Noncitizen Voting?

 Many posts have discussed immigration. Illegal voting by noncitizens is rare.

Jude Joffe-Block and Miles Parks at NPR:

In a call with Nevada state election officials earlier this month, the Trump administration's point person on noncitizen voting insisted her team was working "in good faith."

"We are an open book here," said Heather Honey, an official at the Department of Homeland Security, who previously worked to push election falsehoods before her current post. "We are acting in very good faith. And we just want to help you."

But more than a month after President Trump touted in a primetime address that his administration had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls of Nevada and just three other states, those states are still asking for proof or even a complete list of the voters federal officials say should be investigated.

In the Nevada call, federal officials did more to detail how they arrived at their numbers, but their statements also undermined the broader claim that American elections are rife with noncitizen voters.

DHS initially announced it had found close to 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada's voter list. But a DHS official acknowledged in the meeting with Nevada officials that number was "the ceiling" and each voter still had to be manually reviewed. Then, a day later, DHS provided the state with a list of 185 ID numbers pertaining to voters the agency said it was confident were noncitizens. NPR acquired records and a recording of the video call, first reported by The New York Times, via a public record request.

Nevada asked for more information on that smaller group of 185 voters, and the data points used to match them to noncitizens. DHS declined to provide that. The agency did say it still had more than 14,000 Nevada voters that "need additional review," and it also provided the state with a list of more than 6,000 voter IDs the agency said were "higher confidence" matches but had yet to be reviewed.

Deleting J6 History

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.  The Trump administration has killed off or limited access to many such resources, including the CIA World Factbook. 

Jennifer Bowers Bahney at Mediaite:

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has erased hundreds of press releases from its website that detailed the charges against January 6 Capitol rioters — information the DOJ deemed “partisan propaganda.”

“We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda,” the DOJ Rapid Response X account declared Friday.

The move came just days after the DOJ announced it was creating a $1.8 billion taxpayer-backed “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to pay restitution to anyone who felt they were wronged by the federal government. Critics, including congressional Republicans, have called it a “slush fund” for Trump allies, including the rioters that he pardoned.

Myths, Misinformation, and Minneapolis

Besides not knowing what habeas corpus means, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has had problems.

Daniel Dale at CNN:

Top officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have responded to the killing of Alex Pretti by the Border Patrol in Minneapolis on Saturday with a torrent of claims that are either contradicted by video footage or unsupported by any evidence presented so far.

• Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Pretti “attacked” officers, an assertion echoed by FBI Director Kash Patel, but no footage available as of Sunday afternoon shows Pretti committing any attack.
• Noem claimed Pretti was “brandishing” a gun, but no available footage shows Pretti even holding a weapon in his hand at the scene; a concealed gun appeared to be taken from his waistband area by a federal agent moments before he was shot.
• White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller referred to Pretti as “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents,” Vice President JD Vance reposted this claim, and Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino (and the Department of Homeland Security in a social media post) said it “looks like” Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” But nobody has shown any evidence that Pretti sought to kill anyone, let alone perpetrate a massacre.
• Patel suggested that Pretti broke the law by carrying a concealed gun at a protest, but the Minneapolis police chief said Pretti had a permit to carry the gun and was allowed to have it on him as he was protesting in a public place.

  Tiffany HsuStuart A. Thompson and Steven Lee Myers at NYT:

Across social media, pro-Trump influencers and others muddled the evidence of the killing of a nurse in Minneapolis on Saturday with social media posts that included misdirection and fabricated content.

While verified videos and witnesses showed how federal immigration agents tackled and shot Alex Pretti, 37, the posts tried to warp the events, including in ways intended to support the Trump administration’s claims that Mr. Pretti was at fault for his own death. Some posts smeared him or portrayed him as a radical activist.

Nick Sortor, a pro-Trump influencer with 1.4 million followers on X, incorrectly identified Mr. Pretti, a U.S. citizen, as an unauthorized immigrant. Jack Posobiec, a Trump loyalist with 3.3 million followers on X, falsely described Mr. Pretti as having “run up on police” and drawn a gun — claims that other users on X corrected in an appended note. Photos of different men — dressed in drag or shirtless at a street festival — were wrongly identified as Mr. Pretti and shared widely.

