligent treatment or maltreatment.

The bill would add the pursuit of “protected health care services” to the list of “compelling reasons.” Protected health care services would include reproductive health care, meaning contraception and abortion, and gender-affirming care, which we’ll explain further below.

The law would still — as it currently does — require the children’s department to make a good faith attempt to notify a parent after a minor is referred for care and it must “offer services designed to resolve the conflict and accomplish a reunification of the family.”

That would be handled through the department’s Family Reconciliation Services, Nancy Gutierrez, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Children, Youth & Families, told FactCheck.org in an email.

FRS offers short-term family counseling and referrals for mental health care, among other services, with the aim of keeping families together.

“We would focus on offering services designed to resolve familial conflicts and accomplish reunification as directed by the legislation,” Gutierrez said.

Mike Faulk, a spokesman for Inslee, told us the same thing in an email.

“DCYF’s main role is to offer services designed to resolve family conflicts and accomplish a reunification of the family,” he said.

But online posts have misrepresented the proposed legislation, prompting confusion.

For example, Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter, “Washington passes bill allowing the state to TAKE CHILDREN AWAY FROM PARENTS that do not consent to their child’s gender transition surgeries…”

And the conservative website 100 Percent Fed Up posted a headline claiming: “BREAKING: State of Washington Passes Bill Allowing Government to Take Minor Children Away From Parents If They Refuse To Agree to Gender Transition Surgery.” The site shared that story with its 1.5 million Facebook followers.

Those claims misleadingly exaggerate the bill’s impact.

No Change to Medical Consent Laws

The online claims suggest that the bill would create a new exception allowing minors to undergo major medical procedures without parental consent. But the bill doesn’t change the state’s medical consent laws.

Under state law, those under age 18 don’t generally have the right to make medical decisions without parental consent.

There is, however, an exception that was introduced in 2022 that allows homeless youth — as defined by the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act — to get consent from a school nurse, school counselor or homeless student liaison for “nonemergency, outpatient, primary care services, including physical examinations, vision examinations and eyeglasses, dental examinations, hearing examinations and hearing aids, immunizations, treatments for illnesses and conditions, and routine follow-up care customarily provided by a health care provider in an outpatient setting, excluding elective surgeries.”

Kim Justice, executive director of Washington’s Office of Homeless Youth Prevention & Protection Programs, told FactCheck.org in an email: “SB 5599 does not make any changes to the types of health care available to homeless youth or how they access that care. The bill only pertains to situations in which the Department of Children, Youth, and Families would be notified instead of a parent regarding a youth’s admission to a shelter or host home program.”

A Range of Gender-Affirming Care

A related suggestion from the online posts is the emphasis on “gender transition surgeries,” as if surgery is the primary type of treatment.

But gender-affirming care is much more encompassing than just surgery. The Washington bill uses this definition: “[A] service or product that a health care provider… prescribes to an individual to support and affirm the individual’s gender identity.”

The World Health Organization has explained that “gender-affirmative health care can include any single or combination of a number of social, psychological, behavioural or medical (including hormonal treatment or surgery) interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity.”

In addition, gender–affirming surgery — which includes facial surgery, surgery to either reduce or augment breasts and genital surgery — is generally performed on adults.

“Although current protocols typically reserve surgical interventions for adults,” says the American Academy of Pediatrics’ policy statement on care for transgender children and adolescents, “they are occasionally pursued during adolescence on a case-by-case basis, considering the necessity and benefit to the adolescent’s overall health and often including multidisciplinary input from medical, mental health, and surgical providers as well as from the adolescent and family.”

So surgical procedures are uncommon for minors in general, and that’s expected to be the case for those who would be affected by the Washington bill.

Some medical options for gender-affirming care for minors include puberty blockers and hormone therapy, the effects of which are either reversible or partially reversible.

The most recent standards of care published in 2022 by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health advise that adolescents, their parents and their doctors should understand the evidence for both medical and surgical interventions before starting treatment.

“It seems reasonable that decisions to move forward with medical and surgical treatments should be made carefully,” the association says. “Despite the slowly growing body of evidence supporting the effectiveness of early medical intervention, the number of studies is still low, and there are few outcome studies that follow youth into adulthood.”

The Washington bill would largely provide transgender youth with doctors who offer a safe and understanding environment — calling patients by their preferred pronouns, for example — and connecting them to counselling, Sanders said.

“Surgeries are not the majority,” he said, explaining that the bill is much more about social and therapeutic services. The goal is really to reduce suicide attempts, Sanders said.

Gender-affirming care, which can reduce that risk, is supported by more than two dozen major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the Endocrine Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Evidence has demonstrated that forgoing gender-affirming care can have tragic consequences,” the AMA wrote in a recent letter urging governors to reject bans on gender-affirming care. The letter cited heightened incidences of mental health disorders among transgender people, which, it said, “is widely thought to be a consequence of minority stress, the chronic stress from coping with societal stigma, and discrimination because of one’s gender identity and expression. Because of this stress, transgender minors also face a significantly heightened risk of suicide.”

“Transgender children, like all children, have the best chance to thrive when they are supported and can obtain the health care they need,” the letter said. “Studies suggest that improved body satisfaction and self-esteem following the receipt of gender-affirming care is protective against poorer mental health and supports healthy relationships with parents and peers. Studies also demonstrate dramatic reductions in suicide attempts, as well as decreased rates of depression and anxiety.”

Providing Safe Shelter

Another major claim in the online posts is that the bill would impact laws regarding the removal of children from their homes.

That’s not the case, said Laurie Lippold, director of public policy at Partners for Our Children, housed at the University of Washington, which researches the child welfare system.

Current state law requires Child Protective Services to initiate a process overseen by the courts to remove a child in the case of abuse or neglect.

This bill doesn’t propose changes to those laws.

It wouldn’t change any child abuse reporting laws or justification requirements for removing children from homes, Lippold said.

Rather, the bill is designed to ensure that minors who have left home have access to safe shelter.

So, the claims that Washington has passed a sweeping new bill that will result in teens being taken from their homes to undergo surgery are vastly overstating the reality. The proposed law would likely affect about a dozen vulnerable transgender minors each year by providing them with housing if they have left home in order to pursue certain types of gender-affirming or reproductive care.

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Sources

Johns, Michelle M., et al. “Transgender Identity and Experiences of Violence Victimization, Substance Use, Suicide Risk, and Sexual Risk Behaviors Among High School Students — 19 States and Large Urban School Districts, 2017.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 25 Jan 2019.

Herman, Jody L., Taylor N.T. Brown and Ann P. Haas. “Suicide Thoughts and Attempts Among Transgender Adults.” UCLA School of Law Williams Institute. Sep 2019.

Paley, Amit, et al. “2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health.” Trevor Project. Accessed 22 Apr 2023.

Washington State Legislature. Bill Information — SB 5599. Accessed 21 Apr 2023.

Liias, Marko and Joe Nguyen. “What the right has wrong about caring for trans youth.” Seattle Times. Updated 24 Feb 2023.

Inslee, Jay (@GovJayInslee). “WATCH: Governor Inslee Media Availability.” YouTube. 13 Apr 2023.

Sanders, Jarel. Board of directors, Equal Rights Washington. Telephone interview with FactCheck.org. 20 Apr 2023.

Health and Human Services, Office of Population Affairs. Gender-Affirming Care and Young People. Accessed 21 Apr 2023.

Hut Erin. Spokeswoman, Sen. Marko Liias. Email to FactCheck.org. 26 Apr 2013.

Gutierrez, Nancy. Spokeswoman, Washington Department of Children, Youth & Families. Email to FactCheck.org 1 May 2023.

Faulk, Mike. Spokesman, Gov. Jay Inslee. Email to FactCheck.org. 1 May 2023.

Cleveland Clinic. Gender Affirmation (Confirmation) or Sex Reassignment Surgery. Reviewed 3 May 2021.

Liang, Fan. “Gender Affirmation Surgeries.” Johns Hopkins Medicine. Accessed 24 Apr 2023.

Rafferty, Jason, et al. “Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents.” American Academy of Pediatrics. 1 Oct 2018.

Justice, Kim. Executive director, Washington’s Office of Homeless Youth Prevention & Protection Programs. Email to FactCheck.org. 1 May 2023.

Coleman, E., et al. “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8.” International Journal of Transgender Health. 15 Sep 2022.

Smith, Timothy M. “What to know about gender-affirming care for younger patients.” American Medical Association. 21 Dec 2021.

American Psychiatric Association. “Position Statement on Access to Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse Individuals.” Jul 2018.

Endocrine Society. Transgender Health — An Endocrine Society Position Statement. 16 Dec 2020.

