During the second year of the Biden presidency, readers appeared most interested in fact checks that re-litigate aspects of the 2020 election, especially allegations about Hunter Biden, the president’s son. Moreover, only one fact check about President Biden’s utterances made it among our most-read fact checks this year.
By a large margin, our coverage of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his voting record especially captivated readers, with three of our articles on Meadows among the most popular. We have listed them all together to avoid being repetitive.
Here’s the rundown.
1. Debra Meadows appears to have filed at least two false voter forms
The Fact Checker’s reporting showed that in 2020 Debra Meadows, wife of the former chief of staff, signed at least two forms — a voter registration form and the one-stop application — that warned of legal consequences if falsely completed and signed. Yet Debra Meadows certified that she had resided at a 14-by-62-foot mountaintop mobile home for at least 30 days — even though she did not live there. Our disclosure of this form was the latest in a string of revelations concerning the former chief of staff — who echoed President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud in 2020 — and his wife. Other popular articles on the Meadowses’ voting habits included “Mark Meadows was simultaneously registered to vote in three states” and “Mark Meadows, his wife, Debra, and their trailer-home voter registration.”
2. Trump’s effort to rewrite history on his support of NATO and Ukraine
Since Trump left office, we have tried to be selective in vetting his many false claims. But as always, readers love to read fact checks of Trump. Here we focused on a claim he made just days after he had lauded Russian President Vladimir Putin as “very savvy” for making a “genius” move by declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states and dispatching Russian forces to seize them. When Ukraine unexpectedly stood firm against the Russian invasion, Trump scrambled to claim he deserved credit for saving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. With Trump, it’s hard to know whether he’s willfully ignorant or whether he has simply swallowed his own spin. Far from being a savior of NATO, he frequently sought to undermine it. He earned Four Pinocchios.
3. The truth about Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian ‘bio labs’
The Russian Defense Ministry knows how to stir up the interest of the right-leaning news media in the United States — just mention Hunter Biden. Russia for years has been seeding the ground to claim that the United States set up biowarfare labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics — claims that have been revived as part of the invasion of Ukraine. We already had debunked these claims in another widely read fact check but here tackled the claim, echoed by the right-wing media, that Hunter Biden was somehow involved in financing the labs. We dug into the records and discussed the deals in question with people involved. We revealed that Hunter Biden was not part of a decision to invest in a company at the center of the Russian allegations, he did not profit from it because he was kicked out of the investment firm over cocaine allegations, and the company made little money from its tiny bit of business in Ukraine.
4. Unraveling the tale of Hunter Biden and $3.5 million from Russia
This was another trip down the rabbit hole of claims about Hunter Biden. During the 2020 election, Trump claimed 42 times that Hunter had received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, a Russian billionaire and the widow of the former mayor of Moscow. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Trump called on Putin to reveal what he knows about it. That statement inspired us to take another look. We interviewed people familiar with the transactions, reviewed property and real estate documents and probed for leads in the emails contained on a hard drive copy of the laptop Hunter Biden supposedly left behind for repair in a Delaware shop in April 2019. It’s a complicated story, involving a web of corporate entities, that eventually leads to the purchase of millions of dollars’ worth of real estate in Brooklyn by the Russian billionaire. We found no evidence that Hunter Biden was part of those transactions.
5. A Bottomless Pinocchio for Biden — and other recent gaffes
President Biden is a self-described “gaffe machine.” Readers had asked for fact checks of a variety of recent Biden statements, but none of them seemed big enough for a stand-alone fact check. So we produced a roundup of some of the president’s recent errors of fact, made as he barnstormed the country boosting Democrats and raising contributions in advance of the midterm elections. Most noteworthy was an old claim we had debunked shortly after Biden took office, giving him Three Pinocchios — that he had traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese president Xi Jinping. On Nov. 3, the president repeated this claim for the 20th time since he became president. During Donald Trump’s presidency, we had established a new category, the Bottomless Pinocchio, to account for false or misleading statements repeated so often that they became a form of propaganda. A statement would get added to the list if it had earned a Three or Four Pinocchios rating and been repeated at least 20 times.
6. The faux outrage that President Biden is stockpiling baby formula for undocumented immigrants
Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) sparked a furor in May when she posted photos that compared what she said were stockpiles of baby formula for undocumented immigrants with empty grocery shelves for Americans in local stores. “You see the American government sending by the pallet thousands and thousands of containers of baby formula to the border, that would make my blood boil,” she said. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans quickly jumped on the bandwagon, with Abbott blaming what he called President Biden’s “reckless, out-of-touch priorities.” The problem is that the Biden administration was following the law — a law that Trump also followed. Abbott earned Four Pinocchios.
7. The truth about gas prices and oil production
In a moment of national unity against Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Democrats and Republicans kept fighting passionately over the steep increase in the cost of gasoline. Prices have already risen sharply since Biden became president — and he acknowledged that his ban on U.S. importation of Russian oil and gas could send them even higher. Partisans on all sides, as is often the case, misrepresented the facts, obscuring the complicated truth about oil production, gas prices and the role of renewables. So we produced a guide to help readers sort out the rhetoric.
8. How the falsehood of athletes dying of coronavirus vaccines spread
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for many months has spouted dubious claims about coronavirus vaccines. He caught our attention with the comment that “we’ve heard story after story. I mean, all these athletes dropping dead on the field, but we’re supposed to ignore that.” When we investigated his sources of information, we uncovered a trail of misinformation that started with mysterious Austrian websites with ties to that country’s far-right populist party, the Freedom Party. Those stories were then recycled by right-wing media in the United States and eventually came out of the mouth of a U.S. senator.
9. Tucker Carlson says Ukraine is not a democracy. Here are the facts.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson has channeled many of Putin’s arguments for invading Ukraine, including that Ukraine is not a democracy. “In American terms, you would call Ukraine a tyranny,” Carlson claimed. To some extent, whether Ukraine is a democracy is a matter of opinion, so we did not offer a Pinocchio rating. But Carlson — who has expressed admiration for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his crackdown on civil liberties — is stacking the deck against Ukraine. It is a fledgling democracy, with significant growing pains, largely the result of Russian pressure and interference in its affairs. It is certainly not “a tyranny.”
10. What research shows on the effectiveness of gun-control laws
In the aftermath of the mass killing in May of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Tex., we deeply examined what academic research showed about the effectiveness of gun laws in preventing such tragedies. The short answer was that many proposed laws probably would not have much of an effect on curbing the mass killings that dominate the news. But they could lessen their severity, and might also bring down overall gun violence. We further expanded our inquiry into this subject with a detailed look at 41 gun-related mass killings since 2015. We found that only about one-third of these mass killings might have been prevented by any major proposals. But some ideas — such as not allowing people under age 21 to buy assault rifles and banning ammunition storage and feeding devices known as magazines that hold more than 10 rounds — might have minimized the bloodshed.
Top columns in 2022 — that were published before 2022
Many readers discover old fact checks when searching the internet for information. Here’s a list of fact checks that ranked among the top 50 in 2022 — even though they were first published in 2021. The first story on this list even made it into the top 15, even though it was published almost two years ago.
1. Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years (Jan. 24, 2021)
3. Biden’s claim that the 1994 assault-weapons law ‘brought down’ mass shootings (March 24, 2021)
4. No, Trump did not order 10,000 troops to secure the Capitol on Jan. 6 (Dec. 15, 2021)
5. The false and misleading claims President Biden made during his first 100 days in office (April 30, 2021)
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