Mr. Posobiec, Mr. Sortor and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

No Absolute Immunity for Feds Who Break State Laws

Our chapter on federalism includes an extensive discussion of crime.

Devan Cole at CNN:

Vice President JD Vance’s claim Thursday that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis is “protected by absolute immunity” drew immediate pushback from experts who said the legal landscape around a potential prosecution is far more complicated.

Speaking at the White House, Vance appeared to try to stymie any efforts by Minnesota prosecutors to pursue a criminal case against the agent.

“The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action – that’s a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job,” Vance said, echoing others in the Trump administration. “I’ve never seen anything like that. It would get tossed out by a judge.”

That assessment was quickly met with skepticism by experts who said the vice president was overstating the law around immunity for federal officials. Vance’s comments come amid nationwide protests of ICE officials and criticism of the agency’s efforts to carry out a historic deportation campaign with little to no oversight.

Bryna Godar at Lawfare:

As a baseline, federal officials are not immune from prosecution for state crimes just because they committed the offense while on the job. Some state prosecutions of federal officials that have gone ahead include a manslaughter charge against a postal worker who hit and killed someone while delivering mail, murder charges against military members who shot and killed a man they believed was stealing copper fixtures, and murder charges against federal officers who killed a passenger when shooting their guns at a departing car they alleged was illegally transporting whiskey.

The Supreme Court has long emphasized that “[a]n employee of the United States does not secure a general immunity from state law while acting in the course of his employment.” So when a federal officer—be it an ICE agent or a postal worker—violates a state criminal law, they can potentially face prosecution. This could include charges for trespass, breaking and entering, kidnapping, assault, manslaughter, murder, or a host of other state-law crimes.

What happens next is where things get complicated. Generally, federal officers will seek to move their case into federal court. They will claim that they are immune from prosecution under the Supremacy Clause, and a federal court will decide whether the state’s prosecution can proceed. If it does proceed, it will typically play out in federal—not state—court, though state or local officials will still prosecute the case. And if the trial ultimately leads to a conviction, that conviction will be for a state—not federal—crime. This is an important point in state-federal conflicts because the president’s pardon power extends only to federal crimes, not state crimes. (For a more thorough analysis of the procedural elements, see this Lawfare article.)

Breaking down the immunity piece, federal officials prosecuted for state crimes generally claim that they are immune from prosecution under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. The Supremacy Clause provides that federal law is “the supreme Law of the Land” and overrides state law when the two conflict. Courts have interpreted this provision to preclude state prosecutions when federal officials are reasonably carrying out lawful federal duties. For example, in the foundational case on Supremacy Clause immunity from 1890, the Supreme Court concluded that California could not prosecute a U.S. Marshal for murder where the marshal, who was assigned to protect a U.S. Supreme Court justice, shot and killed an attacker. In other examples, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in 2006 affirmed dismissal of a Wyoming trespassing prosecution against federal wildlife officers who accidentally entered private land while collaring wolves, and a federal district court in the 1960s ordered the dismissal of disorderly conduct charges against a U.S. Marshal for his actions quelling a segregationist riot at the University of Mississippi.

The theory behind Supremacy Clause immunity, as explained in the 2006 Tenth Circuit wolf-collaring opinion authored by then-Judge Michael McConnell, is that, “while state criminal law provides an important check against abuse of power by federal officials, the supremacy of federal law precludes the use of state prosecutorial power to frustrate the legitimate and reasonable exercise of federal authority.”

To strike this balance, federal courts have adopted a two-part test for Supremacy Clause immunity: The federal official’s actions must have been (a) authorized by federal law and (b) “necessary and proper” in fulfilling the official’s federal duties. In other words, if an officer’s actions are unauthorized, unlawful, unnecessary, or improper, the state prosecution poses no Supremacy Clause problem because it is not undermining the implementation of federal law.