Revised Code of Washington. RCW 26.28.015. Age of majority for enumerated specific purposes. Accessed 25 Apr 2023.

Washington State Legislature. Bill Information — SB 5883. Accessed 25 Apr 2023.

Revised Code of Washington. RCW 7.70.065. Informed consent—Persons authorized to provide for patients who do not have capacity—Priority—Unaccompanied homeless minors. Accessed 25 Apr 2023.

Lippold, Laurie. Director of public policy, Partners for Our Children. Telephone interview with FactCheck.org. 20 Apr 2023.

Washington State Department of Children, Youth & Families. Placement Out-of-Home and Conditions for Return Home. Updated 20 Oct 2022.

The post Online Claims Misrepresent Washington Bill Aimed at Runaway Transgender Youth appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Quick Take

Tabulating machines at some polling locations in Maricopa County, Arizona, couldn’t process ballots during part of Election Day, though affected voters could leave their ballots in a secure box or go elsewhere to vote. But some conservatives, including former President Donald Trump, made the unfounded claim that the setback indicated an attempt to “steal” the election.

Full Story

Printers in Maricopa County, Arizona, produced ballots that were too light for scanners to read at some polling locations for part of the day on Election Day, according to the Maricopa County Elections Department.

Election workers identified the problem and began fixing it by mid-afternoon, the elections department said in a post on Twitter. Tabulators at approximately 60 of the county’s more than 200 polling locations were affected.

Throughout the day, election officials advised that voters could leave their ballot in a secure box to be tabulated later, or they could check out of the polling location and cast a ballot at a different location.

Arizona’s elections have drawn national attention in this midterm cycle in part because a slate of election deniers were on the ballot for statewide office — including the Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, who started casting doubt on this year’s election as ballots were being counted in her close race. Arizona also had one of the tight races that could determine control of the Senate, between Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat, and Republican Blake Masters.

So it wasn’t surprising that conservative commentators with large followings on social media used the ballot situation to stoke anxiety about the integrity of the election.

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was among the first to do so, according to a graph compiled by researchers at the University of Washington that charted the rise of claims about the Maricopa situation.

One of Kirk’s tweets claimed: “2 hour wait minimum at most polling places in Maricopa. Democrats running elections here knew this would happen. Traffic jam by design. DONT LET THEM DO 2020 AGAIN.”

The county responded, sharing a screenshot of Kirk’s tweet with a post that said, “No part of the tweet below is accurate. The vast majority of Vote Centers are seeing wait times under 30 minutes, and whether by tabulator or secure ballot box, all voters are being served.” The county included a link to its election website, where voters could find information on polling places and wait times.

It’s also worth noting that elections in Maricopa County, contrary to Kirk’s claim, are run by a Republican-controlled board of supervisors and recorder’s office. Four of the five members of the board of supervisors, including the board chairman, are Republicans, as is the Maricopa County recorder.

So, there weren’t long lines at most polling locations, and the officials in charge of the election were almost exclusively Republican.

Still, others — including Donald Trump Jr. and commentator Candace Owens — amplified similar suggestions over the course of the afternoon, according to the University of Washington graph.

Former President Donald Trump, who has frequently spread election misinformation, made suggestive claims on his own social media platform. He claimed “they” — without identifying anyone — were trying to “steal” the election.

But from the time that the county posted a video of elections officials reporting the problem in the morning, it appeared to be an issue affecting a minority of locations and the county offered remedies for any voter who was affected.

Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County Recorder, reassured voters in a statement, saying: “Every legal vote will be tabulated. I promise.”

So, the combination of closely watched races with a malfunction in the election machinery was a recipe for widespread conspiratorial claims. Other largely innocuous glitches in election machines have led to similar claims elsewhere, including Detroit, where election officials explained that they had resolved a “harmless data error” that had caused confusion at some polling locations. As we have written, Trump had made misleading claims about that city, too.

Update, Nov. 29: Maricopa County issued a report on Nov. 27 that offered more details on the issue with its printers, although the county’s root-cause analysis is still underway. The report found that 43 of the county’s 223 vote centers had been confirmed to have had a printer-related issue on Election Day – that’s 19%. But, the report explained, other voting options meant that “every voter was afforded the ability to legally and securely cast their ballot.” Voters who encountered problems had the option to deposit their ballots in a secure box to be tabulated later. The report said 16,724 ballots, or 1% of the total ballots issued by the county, were put in secure boxes.

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

Maricopa County (@maricopacounty). “.@maricopavote has identified the solution for the tabulation issues at about 60 Vote Centers. County technicians have changed the printer settings, which seems to have resolved this issue. It appears some of the printers were not producing dark enough timing marks on ballots.” 1/3. Twitter. 8 Nov 2022.

Maricopa County Elections Department (@MaricopaVote). “Maricopa County has identified the solution for the tabulation issues at about 60 Vote Centers. This solution has worked at 17 locations, and technicians deployed throughout the county are working to resolve this issue at the remaining locations.” Twitter. 8 Nov 2022.

Maricopa County Elections Department. Where to vote — voting locations & drop boxes. Accessed 8 Nov 2022.

Maricopa County Elections Department (@MaricopaVote). “Advice for Voters: If a tabulator is not working at a site, you can still vote! You have the option to cast your ballot and place it into the secure ballot box. The poll workers on site at the voting location are best equipped to help you ensure your ballot cast.” Twitter. 8 Nov 2022.

Starbird, Kate (@katestarbird). “Interactive graph tracking discourse re: voting issues in Maricopa County, incl. legitimate concerns, motivated criticism, directives for how to make sure votes are counted, and some false claims (of intentionality). We’ll keep watching as this evolves.” Twitter. 8 Nov 2022.

Gore, D’Angelo, et al. “Trump Repeats Baseless, False Claims About the Election.” FactCheck.org. Updated 1 Dec 2020.

Gore, D’Angelo, et al. “Debunking Trump’s Latest Arizona Election Claims.” FactCheck.org. 20 Jul 2021.

Sanderson, Zeve, et al. “Twitter flagged Donald Trump’s tweets with election misinformation: They continued to spread both on and off the platform.” Misinformation Review. 24 Aug 2021.

Farley, Robert. “Trump’s Bogus Voter Fraud Claims.” FactCheck.org. 19 Oct 2016.

Kiely, Eugene and Rem Rieder. “Trump’s Claims on IG, Wisconsin Election.” FactCheck.org. 8 Apr 2020.

Kiely, Eugene and Rem Rieder. “Trump’s Repeated False Attacks on Mail-In Ballots.” FactCheck.org. 25 Sep 2020.

Richer, Stephen (@stephen_richer). “STATEMENT.” Twitter. 8 Nov 2022.

Kiely, Eugene. “‘Harmless Data Error’ to Blame for Glitch at Some Detroit Polling Places, Contrary to Trump’s Post.” FactCheck.org. 8 Nov 2022.

The post Ballot Printer Delayed Maricopa Voting, Contrary to Unfounded Claims appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Quick Take

A man armed with a hammer broke into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and fractured the skull of her husband, Paul. Some conservative figures — including Donald Trump Jr. — have shared social media posts claiming with no evidence and contrary to police reports that the man was a prostitute known to Paul Pelosi. He wasn’t.

Full Story

Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked by an intruder with a hammer in the couple’s San Francisco home in the early morning hours of Oct. 28.

Following the attack, Pelosi needed surgery “to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands,” according to a statement from the speaker’s office.

Federal agents have charged David DePape, 42, whom local police had identified as the intruder, with assault of an immediate family member of a U.S. official with the intent to retaliate against the official on account of the performance of official duties, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, and attempted kidnapping of a U.S. official on account of the performance of official duties, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, according to the Department of Justice.

But false claims and innuendos about the attack have flooded social media, adding to a deepening well of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

Elon Musk, for example, tweeted and then deleted a link to a story on a dubious website that baselessly suggested DePape was a prostitute. The claim then trended on Twitter, according to Ben Collins, who covers disinformation and extremism for NBC.

Donald Trump Jr. also promoted the completely unfounded claim. He posted — and later deleted — a sexually explicit cartoon image on Instagram and included a message that said: “Dear fact checkers this has nothing at all to do with anything going on in the news and simply posting a cartoon of what appears to be an altered South Park scene.”

But his 6.2 million followers showed their understanding of the post in the comments, saying things such as, “I dunno man, it doesn’t appear altered.. looks like a still from the Pelosis security cam to me.”

Conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza posted a more suggestive claim on Twitter, asking: “How did Pelosi know his attacker’s name? He told the police the assailant’s name was ‘David.’ He also said David was his ‘friend.’ This is on the police recording and you can listen to it yourself. So how do you explain these two telling facts?”

