Category: Fact Check

The latest ad from the anti-Trump Lincoln Project promotes the same mistaken argument that Donald Trump himself has made — that the former president has been charged with spying or espionage. Trump was charged under a part of the Espionage Act concerning the willful retention of national defense information. That’s different from spying.

The ad likens Trump to some of the country’s worst traitors, all charged under different portions of the Espionage Act related to passing classified information to U.S. adversaries, either the former Soviet Union or Cuba. That’s not what Trump is accused of in the June 8 federal indictment.

The Lincoln Project, a group of mostly former and current Republicans who regularly produce biting ads targeting Trump, often runs those ads where Trump lives, specifically to get under the former president’s skin. The 60-second “Espionage” ad, for example, was aired this week on Fox News in the Palm Beach area, which includes Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home and club; in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers; and in Washington, D.C.

But in this case, the group is making the same argument Trump himself has been making — implying that he has been charged as a spy — though for very different reasons. Trump has wrongly said he is being charged as a spy to make the argument that the Department of Justice is overreaching. The Lincoln Project, on the other hand, simply makes the argument that Trump is accused of “one of the worst crimes imaginable” and therefore belongs in prison.

The ad’s narrator says, “Indicted again, this time for violating the Espionage Act. One of the worst crimes imaginable, but he joins a select list of Americans also indicted for this crime. Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, Ana Montes, John Walker, Ronald William Pelton, all indicted for violating the Espionage Act with the prison terms that traitors and spies against America deserve. … There’s no excuse for espionage.”

These are the people listed in the ad, all spies who provided classified information to U.S. adversaries:

• Robert Hanssen. A former FBI agent, Hanssen was arrested in 2001 “and charged with committing espionage on behalf of Russia and the former Soviet Union … in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, bank funds, and diamonds,” according to the FBI, which called him “the most damaging spy in Bureau history.” He pleaded guilty to espionage, attempted espionage and conspiracy to commit espionage. Hanssen died in prison earlier this month.
• Aldrich Ames. Ames was a 31-year employee of the CIA who was accused by the FBI in 1994 of spying for the Russians. The FBI said Ames “passed classified information about CIA and FBI human sources, as well as technical operations targeting the Soviet Union” to Russian KGB agents in exchange for payments of nearly $2 million. The FBI said some of Aldrich’s disclosures compromised “the identities of CIA and FBI human sources, some of whom were executed by Soviet authorities.” He pleaded guilty to espionage and is serving a life sentence in prison.
• Ana Montes. Montes was a senior analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency who acted as a spy for Cuba, sharing classified information with the U.S. adversary, according to the FBI. She was charged in 2001 with conspiracy to deliver U.S. national defense information to Cuba. The FBI says Montes’ motivation for spying for Cuba was not greed — she was not paid for providing Cuba classified information — but rather “[p]ure ideology—she disagreed with U.S. foreign policy.” Montes was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and was released earlier this year. She lives in Puerto Rico.
• John Anthony Walker Jr. Walker is a former U.S. Navy warrant officer who was charged in 1985 with “selling U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union,” the FBI said. Walker provided the Soviets with classified information, including naval cryptographic technology, and, the FBI said, recruited a friend and family members to spy for the Soviet Union as well. He pleaded guilty to espionage. He was sentenced to life and died in federal prison in 2014.
• Ronald William Pelton. A former communications specialist for the National Security Agency, Pelton was convicted in 1986 of selling classified information to the Soviets for five years, the FBI said, “including details on U.S. collection programs targeting the Soviets.” During his trial, Bob Woodward and Patrick E. Tyler wrote for the Washington Post that “Pelton’s betrayal represented one of the gravest American intelligence losses to the Soviet Union.” He was sentenced to life in prison but was released after serving nearly three decades behind bars. He died in September.

As we have written, Trump was charged with 31 alleged violations of a section of the Espionage Act. But he is not accused of being a spy.