In practice, the contours of this two-part test are often contested. The U.S. Supreme Court has not weighed in on Supremacy Clause immunity in more than 100 years, so the doctrine has been developed largely in lower federal courts.

An Incident in Minneapolis

 Zolan Kanno-Youngs at NYT:

Just hours after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Mr. Trump told a group of New York Times reporters that the woman was at fault because she had tried to “run over” the officer.

We were in the Oval Office for an interview with the president, and the unfolding situation in Minneapolis was high on our list of questions. As soon as we started asking him about the incident, he said: “I want to see nobody get shot. I want to see nobody screaming and trying to run over policemen either.”

When we pressed Mr. Trump on his conclusion that the victim, Renee Nicole Good, tried to run over the agent, he asked an aide to pull up the video on a laptop in an effort to prove his point.

“That was a vicious situation that took place,” Mr. Trump said, apparently referring to what federal officials have said was an effort by Ms. Good to run down an ICE agent.

...

Before the video began, Mr. Trump acknowledged the tragic nature of the shooting. “With all of it being said, no, I don’t like that happening,” he said, before pivoting to his common refrain of criticizing illegal immigration.

As a slow-motion surveillance video of the shooting played on the laptop, we told him that this angle did not appear to show an ICE officer had been run over.

“Well,” Mr. Trump said. “I — the way I look at it … ”

“It’s a terrible scene,” Mr. Trump said at the end of the video. “I think it’s horrible to watch. No, I hate to see it.”

But did this fatal shooting mean his ICE operation had gone too far? Mr. Trump sidestepped the question, instead blaming his predecessor's immigration policies.

But did this fatal shooting mean his ICE operation had gone too far? Mr. Trump sidestepped the question, instead blaming his predecessor's immigration policies.

 

Btw, those in my QT's smugly asserting that law enforcement has wide latitude to use lethal force against fleeing suspects may wish to consult Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985).

— Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 (@JessicaBRiedl) January 8, 2026

Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985) Argued: October 30, 1984 Decided: March 27, 1985 Annotation Primary Holding Under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a police officer may use deadly force to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect only if the officer has a good-faith belief that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.

Jack Smith Testimony

Many posts have discussed the insurrection of January 6, 2021. 

On New Year's Eve, the GOP majority on the House Judiciary Committee released the transcript of special counsel Jack Smith's December 17 testimony.

Q But the President's statements that he believed the election was rife with fraud, those certainly are statements that are protected by the First Amendment, correct? 

A Absolutely not. If they are made to target a lawful government function and they are made with knowing falsity, no, they are not. That was my point about fraud not being protected by the First Amendment. 

Q I mean, there is a long list of disputed elections, I mean, the election of 1800,  1960, year 2000, where candidates believed they were wronged by the -- you know, because they lost. And there's a long history of candidates speaking out about they believe there's been fraud, there's been other problems with the integrity of the election process. And I think you would agree that those types of statements are sort of at the core of the First Amendment rights of a Presidential candidate, right? 

A There is no historical analog for what President Trump did in this case. As we said in the indictment, he was free to say that he thought he won the election. He was even free to say falsely that he won the election. But what he was not free to do was violate Federal law and use knowing -- knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function. That he was not allowed to do. And that differentiates this case from any past history. 

Q A lot of these statements, though, you know, people come into the Oval Office -- I mean, the President isn't conducting his own due diligence. He is receiving people in his office that are telling him these things, whether it be Rudy Giuliani, whether it be John Eastman, whether it be Jeffrey Clark, whether it be Sidney Powell. And, you know,  for the most part, he is just receiving this information and, you know, his statements are almost just regurgitating what these people have told him. I mean, isn't that the case?