Any suggestion that Pelosi hired DePape as a prostitute or that Pelosi knew him in any capacity is false.

Robert Rueca, spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department, told us in an email that officers found no “evidence that shows that the victim and the suspect knew each other.”

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins had said the same thing in a local TV news interview on Oct 30.

And DePape himself told FBI officers in a recorded interview that he had broken into the home with the intention of holding Nancy Pelosi hostage and breaking her kneecaps if she “lied” to him. He wasn’t there for Paul Pelosi.

What We Know About the Break-In

Sometime before 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 28, DePape used a hammer to break the glass on the back door of the Pelosis’ home, DePape told the FBI.

He entered the house and went up to the second floor where Paul Pelosi was in bed alone. Nancy Pelosi was not in San Francisco at the time.

DePape “told Pelosi to wake up,” according to the charging documents from the FBI. DePape then “told Pelosi that he was looking for Nancy.”

At about 2:23 a.m., Paul Pelosi called 911.

The circumstances around the call are still unclear, but according to the charging documents and statements from police at press conferences, Pelosi was able to go into the bathroom where he dialed 911. DePape became aware of the call at some point and, without being able to relay specifics of the home invasion, Pelosi conveyed to the dispatcher that there was a problem.

San Francisco Police Chief William Scott repeatedly praised the 911 dispatcher who took the call, explaining at an Oct. 28 press conference that the dispatcher’s experience and intuition told her that, although the report qualified for a wellbeing check, “something more was going on.”

The dispatcher escalated the call to officers, Scott said, adding, “she went that extra step.”

This might be where claims like D’Souza’s originated.

Recorded audio of radio communications between the dispatcher and officers circulated on conservative media. In the audio, which identified Pelosi as “RP,” or “reporting person,” an officer can be heard saying, “RP stated that there’s a male in the home and that he’s going to wait for his wife. RP stated that he doesn’t know who the male is, but that he advised that his name is David and that he is a friend. RP sounded somewhat confused.”

Scott explained in the press conference that dispatchers “can’t report anything other than what’s being told” to them over the phone.

“An experienced dispatcher with good instincts, they know how to read between the lines, but they have to report what’s being told,” he said.

So, any recording of officers getting initial information from dispatch would reflect only what had been relayed over the phone, which, in this case, came from Pelosi as he was trying to surreptitiously report the break-in while DePape was present.

When responding officers arrived at the home minutes later, they witnessed Pelosi and DePape in a struggle over the hammer, ending with DePape hitting Pelosi in the head.

Also, contrary to claims that DePape was in his underwear when officers arrived — like this one from conservative commentator Terrence K. Williams — according to the charging documents, DePape was clothed and, specifically, wearing shorts.

Update, January 27: The San Francisco Superior Court on Jan. 27 released U.S. Capitol Police surveillance video showing DePape breaking into the Pelosi home, and San Francisco Police body-cam footage showing DePape, in short pants,lunging at Paul Pelosi with a hammer when officers arrived.

What We Know About DePape

DePape, raised in British Columbia, Canada, moved to the U.S. about 20 years ago to pursue a romantic relationship, according to news organizations that interviewed several members of his family, from whom DePape was estranged.

At times homeless, DePape, prior to the attack on Pelosi, was living in the garage of a house in Richmond, California, according to the criminal complaint filed against him. Richmond is less than 20 miles from San Francisco.

DePape’s ex-girlfriend, Oxane “Gypsy” Taub, a public nudity activist with whom DePape raised three children, recently told the San Francisco Chronicle that DePape has struggled for years with mental illness and drug abuse. Taub did the interview from a California women’s prison where she is serving a sentence for stalking and attempting to abduct a minor in 2018.

News outlets have reported that DePape, in recent months, wrote dozens of troubling posts on his Facebook page and also allegedly posted numerous writings on a blog and website believed to have been registered in his name. According to news outlets that reviewed the sites, which have since been removed, the posts often repeated baseless conspiracy theories and made disparaging comments about religious and minority groups.

“A WordPress blog that DePape maintained titled God Is Loving railed against censorship by an elite cabal of tech companies, government officials and media outlets,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, for example. “As recently as Aug. 25, DePape posted entries with such headlines as ‘Communist Voodoo Science’ and ‘The Woke are racists with a guilty conscience.'”

“On a separate website, DePape’s posts became more erratic,” the Chronicle said. “He espoused vaccine conspiracy theories and claims about election fraud, writing that any journalist who disputed such claims ‘should be dragged out into the street and shot.’ Days before the alleged hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, DePape published a post saying the war in Ukraine was a ploy to benefit Jewish people.”

The Associated Press reported: “There appeared to be no direct posts about [Nancy] Pelosi, but there were entries defending former President Donald Trump and Ye, the rapper formally known as Kayne West who recently made antisemitic comments.”

 DePape’s Plan

When DePape entered the Pelosis’ house in the early morning on Oct. 28, he “was prepared to detain and injure Speaker Pelosi,” according to the federal charging documents.

He had arrived with zip ties, tape, rope and at least one hammer.

According to the federal criminal complaint, DePape told officers “that he was going to hold Nancy hostage and talk to her. If Nancy were to tell DePape the ‘truth,’ he would let her go, and if she ‘lied,’ he was going to break ‘her kneecaps.’ DePape was certain that Nancy would not have told the ‘truth.'”

DePape told FBI interviewers that “he viewed Nancy as the ‘leader of the pack’ of lies told by the Democratic Party,” according to the complaint. He “also later explained that by breaking Nancy’s kneecaps, she would then have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other Members of Congress there were consequences to actions.”

DePape used rhetoric common in right-wing media during the interview described in charging documents. He told officers that he didn’t leave the house after Pelosi’s call to 911, “because, much like the American founding fathers with the British, he was fighting against tyranny without the option of surrender.”

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

San Francisco Police Department. Press release. “San Francisco Police Arrest Suspect in Violent Assault at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Residence 22-153.” 29 Oct 2022.

Hammill, Drew. Spokesman, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Press release. “Pelosi Spokesperson Statement on Paul Pelosi’s Successful Surgery Following Violent Assault.” 28 Oct 2022.

San Francisco Police Department. “San Francisco Police News Conference on Attack Against Paul Pelosi.” C-SPAN. 28 Oct 2022.

Department of Justice. Press release. “Man Charged with Assault and Attempted Kidnapping Following Breaking and Entering of Pelosi Residence.” 31 Oct 2022.

Stocking, Galen, et al. “The Role of Alternative Social Media in the News and Information Environment.” Pew Research Center. 6 Oct 2022.

Rueca, Robert. Spokesman, San Francisco Police Department. Email to FactCheck.org. 31 Oct 2022.

KPIX CBS SF Bay Area. “S.F. DA Jenkins swats back misinformation about Pelosi attack.” YouTube. 30 Oct 2022.

U.S. v. David Wayne DePape. Complaint. U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Tolan, Casey, et al. “Alleged Paul Pelosi attacker posted multiple conspiracy theories.” Cnn.com. 28 Oct 2022.

Biesecker, Michael and Bernard Condon. “Suspect in assault at Pelosi home had posted about QAnon.” Associated Press. 29 Oct 2022.

Lin, Summer, et al. “Accused Pelosi attacker David DePape spread QAnon, other far-right, bigoted conspiracies.” Los Angeles Times. 28 Oct 2022.

Swan, Rachel, et al. “Paul Pelosi attack: From nudist activism to online hate, suspect David DePape’s strange descent.” San Francisco Chronicle. 28 Oct 2022, updated 31 Oct 2022.

The post Conservative Figures Spread Baseless Claims About Attack on Paul Pelosi appeared first on FactCheck.org.

SciCheck Digest

As the virus that causes COVID-19 has evolved, the vaccines have become less effective in preventing symptomatic infection while remaining highly effective in preventing severe disease and death. This shift has been misrepresented by anti-vaccine influencers who falsely claim that it means the vaccines don’t work and have been ineffective all along.

How effective are the vaccines?

Full Story

Viruses mutate, or change, as they replicate. That’s largely why the currently available vaccine formulas aren’t working as well at preventing infection with the virus that causes COVID-19.

Those vaccines — made by Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson — were highly effective in preventing both symptomatic infection and serious illness against early strains of the virus. But they are less effective against infection from the currently circulating subvariants of the omicron variant.

Public health officials have acknowledged this shift and changed their advice accordingly, in an effort to deal with a disease that became the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021 and has killed more than a million people across the country.

But anti-vaccine campaigners and those who have cast doubt on the severity of COVID-19 have twisted those remarks to suggest that the health care establishment had given faulty advice about the value of the vaccines from the beginning.

