Federal law enforcement officials have identified an Army veteran, who was born in the United States, as the sole person responsible for the Jan. 1 terrorist attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people and injured many more. But some Republican politicians and social media posts have wrongly claimed or suggested that the attack was the result of illegal immigration.
House Speaker Mike Johnson was spinning the facts when he claimed Republicans would have won a larger majority in the House in the 2024 election if not for Democrats’ gerrymandering of districts. The net effect of redistricting did not give the Democrats a large advantage, experts told us, with most of them saying the Republicans benefited more than Democrats.
Election law experts say House Speaker Mike Johnson is wrong when he says it is “unlawful” for Democrats to “simply just switch out a candidate who has been chosen through the … democratic process.”
On a night when the focus was on safety and unity at the Republican convention, a number of GOP leaders also offered up some misleading and false claims we have seen before.
Both Easter and the Transgender Day of Visibility happened to fall on March 31 this year. President Joe Biden recognized both occasions, as he has done every year in office. But some social media posts and conservative politicians characterized his acknowledgement of Transgender Day of Visibility as “mocking” Easter and declaring “war” on Christianity.
At their weekly news conference, several Republican House leaders wrongly claimed the special counsel report into Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents found the president was mentally unfit to stand trial. The report said no such thing.
Even before a bipartisan group of senators unveiled the text of a foreign aid and immigration overhaul bill on Feb. 4, it faced significant opposition from former President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders. We’ll explain what was in the legislation and the facts on two popular talking points.
House Speaker Mike Johnson cited concern about “fiscal stability” in saying that a Republican bill to provide aid for Israel would have “pay-fors in it.” But the legislation would increase the deficit, not pay for itself.
While former special counsel Robert S. Mueller reiterated in congressional testimony what he said in his voluminous report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, politicians reiterated some claims about the inquiry and its findings.