A No. And, in fact, one of the strengths of our case and why we felt we had such strong proof is all witnesses were not going to be political enemies of the President. They were going to be political allies.We had numerous witnesses who would say, "I voted for President Trump. I campaigned for Trump President Trump. I wanted him to win." The Speaker of the House in Arizona. The Speaker of the House in Michigan. We had an elector in Pennsylvania who is a former Congressman who was going to be an elector for President Trump who said that what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal. Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party.And so the President got information from people he trusted on other issues. He rejected it whenever it didn't fit him staying in office. And there was a pattern in our case where any time any information came in that would mean he could no longer be President he would reject it. And any theory, no matter how far-fetched, no matter how not based in law, that would indicate that he could, he latched on to that. And we had -- we were confident that we had very strong proof of that pattern. He also, I would just add, very consciously did not try to reach out to the sort of people who have the most expertise on these issues. He reached out to people who he thought could back him up.

Why DOGE Failed

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

At The Dispatch, Jessica Riedl writes that DOGE was incompetent and illegal.  Most important, its assumptions were wrong.

The promise to save trillions of dollars was ultimately doomed by the reality that most federal spending was off limits to DOGE. Roughly two-thirds of all federal spending goes to five items (Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest) that Trump either promised not to cut, or in the case of interest, cannot directly reduce. Attempts by DOGE to scale back Social Security customer service spending as well as assistance at veterans’ hospitals were largely abandoned in the face of a steep backlash. Even much of the remaining one-third of federal spending consists of programs that Trump voters generally support, such as infrastructure, border security, farm subsidies, and law enforcement. Ultimately, DOGE was left to slash cultural totems that benefit MAGA enemies: aid to Africa, DEI contracts, Politico subscriptions, and government employees. And while the potential savings from these expenditures look like a lot of money for a typical family, they represent budget dust in the context of a $7 trillion federal budget.

Because real waste exists in the federal budget, DOGE represents a colossal missed opportunity. After all, Washington has a moral obligation to eliminate unnecessary and wasteful spending in order to minimize the necessary cuts to priority programs. OMB estimates that $191 billion annually is lost to payment errors, which overwhelmingly take place within Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and earned income tax credit payments. Moreover, Washington is plagued with dozens of overlapping programs in areas such as education, economic development, and job training. And the Defense Department has a long record of losing tens of billions of dollars in contract cost overruns.

These examples of wasteful spending are easy to identify yet quite difficult to fix. Cleaning up such waste often involves completely overhauling countless government computer systems, developing new oversight controls (without unduly paralyzing the distribution of legitimate benefits), and coordinating with state governments that share in the administration of key programs. Overhauling these practices across hundreds of federal programs is tedious, complicated, and thankless—which is why it occurs so rarely. Lawmakers will hold hearings and press conferences blasting government waste, yet few are willing to invest significant resources into, for example, reducing Medicaid payment errors. DOGE could have focused on such activities—especially given its leaders’ background in computing technology—yet it seemed to lack the required attention span. Trump and Musk instead prioritized headline-grabbing gimmicks such as demanding a war on “millions” of fraudulent Social Security payments that did not actually exist.

Posting Lies, Deleting Facts

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.

Alexandra Banner at CNN:

Scientific information on the CDC's website was replaced this week with anti-vaccine talking points, including false claims that link autism and vaccines. It's the latest move by the Trump administration to alter longstanding US vaccine policy and cast doubt on vaccinations. "We are updating the CDC's website to reflect gold standard, evidence-based science," Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said Thursday. But abundant evidence has shown that there is no connection between vaccines and autism. In a CNN interview, a former top CDC official called the website changes "a national embarrassment" that could leave parents confused.

Catherine Rampell at The Bulwark:

In August, Trump’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the BLS commissioner, grabbed headlines,2 but the top job is hardly the only hole this administration has blown in that agency. At the time of McEntarfer’s firing, a third of senior BLS leadership positions were already vacant. (That’s still the case, in fact.)

The rest of the agency has been swiss-cheesed too. Some regional field offices—such as the consumer price index offices in Buffalo, New York; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Provo, Utah—have been shuttered entirely. Meanwhile, post-COVID, the agency was already struggling with reduced survey-response rates, which have made its numbers noisier and more susceptible to big revisions. The administration’s response has been to disband the task force working to fix these problems.