For example, conservative influencer David Harris Jr. — who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram — posted a pair of video clips featuring Brett Sutton, the chief health officer for the Australian state of Victoria. One clip is from April, showing Sutton encouraging people to get a booster shot, saying that it can help keep people from “getting infected in the first place.” The other clip shows part of a press conference from August, as Victoria was experiencing a surge in cases, where Sutton said: “Despite two, three, four doses of the vaccine, it’s not so good at preventing infection in the first place.”

Harris didn’t include the dates of the clips — he labeled them only “Then” and “Now.” In the caption, he referred to his earlier claim that the COVID-19 vaccine “doesn’t work,” writing: “I wonder which of my other conspiracy theories will be proven true next???”

Similar claims have been ubiquitous on social media and beyond. They’ve been posted on platforms such as the right-wing website Gateway Pundit, which claimed in a headline that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “finally admits their vaccines do not prevent anyone from getting or spreading the virus.”

And they’ve shown up on a San Diego television station that has a history of promoting dubious claims about COVID-19. The station featured a guest who claimed the CDC had said of the vaccines, “turns out they don’t really work anyway,” and that CDC officials “knew they weren’t really going to do what we said they would.”

That guest was Dr. Kelly Victory, who holds an active medical license in both Colorado and Ohio, but according to her LinkedIn profile has spent the last 16 years as a consultant for disaster preparedness training. She also campaigned against the Affordable Care Act in 2012.

Victory has advocated against most public health advice over the course of the pandemic, claiming that “masks don’t work” and that asymptomatic spread “simply doesn’t occur with respiratory viruses.” In one talk radio appearance in 2021, Victory said that she had been “censored” for making those claims. But her claims just aren’t true.

Other related claims have been pervasive online, such as the meme shared by Donald Trump Jr. suggesting that recently updated guidance from the CDC matches what those who have downplayed the severity of the pandemic and questioned the value of the vaccines had been saying all along.

But the new guidance doesn’t indicate that health care experts were wrong about the vaccines or any other mitigation measures they had recommended.

Highly Effective Against Initial Outbreak

“The truth is, the effectiveness of vaccines shifted with each of the new variants,” Dr. Peter Hotez, Co-Director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told us in a phone interview.

When the vaccines were approved for emergency use in 2020, they were approved based on their demonstrated ability to prevent symptomatic illness, he said. And large clinical trials showed that the efficacy was high.

For example, the updated trial results reported to the Food and Drug Administration for full approval showed the Moderna vaccine was 93.2% effective in preventing symptomatic disease at least two weeks after the second dose in people 18 years of age and older.

The vaccines were also highly effective when they were first introduced to the public in the real world.

“The initial SARS-CoV-2 that we had, that initial wild type, the vaccine against it did work against infection,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said in a recent interview on Fox News. “It worked actually quite well against infection. It also worked against severe disease and death.”

A promising early study from Israel showed that the vaccines had been more than 90% effective in preventing both symptomatic illness and asymptomatic infection in the early days after the rollout.

“That was really exciting because it meant that, maybe, we could vaccinate our way out of this pandemic,” Hotez said.

After the first variant, alpha, emerged, the vaccines remained highly effective against infection, severe disease and death, Walensky said.

In May 2021, the CDC said that those who were fully vaccinated could stop wearing masks.

Then the virus mutated, and the delta variant became dominant in the summer of 2021.

Recommendations Evolved With Variants

Although the vaccines remained effective against severe illness and death from COVID-19, they were somewhat less effective at preventing infection from delta.

That’s when the CDC reversed its recommendation and said that those who were vaccinated should wear a mask indoors.

That fall, the Biden administration made booster shots available.

The virus keeps changing, and subvariants of omicron are now dominant. It’s become increasingly clear that the vaccines are less effective in preventing infection than they had been with earlier variants.

This is due to two things, Hotez said — changes to the virus and the natural decline in the potency of vaccination over time, which happens with most vaccines.

The CDC noted the waning effect of immunity from the vaccines in an August report explaining the most recent changes to its guidance on COVID-19 prevention, which included a recommendation for booster doses.

“Overall booster dose coverage in the United States remains low, which is concerning given the meaningful reductions in risk for severe illness and death that booster doses provide and the importance of booster doses to counter waning of vaccine-induced immunity,” according to the paper, which was published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on Aug. 11.

It also noted that the vaccines are “highly protective” against severe disease and death, and that they offer “minimal protection against infection and transmission.” That last part is what Victory and others highlighted, while neglecting to mention how effective the vaccines are against serious illness.

Victory claimed that the CDC had “acknowledged” that the vaccines were “essentially ineffective.”

But that’s not accurate.

As we said, the CDC explained that being up to date with vaccination offers minimal protection from infection, but, importantly, significant protection against severe disease. Being up to date with vaccination means that you’ve gotten the primary series of doses and any boosters that are available for your age group, the CDC has explained.

“Being up to date with vaccination provides a transient period of increased protection against infection and transmission after the most recent dose, although protection can wane over time,” the CDC said. The rates of hospitalization and death are “substantially higher” among unvaccinated adults, especially those 65 and older, compared with those who are up to date with vaccination, the CDC also said.

In fact, data from the COVID-19 Associated Hospitalization Surveillance Network for March 20 through May 31, 2022, showed: “Hospitalization rates among unvaccinated adults were 3.4 times as high as those among vaccinated adults,” according to an Aug. 26 CDC report.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s COVID-19/Vaccination Project is made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation. The goal of the project is to increase exposure to accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines, while decreasing the impact of misinformation.

Sources

Cox, Elizabeth. “What is a coronavirus?” Yale School of Medicine. Updated 3 Sep 2020.

National Institutes of Health. Press release. “COVID-19 was third leading cause of death in the United States in both 2020 and 2021.” 5 Jul 2022.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. COVID Data Tracker. Accessed 26 Aug 2022.

McDonald, Jessica. “The Evolving Science of Face Masks and COVID-19.” FactCheck.org. Updated 20 Jan 2022.

McDonald, Jessica. “Unpacking WHO’s Asymptomatic COVID-19 Transmission Comments.” FactCheck.org. 12 Jun 2020.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Press release. “CDC streamlines COVID-19 guidance to help the public better protect themselves and understand their risk.” 11 Aug 2022.

Hotez, Peter. Co-Director, Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital. Dean, National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. Telephone interview with FactCheck.org. 23 Aug 2022.

Walensky, Rochelle. Interview with Neil Cavuto. Your World. Fox News. 23 Aug 2022.

Dagan, Noa, et al. “BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Mass Vaccination Setting.” New England Journal of Medicine. 15 Apr 2021.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Interim Public Health Recommendations for Fully Vaccinated People. Updated 13 May 2021.

McDonald, Jessica. “Vaccines Remain Largely Effective Against Delta Variant, Counter to Claims From Fox News Guest.” FactCheck.org. Updated 10 Feb 2022.

Kiely, Eugene. “Misinformation About Face Masks.” FactCheck.org. 13 Aug 2021.

Cohen, Jon. “How long do vaccines last? The surprising answers may help protect people longer.” Science. 18 Apr 2019.

Massetti, Greta, et al. “Summary of Guidance for Minimizing the Impact of COVID-19 on Individual Persons, Communities, and Health Care Systems — United States, August 2022.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 11 Aug 2022.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Stay Up to Date with COVID-19 Vaccines Including Boosters.” Updated 23 Aug 2022.

Havers, Fiona, et al. “Laboratory-Confirmed COVID-19–Associated Hospitalizations Among Adults During SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.2 Variant Predominance — COVID-19–Associated Hospitalization Surveillance Network, 14 States, June 20, 2021–May 31, 2022.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 26 Aug 2022.

The post Widespread Claims Misrepresent Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Quick Take

Dozens of former President Donald Trump’s supporters gathered outside his Florida home to protest a recent FBI search of the building. The activity triggered a satirical tweet falsely attributed to Trump’s eldest son, purportedly telling supporters to disperse, and saying, “We have many important people coming through the club and need to keep it clean.”

Full Story

Dozens of former President Donald Trump’s supporters gathered outside his home at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after the building was searched by the FBI on Aug. 8.

Agents recovered some materials described as confidential, secret and top secret, according to a list of seized items that was unsealed with the search warrant on Aug. 12.

Although the reason for the search wasn’t publicly disclosed at the time, it was widely assumed that the search was related to the National Archives and Records Administration’s ongoing efforts to retrieve documents from the former president. But Trump’s supporters protested the FBI’s actions and held signs and flags with Trump campaign slogans.

