Former President Bill Clinton settled a sexual harassment lawsuit with Paula Jones in a case that was a matter of public record. Former President Donald Trump made a secret payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels, which may lead to criminal charges against him. Social media posts falsely claim the situations are similar and Trump is being treated differently by prosecutors.
We answer some questions about the events leading up to the criminal indictment of former President Donald Trump.
With the recent failure of two midsize banks, some Democrats have blamed deregulation championed by then-President Donald Trump in 2018. While the law did reduce oversight of small and midsize banks, experts are divided over whether deregulation in 2018 ultimately caused Signature and Silicon Valley Bank to collapse.
Efforts to stop child sex trafficking in the U.S. have been underway for decades, led by presidents including Joe Biden. But an Instagram post makes the false claims that former President Donald Trump was the first to “acknowledge that children are being sold for sex in the U.S.” and that Biden “rescinded” a Trump order addressing the problem.
The National Transportation Safety Board’s chair said an Obama-era rule the Trump administration nixed would not have prevented the derailment of a train in Ohio, as some partisan commentators inaccurately claim. The rule requiring a new electronic braking system for certain trains carrying hazardous cargo did not apply to that train.
The people affected by the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, do not qualify for direct financial aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But FEMA and other federal agencies have been assisting since the accident there in early February. Social media posts have misleadingly claimed that the federal government has denied aid.
Billionaire George Soros said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “is likely to be the Republican candidate” in the 2024 presidential race. But social media posts edited Soros’ remarks to falsely claim he endorsed the governor. Soros’ full remarks show that he does not support DeSantis for president and that he hopes for “a Democratic landslide.”
Former President Donald Trump, who has regularly complained about the amount of money South Korea pays the U.S. to maintain American military bases there, falsely claimed this week that he “had a deal [with South Korea] for full payment to us, $Billions, and Biden gave it away.”
Former President Donald Trump says two Jan. 6, 2021, tweets that the “highly partisan January 6th Committee” tried to hide have now been “fully restored” by Twitter and “fully exonerate me.” But the posts are included, and discussed at length, in the committee’s final report.
Former President Donald Trump’s latest defense for having classified documents found by FBI agents at his Mar-a-Lago home is that many of them were simply “empty folders” stamped “classified” on the outside that Trump kept as mementos. The FBI says it did find dozens of empty folders, but it also found 103 classified documents.