The result is that federal data are being degraded—or deleted altogether. And deletion is especially common when statistical series measure issues that this administration would rather not track.

In September, for instance, the administration canceled a three-decade-old annual survey that measures how many Americans struggle to get enough food. A few months earlier, HHS eliminated the team that produces the poverty guidelines, which determine how we count the number of people in poverty and eligibility for benefits such as SNAP, Medicaid, Head Start, and childcare subsidies. But hey, if you never determine who’s eligible for benefits, maybe that means no one is.

Over the past ten months, I’ve been tracking similar cuts to federal data collection on substance abuse, natural disasters, children’s literacy, climate change, race, crime, immigration, gender identity and other issues. (My non-exhaustive, running list lives here; please send me examples I may have missed.)

Myths, Misinformation, and US Elections

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation. 

Daniel Dale at CNN:

President Donald Trump made a series of false claims about elections in a Monday social media post in which he pledged to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and voting machines – including an inaccurate assertion that states have to run elections in the manner the president tells them to.

Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s comments.

“We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.”

False. Dozens of other countries use mail-in voting, as CNN and others have pointed out when Trump has made such claims before. These countries include Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland.

The specifics of different countries’ policies vary, but it’s simply not true that every other country has abandoned mail-in voting.

“WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

Trump’s claim about Democrats is nonsense. There is simply no basis for the assertion of massive cheating. US federal elections are free and fair; there has generally been a tiny quantity of ballot fraud representing a minuscule percentage of votes cast.

“Our elections are more secure, transparent, and verified than ever before in American history, thanks to the thousands of professional election officials of both parties, at the state and local level, that oversee them,” David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said in a Monday message to CNN.

“…Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS.”

More fiction. Mail-in voting is a legitimate method used by legitimate voters to cast legitimate ballots. Elections experts say the incidence of fraud tends to be marginally higher with mail-in ballots than with in-person ballots – but also that fraud rates in federal elections are tiny even with mail-in ballots.

Republican-dominated Utah is among the states where voters are automatically sent mail-in ballots (though it is now phasing out that policy); its elections, like other states’, have been free of widespread fraud. And it’s worth noting that Trump himself encouraged supporters to vote by mail in 2024.

“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

That’s not what the Constitution says. Here’s what it does say: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

In other words, states set their own election policies unless Congress passes a law preempting them. The Constitution does not grant the president himself the power to simply tell states what to do, using an executive order or anything else.

DOGE Failed

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

 Jessie Blaeser at Politico:

The Trump administration’s claim that it is saving billions of dollars through DOGE-related cuts to federal contracts is drastically exaggerated, according to a new POLITICO analysis of public data and federal spending records.

Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.

Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.

DOGE’s latest figures on contract cuts ticked up to $54.2 billion in an update posted on Tuesday.

POLITICO’s findings come on top of months of scrutiny of DOGE’s accounting, but the magnitude of DOGE’s inflated savings claims has not been clear until now.

David Lawder at Reuters:

 The U.S. government's budget deficit grew nearly 20% in July to $291 billion despite a nearly $21 billion jump in customs duty collections from President Donald Trump's tariffs, with outlays growing faster than receipts, the Treasury Department said on Tuesday.

The deficit for July was up 19%, or $47 billion, from July 2024. Receipts for the month grew 2%, or $8 billion, to $338 billion, while outlays jumped 10%, or $56 billion, to $630 billion, a record high for the month.

The Cost of Slashing PEPFAR

 Americans vastly overestimate the size of the US budget for foreign aid.  Trump is cutting it, with drastic consequences.

Nicholas Kristof at NYT:

As the world’s richest men slash American aid for the world’s poorest children, they insist that all is well. “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Elon Musk said. “No one.”

That is not true. In South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, the efforts by Musk and President Trump are already leading children to die.

Peter Donde was a 10-year-old infected with H.I.V. from his mother during childbirth. But American aid kept Peter strong even as his parents died from AIDS. A program started by President George W. Bush called PEPFAR saved 26 million lives from AIDS, and one was Peter’s.