Now a fake tweet attributed to Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is circulating online. The tweet was created as satire, but it’s been shared widely without a disclaimer explaining it was satirical.

The phony tweet said: “While my Father loves almost all his supporters, please do not come to Mar-a-Lago to support President Trump. We have many important people coming through the club and need to keep it clean.”

The original version included a fictitious time stamp of “6:99 AM” and an attribution to “Parody by Back Rub” at the bottom — both of which clearly indicate that the tweet isn’t real. It was shared by a satirical Twitter account.

But the image has now been shared without those indicators at the bottom.

Even versions of the claim that did include the satirical clues at the bottom have confused social media users. For example, many of the commenters on comedian Kathy Griffin’s Facebook post that shared the fake tweet — with the “parody” label — didn’t appear to understand it was fabricated. One of Griffin’s 1 million followers wrote, “So he admits that his supporters are NOT important or clean people!!”

But, as we said, the tweet didn’t come from Donald Trump Jr. Screen captures of his Twitter account from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine also show that he never posted the tweet.

Similar claims — using either intentionally misleading fake tweets or phony tweets that were originally made as satire — have been going around for years. We’ve written about at least a dozen of them before.

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

Bickerton, James. “Flag-Waving Trump Supporters Protest Outside Mar-a-Lago After FBI Raid.” Newsweek. 9 Aug 2022.

Kiely, Eugene, Robert Farley and Lori Robertson. “Q&A on the FBI’s Search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Home.” FactCheck.org. Updated 13 Aug 2022.

In Re Sealed Search Warrant. Case no. 22-mj-8332. U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. 11 Aug 2022.

Hale Spencer, Saranac. “Former Presidents Are Not Allowed to Take Home Official Records.” FactCheck.org. Updated 18 Feb 2022.

Nehamas, Nicholas. “Mar-a-Lago becomes a popular spot after FBI raids former President Trump’s home.” Miami Herald. Updated 9 Aug 2022.

Follow Plz? Faith Back Rub (@FaithRubPol). “Trump to Trump supporters: get off our property.” Twitter. 14 Aug 2022.

Internet Archive. Wayback Machine capture: Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) Twitter page. 13 Aug 2022.

The post Kathy Griffin Shares Satirical Trump Tweet, But Not Everyone Is in on the Joke appeared first on FactCheck.org.

SciCheck Digest

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, discussed a recent study that found that on the rare occasion when fully vaccinated people died from COVID-19, they often had multiple risk factors for severe disease. But her reference to vaccinated people was cut in a version of the interview — and conservative figures misleadingly claimed she was talking about all COVID-19 deaths.

How effective are the vaccines?

Full Story

A government study first posted Jan. 6 found that severe illness or death from COVID-19 was rare among those who were fully vaccinated. The study also found that, of those who did die of COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated, 78% had four or more risk factors for severe COVID-19.

The next day, ABC’s “Good Morning America” included a segment at the top of its show highlighting the study’s findings. In that segment, correspondent Matt Gutman reported, “We’ve long known how effective vaccines are, but this new study lends hard numbers to that understanding, basically showing that, if you are vaccinated, you are more likely to be hit by lightning than to die of COVID.”

Indeed, according to the National Weather Service, the odds of a person in the U.S. being struck by lighting in a lifetime are about one in 15,000. And, among the 1.2 million people included in the study, a fully vaccinated person’s odds of dying from COVID-19 were about 1 in 30,000. Of course, as the study found, those odds aren’t universal. Those who are older or have underlying conditions, or what are sometimes called comorbidities, are more at risk than those who don’t.

The study came up again later in the show when the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, appeared as a guest to discuss the pandemic. This was host Cecilia Vega’s final question to her: “I want to ask you about those encouraging headlines that we were talking about this morning, this new study showing just how well vaccines are working to prevent severe illness — given that, is it time to start rethinking how we’re living with this virus, that it’s potentially here to stay?”

Walensky’s full answer was (emphasis ours):

Walensky, Jan. 7: “You know, really important study. If I may just summarize it — a study of 1.2 million people who were vaccinated between December and October and demonstrated that severe disease occurred in about 0.015% of the people who received their primary series and death in 0.003% of those people. The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities. So, really, these were people who were unwell to begin with. And, yes, really encouraging news in the context of omicron — this means not only just to get your primary series, but to get your booster series. And, yes, we’re really encouraged by these results.“

But “Good Morning America” aired a version of Walensky’s answer that had been “edited for time,” according to a disclosure at the end of a clip showing the CDC director’s full answer posted on the show’s website.

The beginning of her answer was cut and the network aired only the section in bold.

That was on Friday, Jan. 7. By the following Monday, major right-wing figures had highlighted the shortened clip, suggesting that Walensky was talking about all COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began in 2020 and that the CDC had hidden this information to further a partisan agenda. Many used the clip to perpetuate a false claim that’s been around for almost as long as the pandemic itself — that public health agencies have inflated the COVID-19 death toll to maintain power and usher in political allies. We’ve written about at least six such claims since April 2020.

For example, a Twitter account managed by the Republican National Committee featured the clip, and Donald Trump Jr. tweeted about it three times that Monday, Jan. 10, saying in one post, “Dems/Media capitalized to move their narrative. Now trying to unwind to save Joe/Dems who has failed at doing anything.” Neither one has updated their feed to correct the information.

On Monday evening, Fox News host Tucker Carlson played the clip of Walensky’s truncated answer, saying, “with Trump safely out of office, the CDC is publicly acknowledging — yeah, they lied.”

But that’s not true.

First of all, as we said, Walensky was talking about a study of those who were fully vaccinated. She wasn’t revealing any new information about deaths from COVID-19 altogether.

Second, the CDC has long told the public that those with certain preexisting health conditions are at the highest risk for severe outcomes from the disease. That’s nothing new. 

A week after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020, the CDC published a report that early data from China suggested a majority of COVID-19 deaths occurred among those over 60 and among those who had serious underlying conditions. It published similar findings the following month, too.

And the CDC continues to inform the public on its website about the risks for severe illness from COVID-19 for those with underlying conditions, including the fact that more than 81% of deaths have occurred in those over 65.

So, even if Walensky had been talking about COVID-19 deaths, generally, it wouldn’t have been new information that a large portion of those deaths were among those who were older or had other conditions.

Bad COVID-19 outcomes, however, don’t occur only in older people or those with other medical conditions. Healthy people of any age can get seriously ill and die, but vaccination reduces those risks. Data from the CDC, for example, shows that in November 2021, COVID-19-associated hospitalizations were 10 times higher in unvaccinated teens ages 12 through 17, 17 times higher in unvaccinated adults ages 18 through 49, and 16 times higher in those aged 50 through 64 years of age, compared with the fully vaccinated. Early evidence also suggests vaccination cuts the chances that a person infected with the coronavirus will develop so-called long COVID.

What the Study Found

Walensky was talking about a study conducted by scientists from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the CDC that included 1.2 million adults who were fully vaccinated (although not necessarily boosted) and got their shots between December 2020 and October 2021.

To put the study’s scale in context, more than 209 million people have been fully vaccinated in the U.S., so far.

The data for those covered in the study came from 465 hospitals and health care systems across the country.

Of the 1.2 million vaccinated people, 2,246 contracted COVID-19. Of those, 189 had a severe outcome. And, of those, 36 died.

Everyone who had a severe outcome had at least one of eight risk factors, which were: being 65 or older, having a suppressed immune system, having diabetes, or having chronic kidney, cardiac, pulmonary, neurologic or liver disease.

And, as the severity of the disease increased, so did the likelihood that the patient had at least four of those risk factors.

For the most severe outcome — death — 28 patients, or 78%, had at least four.

That’s the figure that Walensky referenced.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s COVID-19/Vaccination Project is made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation. The goal of the project is to increase exposure to accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines, while decreasing the impact of misinformation.

Sources

Yek, Christina, et al. “Risk Factors for Severe COVID-19 Outcomes Among Persons Aged ≥18 Years Who Completed a Primary COVID-19 Vaccination Series — 465 Health Care Facilities, United States, December 2020–October 2021.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 7 Jan 2022.

Good Morning America. S12E7. ABC News. 7 Jan 2022.

National Weather Service. How Dangerous is Lightning? Accessed 14 Jan 2022.

Good Morning America. “CDC director responds to criticisms on COVID-19 guidance.” ABC News. 10 Jan 2022.

RNC Research (@RNCresearch). “Biden’s CDC Director: “The overwhelming number of death, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities.” Twitter. 10 Jan 2022.

Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr). “They knew this in 2020. Mds I know told me things like “we had a guy hit by a bus marked as a COVID death because he also had COVID, but I can’t say anything” Dems/Media capitalized to move their narrative. Now trying to unwind to save Joe/Dems who has failed at doing anything.” Twitter. 10 Jan 2022.

Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr). “75% of ‘Covid Deaths’ were in people with at least 4 comorbidities according to the CDC. That’s it. That’s the tweet.” Twitter. 10 Jan 2022.

Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr). “CDC Dir. says over 75% of covid deaths were people with ‘at least 4 comorbidities’ & were ‘unwell to begin with’ How many had 2/3 things that would likely kill them or were in late stage terminal cancer, or were hit by a bus? Whats the # of truly healthy?” Twitter. 10 Jan 2022.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Severe Outcomes Among Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) — United States, February 12–March 16, 2020.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 18 Mar 2020.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Preliminary Estimates of the Prevalence of Selected Underlying Health Conditions Among Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 — United States, February 12–March 28, 2020.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 3 Apr 2020.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Children — United States, February 12–April 2, 2020.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 10 Apr 2020.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People with Certain Medical Conditions. CDC.gov. Updated 14 Dec 2021.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Underlying Medical Conditions Associated with Higher Risk for Severe COVID-19: Information for Healthcare Providers. CDC.gov. Updated 14 Oct 2021.

The post Partisans Seize on Edited Clip of CDC Director’s Comments on COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness appeared first on FactCheck.org.

The Taliban seized an arsenal of U.S.-made military equipment when it overran the Afghan army, but not nearly as much as numerous Republicans have claimed.

Several Republican members of Congress and former President Donald Trump have cited a grossly exaggerated figure of $85 billion worth of equipment they say has now fallen into the hands of the Taliban. But that figure — actually $82.9 billion — is the total amount spent on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the war began in 2001.

Only a portion of that is equipment. And military experts say much of the equipment has been used up or is otherwise inoperable; the military has moved or destroyed some of it as well.

For those reasons, and others, Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told us, “The figure is statistically rubbish.”

Nonetheless, numerous Republicans have cited it, including Trump, who has done so repeatedly.

“They’ve left $83 billion worth of equipment behind, including brand new Apache helicopters, thousands of Humvee vehicles with armor guard, equipment that nobody has ever even seen before, it was so sophisticated,” Trump said at a rally in Alabama on Aug. 22.

In a statement released on Aug. 30, Trump said, “In addition to the obvious, ALL EQUIPMENT should be demanded to be immediately returned to the United States, and that includes every penny of the $85 billion dollars in cost. If it is not handed back, we should either go in with unequivocal Military force and get it, or at least bomb the hell out of it.”

At House Republican press conferences on Aug. 30 and Aug. 31, Rep. Jim Banks also repeatedly cited the figure.

“Never would I have believed then or up until this point where we are today that not just a little bit, not just some, but all of the $85 billion dollar’s worth of American equipment that we turned over to the Afghan police and the Afghan Army would fall in the hands of our enemy,” Bank said on Aug. 30. “That’s where we are at this point because of the negligence, the hasty and incompetent withdrawal led by this commander in chief, all of the $85 billion dollar’s worth of equipment has been left behind and fallen into the hands of the Taliban, without any plan, there was never a plan by this administration or the Pentagon to destroy or evacuate any of that equipment. … Leaving $85 billion of equipment. Vehicles, weapons and ammunition, night vision goggles, medical supplies, biometric devices and data of our allies. All of it falling into the hands of the Taliban.”

Other Republicans, including Reps. Lauren Boebert, Pat Fallon, Jason Smith and Lee Zeldin, have cited the inflated figure as well.

Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. even tweeted a message that broke out the cost per American.

“For perspective… $85,000,000,000 worth of military being left to Taliban Terrorists means that each and every man, woman, and child in American contributed about $265 to their terrorist cause assuming +/-320 mil citizens,” Trump Jr. stated.

Despite its ubiquitousness as a talking point, it isn’t accurate.

It is certainly true that a lot of military equipment provided to Afghan troops was seized by the Taliban. After American troops pulled out, the Taliban paraded in U.S.-made Humvees and armored SUVs, and even flew a recently seized Black Hawk pulling a Taliban flag. And numerous press photos circulated of Taliban fighters sporting U.S.-made rifles and machine guns.

“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan acknowledged on Aug. 17, a couple days after the fall of the capital, Kabul.

According to a Government Accountability Office report, between 2003 and 2016, the U.S. supplied Afghan defense and security forces with an arsenal that included 208 aircraft; more than 42,000 pickup trucks; more than 22,000 Humvees; nearly 9,000 MTV cargo and transport trucks; nearly 1,000 mine resistant ambush protected vehicles; nearly 200 armored personnel carriers; and hundreds of thousands of rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers, rocket propelled weapons and night vision goggles. More has been provided since then.

However, the $83 billion figure cited by Republicans  — more precisely $82.9 billion — is far too high. It comes from a July 30 report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and represents the total appropriated funding for the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund going back to the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. As of June 30, about $75 billion was actually disbursed.

That fund includes money spent to provide military equipment to the Afghans. But equipment costs are only a piece of the fund.

The largest piece of that funding, about half, is for what is called “sustainment.” The lion’s share of that is for salaries for members of the Afghan army and national police. The sustainment category also includes money for ammunition, but only about 5% of the sustainment funds was for ammunition in 2020 and 2021.

About a quarter of the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since 2001 — more than $18 billion — has been specifically for equipment and transportation, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report.

The rest has been for training and infrastructure.

Military experts say there is reason to believe the cost of military equipment seized by the Taliban is smaller than what was purchased for the Afghans because some of the equipment has become inoperable, and some has either been moved out of the country or “decommisioned” or destroyed.

How Much Is Inoperable?

For starters, most of the equipment provided to the Afghans was used in fighting over the last 20 years, and “we junked most of it,” Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told us in a phone interview. “War tends to use stuff up in a hurry.”

Nor should anyone assume the Taliban will have the expertise or wherewithal to operate all of the equipment.

“U.S. military equipment tends to require extensive support from technical specialists,” Loren Thompson, a defense industry consultant and military analyst at the Lexington Institute, told us via email. “In the absence of such specialists, much of it will run down due to wear and a lack of spare parts.”

“This applies in particular to aircraft, many of which will likely be grounded in short order,” Thompson said. “Vehicles will also tend to wear out fairly quickly because of inadequate maintenance. MRAPs [mine resistant ambush protected vehicles] will be especially hard to keep operating because they consume copious amounts of fuel which will likely be in scarce supply.”

“In thinking about the price-tag of equipment left behind, it is worth remembering that much of it has been in country for some time,” Thompson said. “Its value will likely have depreciated from the original purchase price. Some of the equipment brought home from Iraq could not be restored to a useful state and ended up being retired.”

Over the years, the U.S. has also simply lost track of a lot of the military equipment it supplied to Afghanistan forces. In 2016, the Pentagon acknowledged to the New York Times that it could account for only about half of the weapons that a nonprofit called Action on Armed Violence calculated had been supplied to partner forces in Afghanistan and Iraq over the years. The report said many of the weapons ended up on the black market.

How Much Was Moved or Destroyed?

Although Banks said there was “never a plan by this administration or the Pentagon to destroy or evacuate any of that equipment,” there is evidence that some of both occurred (though it is certainly fair to debate whether there was enough planning for either).

During a news briefing on Aug. 30, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., commander of U.S. Central Command, said of the equipment at the airport in Kabul, “We brought some of it out, and we demilitarized some of it.” By demilitarized, he means disabled — and likely means key components were blown up. There were reports of explosions at the airport, which Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor, the joint staff deputy director for regional operations, described as “controlled detonations.”

McKenzie said American forces had “demilitarized” up to 70 MRAPs “that will never be used again by anyone” and 27 Humvees, “that will never be driven again.”

In addition, he said, there were 73 aircraft on the ramp at the Kabul airport.

“Those aircraft will never fly again when we left,” McKenzie said. “They’ll never be able to be operated by anyone. Most of them were non-mission capable, to begin with, but certainly they’ll never be able to be flown again.”

Just before leaving, the military also destroyed a weapon system used to intercept rockets, artillery and mortars, known as C-RAM, McKenzie said. The New York Times reported that C-RAMs and several armored vehicles left behind at the U.S. Embassy were also destroyed or rendered inoperable.

Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said the military has been relocating and destroying equipment in Afghanistan for several years now.

“An awful lot of equipment, weapons, resources were drawn down even in the last years and months of the previous administration, as President Trump decided to move down to a — a force of 2,500,” Kirby said at a press conference on Aug. 23. “So there was a lot of retrograde of things up to that point.”

That continued under Biden, he said.