Under PEPFAR, an outreach health worker ensured that Peter and other AIDS orphans got their medicines. Then in January, Trump and Musk effectively shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, perhaps illegally, and that PEPFAR outreach program ended. Orphans were on their own.

Without the help of the community health worker, Peter was unable to get his medicines, so he became sick and died in late February, according to Moses Okeny Labani, a health outreach worker who helped manage care for Peter and 144 other vulnerable children.

The immediate cause of death was an opportunistic pneumonia infection as Peter’s viral load increased and his immunity diminished, said Labani.

“If U.S.A.I.D. would be here, Peter Donde would not have died,” Labani said.

We worked with experts at the Center for Global Development who tried to calculate how many lives are at risk if American humanitarian assistance is frozen or slashed. While these estimates are inexact and depend on how much aid continues, they suggest that a cataclysm may be beginning around the developing world:

 An estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid for H.I.V. prevention and treatment.

Ukraine Fact and Fiction

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Lori Robertson and Robert Farley at FactCheck.org:

After U.S. and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia to discuss an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, President Donald Trump made several false and misleading statements about the conflict and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

• Trump falsely claimed that Ukraine had “started” the war with Russia, saying the country could have made a “deal.” Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

• He inflated the amount of U.S. aid for Ukraine and wrongly said the U.S. gave “$200 billion more than Europe.” Aid from Europe is higher than that from the U.S.

• Trump distorted comments Zelenskyy made to claim that the Ukrainian president “admits that half of the money that we sent them is missing.” A Trump administration official has said the U.S. tracks the money.

• Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator” and misleadingly said that he “refuses” to have elections. Because of the war, the country is under martial law and can’t have an election, according to Ukrainian law.

The talks between the U.S. and Russia in Saudi Arabia, led by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, were held Feb. 18. Ukraine wasn’t included in the meeting. Trump made his claims about Ukraine late in the afternoon on Feb. 18 and reiterated them the following day in a post on Truth Social and remarks at a summit in Miami.

From the Institute for the Study of War:

The DOGE Dodge

Americans vastly overestimate the amount of waste in the budget

Brian Riedl:

“Why aren’t you cheering Trump & DOGE? I thought you wanted spending and deficit cuts!" Because I’ve been doing this for 25 years and can’t be tricked by gimmicky nonsense. Trump’s first term added $8 trillion in enacted spending hikes and tax cuts to the deficit - half of which was unrelated to the pandemic. This time around, Trump has proposed roughly $8 trillion more in tax cuts and spending hikes over the decade. And right now, a GOP Congress is preparing to abandon most reconciliation cuts and instead add $325 billion this year in new spending. We’re headed towards $4 trillion deficits within a decade. So, no, I don’t get excited when DOGE cancels $1 billion in govt contracts. Or saves $3 billion in federal workforce reductions out of a $7,000 billion budget. Not when Trump and Congress are also preparing to add $800 billion more annually in proposed new tax cuts and spending. And no, the huge savings are not coming. Even (unrealistically) eliminating 20% of the federal workforce would save $60 billion, and overhauling federal systems to sharply reduce payment errors may save perhaps $80 billion (and is probably unlikely too). For all of DOGE’s bluster, administrative and executive reforms would at best save 1-2% of federal spending and offset only a small fraction of Trump’s red ink agenda. That leaves trying to unilaterally impound spending such as USAID—which is wildly illegal—or actually going to Congress to pare back spending the constitutional way. But Trump has already taken Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans, border (and interest) off the table, which is 2/3 of all spending and is driving deficits. And the GOP Congress seems ready to give up on cutting the remaining one-third of spending. Want to cut spending and the deficit? How about they stop passing budget-busting bills. Don’t brag about your coupon-clipping frugality at the same time you are buying a $250,000 Ferrari. I’m not going to cheer Trump and DOGE for adding “only” $750 billion to deficits instead of $800 billion. We’re still going backwards. I’ve spent decades studying the federal budget. I know that $7 trillion(!) behemoth inside and out – where the money really goes, and where the savings opportunities lie. So I can also detect bullshitters who talk tough about trillion-dollar spending cuts without doing their homework. It’s the ones who claim most spending goes to undefined “waste,” federal salaries, immigrants, foreigners, Ukraine, or non-working welfare recipients. It’s the ones who claim we can easily balance the budget or cut $1 trillion without specifying exactly what line-items to cut. Or that we can return to 2019 spending levels for each program, which means a 20% inflationary cut, defaulting on the federal debt, and kicking off every senior who has since retired into Social Security and Medicare. It’s all hot air and empty bluster. Tough talk without following through on anything substantive. Just wait until you see the final deficit numbers in October. And this is why GOP movements to cut spending always fail. They make absurdly ambitious promises without doing their homework, understanding where the money goes, and specifying real plans to fix it. You can’t significantly cut the deficit just by cutting waste, firing bureaucrats, and defunding immigrants and foreigners. There are no easy short cuts. You have to stop cutting taxes and then address Social Security, Medicare, defense, and a lot of other popular programs. Wake me when the GOP goes there. So, no, I will not get excited about a couple billion in DOGE savings on one hand while Trump pushes Congress to add $8 trillion over the decade in tax cuts and spending with the other hand. I’m not that gullible.