“After the president’s decision in mid-April to complete this drown down, albeit on an extended timeline …the very big part of the retrograde was the disposition of weapons and equipment and systems and vehicles. Some of them were destroyed, some of them were brought back home, some of them were deployed — redeployed into the region.”

And on Aug. 16, the New York Times reported that at least five military aircraft that were part of the U.S.-supplied Afghan Air Force flew to Tajikistan and landed safely. A sixth aircraft, believed to be a Super Tucano propeller attack plane, was shot down in Uzbekistan after it entered the country’s airspace without permission. (Its two pilots parachuted to safety.)

A Reuters report said fleeing Afghan soldiers flew 22 military planes and 24 helicopters into Uzbekistan in mid-August.

How Sophisticated?

Although Trump said the U.S.-made military stockpile seized by the Taliban was “equipment that nobody has ever even seen before, it was so sophisticated,” military experts contradicted that.

Gen. Mark Kelly, who leads Air Combat Command, told Defense News in an interview on Aug. 16 that aircraft seized by the Taliban didn’t amount to anything that would threaten U.S. military in potential future clashes.

“It’s understandable for people to be concerned about any capability falling into the hands of folks where we don’t know exactly how they’re going to use it, who are going to use it against, whether that’s an M16 [rifle] or whether that’s an A-29,” Kelly said. “But suffice to say that the technology that’s in the A-29 is not cutting-edge technology. When you look at the airplane’s range and speed and computer power and lifting capability … it’s not something that, frankly, concerns us.”

Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group, also told Defense News that even if the Taliban sold seized aircraft from the Afghan Air Force, the aircraft do not contain sensitive technologies that would be useful to U.S. adversaries.

“Truth be told, if the Russians or Chinese wanted to get their hands on a Super Tucano or early model Black Hawk it wouldn’t be that hard,” he said. “They were equipped in a pretty low-tech way.”

Very little of the equipment left in Afghanistan could be considered sophisticated, Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told us.

“We’re not giving the most advanced intelligence equipment to anyone,” he said.

Nonetheless, there is still a large cache of U.S.-made weaponry that has found its way into the Taliban’s hands. While most of that would be considered “primitive,” by U.S. military standards, Cordesman told us, “that doesn’t mean it isn’t effective.”

In a press conference on Aug. 23, Kirby said the U.S. does not have an “exact inventory of what equipment that the Afghans had at their disposal that now might be at risk. Obviously we don’t want to see any weapons or systems that, to fall into hands of people that would use them in such a way to harm our interests or those of our partners and allies. I mean, we have a vested interest obviously in not wanting that to happen.”

But while an exact accounting is not possible, the $83 billion figure being used by some Republicans is wildly inflated.

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]]> https://www.factcheck.org/2021/09/social-media-posts-draw-unsupported-conclusion-on-afghan-helicopter-video/ Thu, 02 Sep 2021 20:54:45 +0000 https://www.factcheck.org/?p=207420 Afghan journalists report that a video of a person suspended from a helicopter shows an operation in which the person was trying to change a flag. But critics of President Joe Biden have used the footage to claim the Taliban used U.S. equipment for a "hanging." One person who shared the claim, Sen. Ted Cruz, later deleted his tweet, saying it "may be inaccurate."

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Quick Take

Afghan journalists report that a video of a person suspended from a helicopter shows an operation in which the person was trying to change a flag. But critics of President Joe Biden have used the footage to claim the Taliban used U.S. equipment for a “hanging.” One person who shared the claim, Sen. Ted Cruz, later deleted his tweet, saying it “may be inaccurate.”

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Full Story

In the wake of the U.S. military withdrawal, conservative commentators and politicians shared a video on social media that showed a person dangling from a helicopter in Afghanistan and — although the circumstances shown in the video were unclear — they claimed that it showed a “hanging” conducted by the Taliban.

For example, Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas retweeted a copy of the video posted by someone who describes himself as a comedian and had claimed that it showed the “Taliban hanging someone from a helicopter in Kandahar.”

Liz Wheeler, a conservative commentator and former host on One America News Network, retweeted another copy of the video and added this message: “If this is what it looks like… the Taliban hanging somebody from an American Blackhawk… I could vomit. Joe Biden is responsible.”

Another commentator, Carmine Sabia, tweeted the video with this claim: “This is the Taliban, that the Biden administration called ‘pragmatic’ and ‘businesslike’ Pragmatically and businesslike hanging an American interpreter from an American Blackhawk helicopter and if the GOP has any balls this would be every campaign ad in 2022.”

Donald Trump Jr. changed the banner at the top of his Twitter page to an image of President Joe Biden’s campaign logo with a silhouette of a helicopter with a dangling body.

Sen. Ted Cruz, also of Texas, retweeted the same video as Crenshaw, although Cruz later acknowledged that the tweet “may be inaccurate” and deleted his original message.

But the unsupported claim was shared across social media platforms and received tens of thousands of interactions on Facebook.

As we said, the situation shown in the video is unclear, but a closer look from another vantage point appears to show a person in a harness who is waving at those below rather than someone being hanged.

The Indian fact-checking website Alt News posted a thorough examination of the incident, including another video of the helicopter posted by an Afghan news service, which told Alt News, “We have a team there, they have confirmed that the person was controlled and hanging from the helicopter to fix the flag at the governor’s building in Kandahar.”

Another journalist from Afghanistan, Bilal Sarwary, also said that the person suspended from the helicopter was trying to change a flag. He tweeted: “Afghan pilot flying this is someone I have known over the years. He was trained in the US and [United Arab Emirates], he confirmed to me that he flew the Blackhawk helicopter. Taliban fighter seen here was trying to install Taliban flag from air but it didn’t work in the end.”

It’s also worth noting that the widely shared video appears to have been originally posted on Twitter by an account that described itself as the “official account of Islamic Emirate Afghanistan,” which is the Taliban. The message that accompanied the video said nothing about a hanging or execution. Rather, it said, “Our Air Force! At this time, the Islamic Emirate’s air force helicopters are flying over Kandahar city and patrolling the city.”

That account has since been suspended. We asked Twitter why, and we have not received a response.

We also asked the Department of Defense for comment on the video or credible reports of hangings by the Taliban, but did not hear back. We will update this story if we do.

So, we can’t say for sure what is happening in the video, but an Afghan news service and another journalist both reported that it showed an attempt to fix or install a flag. We could find no credible reports of a hanging and, as we said, from some vantage points it appears the person suspended from the helicopter is in a harness, waving.

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.

Sources

Crenshaw, Dan (@DanCrenshawTX). “In what f***ing world was it a good idea to just hand over a country to these people.” Twitter. 30 Aug 2021.

McDonald, Jessica, D’Angelo Gore and Eugene Kiely. “Video Wrong About Fauci, COVID-19.” FactCheck.org. 3 Feb 2021.

Wheeler, Liz (@Liz_Wheeler). “If this is what it looks like… the Taliban hanging somebody from an American Blackhawk… I could vomit. Joe Biden is responsible.” Twitter. 30 Aug 2021.

Sabia, Carmine (@CarmineSabia). “This is the Taliban, that the Biden administration called ‘pragmatic’ and ‘businesslike’ Pragmatically and businesslike hanging an American interpreter from an American Blackhawk helicopter and if the GOP has any balls this would be every campaign ad in 2022.” Twitter. 30 Aug 2021.

Cruz, Ted (@tedcruz). “It turns out the post I shared w/ a video of Taliban ‘hanging a man’ from a helicopter may be inaccurate. So I deleted the tweet. What remains accurate is: – The Taliban are brutal terrorists. – We left them millions in US military equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters.” Twitter. 31 Aug 2021.

Zubair, Mohammed. “Does the video show Taliban ‘hanging’ a body from a helicopter?” Altnews.in. Updated 1 Sep 2021.

Aśvaka – آسواکا News Agency (@AsvakaNews). “Black Hawk over the #Kandahar governor office. #Kandahar #Afghanistan.” Twitter. 30 Aug 2021.

Sarwary, Bilal (@bsarwary). “Afghan pilot flying this is someone I have known over the years. He was trained in the US and UAE, he confirmed to me that he flew the Blackhawk helicopter. Taliban fighter seen here was trying to install Taliban flag from air but it didn’t work in the end.” Twitter. 31 Aug 2021.

Talib Times (@TalibTimes). “Our Air Force! At this time, the Islamic Emirate’s air force helicopters are flying over Kandahar city and patrolling the city.” Twitter. 30 Aug 2021.

The post Social Media Posts Draw Unsupported Conclusion on Afghan Helicopter Video appeared first on FactCheck.org.