The J6 Antifa Myth

Many posts have discussed the insurrection of January 6, 2021. 

Dan Barry and Alan Feuer at NYT:

Before the Capitol had even been secured, Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, was asserting on Twitter that the events had “all the hallmarks of Antifa provocation.” Hours later, the Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham was telling viewers that “there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.” And by morning, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, was claiming on the House floor that some rioters “were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.” (Mr. Gaetz would become President-elect Trump’s first choice for attorney general before being derailed by scandal.)

According to M.I.T. Technology Review, this fabrication was repeated online more than 400,000 times in the 24 hours after the Capitol attack, amplified by a cast of MAGA influencers, Republican officials and members of Mr. Trump’s family.

The former president remained mostly silent in the weeks that followed. But in a late March interview with Washington Post reporters that was not made public until months later, he provided an early hint of how he would frame the Jan. 6 attack.

The day he had previously called calamitous was now largely peaceful. The mob that stormed the Capitol had been “ushered in” by the police. And those who had rallied with him beforehand were a “loving crowd.”

...

Soon after, Mr. Trump broke his monthslong silence about Jan. 6. At an early July rally in Sarasota, Fla., he invoked the name of Ashli Babbitt, a pro-Trump rioter who had been fatally shot by a Capitol police officer while trying to breach the House floor, where lawmakers and staff members had sought safety. She was fast becoming a martyr to the cause.

“Shot, boom,” Mr. Trump said. “There was no reason for it. Who shot Ashli Babbitt?”

The former president also referred to the jailed rioters. Floating the specter of a justice system prejudiced against conservatives, he questioned why “so many people are still in jail over Jan. 6” when antifa and Black Lives Matter hadn’t paid a price for the violent protests that followed the murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

Sobering Words from George Orwell

George Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War," 1942:

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?

Cats, Dogs, Immigrants, and Myths

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Alicia Victoria Lozano at NBC:

The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout.

“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.

Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.

Newsguard, a media watchdog that monitors for misinformation online, found that Lee had been among the first people to publish a post to social media about the rumor, screenshots of which circulated online. The neighbor, Kimberly Newton, said she heard about the attack from a third party, NewsGuard reported.

Newton told Newsguard that Lee’s Facebook post misstated her story, and that the owner of the missing cat was “an acquaintance of a friend” rather than her daughter’s friend. Newton could not be reached for comment.

Lee said she had no idea the post would become part of a rumor mill that would spiral into the national consciousness. She has since deleted the Facebook post.

Other posts have also contributed to the false allegations, including a photo of a man holding a dead goose that was taken in Columbus, Ohio, but was spread by some online as evidence of the claims about Springfield. Graphic video of a woman who allegedly killed and tried to eat a cat was also found not to have originated in Springfield but in Canton, Ohio, and does not have any connection to the Haitian community.