]]> https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/faulty-claim-about-biden-only-ballots-in-georgia/ Thu, 12 Nov 2020 22:35:08 +0000 https://www.factcheck.org/?p=193191 Campaign officials for President Donald Trump and supporters have promoted the faulty claim that Joe Biden received nearly 100,000 votes in Georgia through ballots that only included selections for president, suggesting it's "suspicious." But the claim ignores that some voters do not vote a straight-party ballot.

The post Faulty Claim About ‘Biden-Only’ Ballots in Georgia appeared first on FactCheck.org.

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Quick Take

Campaign officials for President Donald Trump and supporters have promoted the faulty claim that Joe Biden received nearly 100,000 votes in Georgia through ballots that only included selections for president, suggesting it’s “suspicious.” But the claim ignores that some voters do not vote a straight-party ballot.

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Full Story

Social media posts spread by Trump campaign officials suggest that voter fraud may have occurred in Georgia, based on the claim that President-elect Joe Biden secured nearly 100,000 votes through ballots that were “ONLY” cast for Biden — and not for any candidates in other races.

But that claim rests on a flawed assessment of vote tallies.

The claim has nevertheless been passed along by thousands through various social media posts in recent days.

“Nothing suspicious about this at all!” one of President Donald Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr., wrote with a retweet of a post spreading the claim. Both tweets have since been deleted.

“In Georgia, ballots where the voter ONLY voted for President: • Trump: 818 • Biden: 95,801,” the post read. The tweet came from an account using the name “Sarah Hucklebee” that was made to look like an account for former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

The claim was put forward in a Nov. 10 video by Steve Cortes, a Trump campaign adviser, in which he outlined what he deemed a “statistical case” demanding further “investigation.”

“Biden, though, a 95,000 vote differential — there were almost 96,000 people in Georgia, allegedly, who voted Biden-only and then did not vote for Senate,” he said in the video. “That seems far too wide to be believable.”

We don’t know how many voters only voted for Biden, but Cortes’ number doesn’t represent that.

Instead, the figure refers to the fact that Biden won almost 100,000 more votes in Georgia than Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff. But it’s faulty to assume that all of those votes must have been on ballots for Biden only, ignoring that some voters in the state selected Biden for president but didn’t adhere to a strictly party-line vote for the Senate.

As of early Nov. 12, there were 4,992,420 votes counted in the presidential race in Georgia. While the total number of votes fluctuates across other races — since, indeed, some people don’t cast a vote for every race — there were 4,945,792 votes counted in the Senate race between Republican Sen. David Perdue and Ossoff.

That’s a difference of 46,628 total votes — or almost half of what’s being alleged in the viral posts.

The conservative National Review’s Dan McLaughlin said the difference between the total votes cast for the presidential race and the Perdue-Ossoff contest renders “the 95,000 number … mathematically impossible.”

McLaughlin also pointed out that one could look to the election in Maine — where Republican Sen. Susan Collins received 55,468 more votes than Trump as of Nov. 12.

That “means that some voters went for Biden and Collins, as voters have been doing as long as there have been elections,” McLaughlin wrote, later adding: “Split-ticket voting is not fraud, and there is nothing unusual about it.”

Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us in an email that it’s “difficult to assess the accuracy of the factual claims being made” about “Biden-only” ballots.

“How do these folks know how many voters selected Biden or Trump for president but skipped the Senate race?” he said. “Knowing that would require individual-level information from ballots, not aggregation information about ballots cast in each race.”

Burden also said it’s common that voters “choose a candidate at the top of the ballot and then ‘roll off’ as they move down the ballot. There is nothing suspicious about lower participation in lower level races.”

And “even in an era of strong partisanship, some voters split their tickets. That is precisely why aggregate totals can be deceptive when trying to reach conclusions about individual voter behavior.”

Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, made note of many voters straying from party-line votes during a press conference on Nov. 9.

“The other thing we’ve discovered is, from our initial assessment, there was a lot of ticket-splitting going on,” he said.

Biden’s lead in Georgia stood at about 14,000 votes on Nov. 12. Georgia’s secretary of state has announced the state will conduct a hand recount of the presidential race.

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.

This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.

Sources

Burden, Barry. Director, Elections Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Email to FactCheck.org. 12 Nov 2020.

“Georgia Election Results.” New York Times. Accessed 12 Nov 2020.

“Georgia Secretary of State Update on 2020 Election.” C-SPAN. 11 Nov 2020.

“Maine Election Results 2020.” Politico. Accessed 12 Nov 2020.

McLaughlin, Dan. “No, There Were Not 95,000 Biden-Only Ballots in Georgia.” National Review. 11 Nov 2020.

“News Conference on Georgia Vote Count.” C-SPAN. 9 Nov 2020.

The post Faulty Claim About ‘Biden-Only’ Ballots in Georgia appeared first on FactCheck.org.

]]> https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/claim-of-michigan-postal-fraud-is-moot/ Sat, 07 Nov 2020 00:57:50 +0000 https://www.factcheck.org/?p=192896 A video from a right-wing activist suggests that U.S. Postal Service employees backdated ballots in Michigan. The claim is unproven, but, even if true, no ballots in the state are accepted after Nov. 3, regardless of the postmark.

The post Claim of Michigan Postal Fraud Is Moot appeared first on FactCheck.org.

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Quick Take

A video from a right-wing activist suggests that U.S. Postal Service employees backdated ballots in Michigan. The claim is unproven, but, even if true, no ballots in the state are accepted after Nov. 3, regardless of the postmark.

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Full Story

Project Veritas, a right-wing activist organization, added to the onslaught of misinformation aimed at discrediting the election results this week.

In a video posted to the group’s YouTube channel, its founder, James O’Keefe, claimed to present a Postal Service “whistleblower” with information suggesting election fraud in Michigan.

With his voice modified to disguise his identity, the so-called whistleblower says in the video: “We were issued a directive this morning to collect any ballots we find… so that they could hand stamp them with the previous day’s date. Today is Nov. 4, for clarification.”

Election Day was Nov. 3, so the implication is that the U.S. Postal Service was participating in a scheme to allow illegitimate votes to be counted.

We don’t know if there was any such “directive.” The U.S. Postal Service inspector general’s office is investigating the complaint, spokesman Agapi Doulaveris told FactCheck.org by email, and, she said, “no additional information [is] available at this time.”

But, even so, it would have no bearing on the election. Michigan law specifies that mail-in ballots “must reach the clerk or an authorized assistant of the clerk before the close of the polls on election day. An absent voter ballot received by the clerk or assistant of the clerk after the close of the polls on election day will not be counted.”

The Michigan Secretary of State’s office has also explained on its website, “Michigan’s election clerks count valid ballots that they received at their offices or in their official ballot drop boxes by 8 p.m. on Election Day. Ballots received thereafter, regardless of the postmark, are not counted.”

And, just to be very clear, Bonnie Scheele, the county clerk for the area that includes the post office referenced in the video, told PolitiFact, “Even if the ballots were postmarked as Nov. 3, they cannot be counted because the ballots had to be in the hands of the township or city clerks by 8 p.m. Nov. 3.”

Also worth noting is that President Donald Trump received more votes in that county, although his challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, did get more mail-in votes.

Despite the fact that the claim is moot, Donald Trump Jr., one of the president’s children, retweeted the video to his 6 million followers with this message referring to the Department of Justice: “Where is the DOJ???”

And some conservative outlets promoted it, too. Fox News host Sean Hannity called the Project Veritas video a “bombshell” on the Nov. 5 episode of his show, and a website called Chicks On The Right used the same term to describe it. The Russia-based, government-funded network RT, formerly Russia Today, promoted the claim, too.

Update, April 29: John Sullivan, general counsel for Project Veritas, wrote to us to object to our description of O’Keefe as a “right-wing activist.” We described O’Keefe as a “right-wing activist” — as other media outlets have done, including the Associated Press, New York Times and New York Magazine — because O’Keefe and Project Veritas are best known for posting secretly recorded videos that target liberal groups, mainstream news organizations and Democrats.

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.

This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.

Sources

FactCheck.org. “Viral Voting Misinformation.” Updated 6 Nov 2020.

Doulaveris, Agapi. Spokesman, U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General. Email to FactCheck.org. 6 Nov 2020.

Michigan Election Law. Act 116 of 1954. Legislature.mi.gov. Accessed 6 Nov 2020.

Michigan Secretary of State. Election security in Michigan. Accessed 6 Nov 2020.

McCarthy, Bill. “Allegations of USPS election fraud in Michigan don’t hold up.” PolitiFact. 5 Nov 2020.

Trump, Donald Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr). “Where is the DOJ???” Twitter. 4 Nov 2020.

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