Local police and city officials have repeatedly said there is no evidence of such crimes in Springfield, but that hasn’t stopped the lies from spreading across the country and igniting a national frenzy that landed on the presidential debate stage this week. Former President Donald Trump and his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who was born less than an hour away from Springfield, have repeated the baseless allegations.

Russian Disinformation: Operation Overload

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy.  The Russians target other Western countries, too.

James Thomas at Yahoo:

Pro-Russian actors are purposefully barraging journalists with fake news in an effort to spread verification resources thin and amplify the reach of disinformation, according to a new study.

Dubbed “Operation Overload” by Finnish software and methodologies company Check First, which published the report, the ongoing scheme involves anonymous pro-Russian actors who contact journalists in a coordinated campaign to have them verify suspected fake news.

The ploy relies on the simple principle that “all publicity is good publicity”.

The verification requests usually target Ukraine, France and Germany and take the form of emails and social media mentions.

Operation Overload has targeted more than 800 news organisations in Europe and beyond so far, hitting them with around 2,400 tweets and more than 200 emails.

Telegram has also played a significant role, with most of the links sent to journalists taking them to the messaging app.

Check First found that more than 250 fact-checks mentioning the false narratives created for Operation Overload have been published in the past few months.

For example, the sender of one email cited in the report poses as a concerned citizen who has supposedly seen suspicious claims in Russian media and asks journalists to take a look.

In another, the author makes it clear they want any fact-checks to be shared widely so they can be seen by as many people as possible.

This proves Operation Overload’s goal to reach wider audiences, whether the story is debunked or not, according to Check First.

Vaccine Misinformation

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation -- especially about COVID and vaccines.

  Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu at Poynter:

COVID-19 vaccines were quickly developed, with U.S. patients receiving the first shots in December 2020, 11 months after the first domestic case was detected.

Experts credit the speedy development with helping to save millions of lives and preventing hospitalizations. Researchers at the University of Southern California and Brown University calculated that vaccines saved 2.4 million lives in 141 countries from January 2021 to August 2021 alone. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows there were 574 U.S. deaths attributed to COVID-19 the week of March 2, down from nearly 26,000 at the pandemic’s height in January 2021, as vaccines were just rolling out.

But on social media and in some public officials’ remarks, misinformation about COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and safety is common. U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. built his 2024 campaign on a movement that seeks to legitimize conspiracy theories about the vaccines. We made that our 2023 Lie of the Year.

PolitiFact has seen claims that spike proteins from vaccines are replacing sperm in vaccinated males. (That’s False.) We’ve researched the assertion that vaccines can change your DNA. (That’s misleading and ignores evidence). Social media posts poked fun at Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce for encouraging people to get vaccinated, asserting that the vaccine actually shuts off recipients’ hearts. (No, it doesn’t.) And some people pointed to an American Red Cross blood donation questionnaire as evidence that shots are unsafe. (We rated that False.)

Experts say this misinformation has real-world effects.

A Nov. 2023 survey by KFF found that only 57% of Americans “say they are very or somewhat confident” in COVID-19 vaccines. And those who distrust them are more likely to identify as politically conservative: Thirty-six percent of Republicans compared with 84% of Democrats say they are very or somewhat confident in the vaccine.

Immunization rates for routine vaccines for other conditions have also taken a hit. Measles had been eradicated for more than 20 years in the U.S. but there have been recent outbreaks in states including Florida, Maryland and Ohio. Florida’s surgeon general has expressed skepticism about vaccines and rejected guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about how to contain potentially deadly disease spread.

The vaccination rate among kindergarteners has declined from 95% in the 2019-20 school year to 93% in 2022-23, according to the CDC. Public health officials have set a 95% vaccination rate target to prevent and reduce the risk of disease outbreaks. The CDC also found exemptions had risen to 3%, the highest rate ever recorded in the U.S.