Rather, Trump is charged with violating 18 U.S.C. 793 (e), a section of the act concerning the willful retention of national defense information. That part of the law makes it a crime to have “unauthorized possession” of documents “relating to the national defense.” It is not only unlawful if someone “willfully communicates, delivers, transmits” such documents to “any person not entitled to receive it” — which the indictment alleges Trump did twice, once to an author and once to a staffer at his political action committee — but the law also says it is illegal if a person “willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.”

Like the ad does, Trump and some of his defenders have also misleadingly claimed that Trump was charged with espionage.

“Espionage charges are absolutely ridiculous,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said on ABC’s “This Week” on June 11. “Whether you like Trump or not, he did not commit espionage. He did not disseminate, leak or provide information to a foreign power or to a news organization to damage this country. He is not a spy. He’s overcharged.”

In his speech in New Jersey following his June 13 arraignment in Miami, Trump said, “The Espionage Act has been used to go after traitors and spies. It has nothing to do with a former president legally keeping his own documents.”

Trump also raised the “spy” straw man in a speech in Georgia on June 12. Trump noted that when he left office, there were photos taken of boxes of documents stacked on the sidewalk outside the White House prior to their transport to Florida.

“If that’s a spy operation or if that’s something bad, we did a very poor job, I will tell you,” Trump said.

But, again, those are a mischaracterization of the charges.

“Trump is not accused of committing espionage, or being a spy,” David Alan Sklansky, a professor who teaches criminal law at Stanford University, told us via email. “He is accused of illegally holding onto documents with sensitive information about the national defense, lying to federal investigators, obstructing justice.”

The Espionage Act “contains a bunch of different criminal prohibitions related to national defense and national security; one of them applies to anyone who, without authorization, holds onto documents with sensitive national defense information,” Sklansky added. “That’s one of the crimes that Trump is accused of having committed. But he is not charged with ‘espionage’ or with being a ‘spy.’ Those words do not even appear in the indictment.”

Now, Trump’s detractors are misleadingly using the charges against Trump to tie him to spies convicted of passing classified information to U.S. adversaries. 

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SciCheck Digest

Human coronaviruses first identified in the 1960s cause common colds. But a viral video misrepresents early research on common coronaviruses and cites unrelated patents to falsely suggest U.S. scientists created the viruses that cause SARS and COVID-19. The video also is not footage of official testimony before the European Parliament.

What do we know about the origins of SARS-CoV-2?

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Full Story

Scientists have been studying coronaviruses, a family of viruses that infect animals and humans, for decades — the first was identified in chickens in the 1930s. In 1968, after the first human coronavirus was identified in 1965, virologists grouped them and named them coronaviruses for their crown-like surface, which also resembles the outermost layer of the sun called the corona (corona is the Latin word for crown). 

Seven coronaviruses are known to infect humans — four of them, known as common human coronaviruses (229E, NL63, OC43 and HKU1), generally cause mild to moderate symptoms of a common cold. But coronaviruses got more attention in 2003, after the emergence of SARS-CoV-1, the first coronavirus known to cause a severe respiratory illness in humans, followed by MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, in 2019.

Both SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV originated in animals and jumped to humans. Although there is still no proof of how SARS-CoV-2 started, many scientists think the available evidence also points to a zoonotic spillover. If SARS-CoV-2 did escape from a lab in Wuhan, there is a general consensus that it was an accident. A U.S. Intelligence report released in 2021 showed that all agencies agreed that “the virus was not developed as a biological weapon” and “most” said the virus “probably was not genetically engineered,” as we reported.

Yet, in a widely shared video misleadingly presented as testimony to the European Parliament, David Martin, a financial analyst, cited unrelated patents and distorted early research on coronaviruses to falsely suggest that scientists in the U.S. created the viruses that cause SARS and COVID-19 as part of a plot to drive vaccine profits.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this was premeditated domestic terrorism,” he said of the COVID-19 pandemic (mark 19:22). “This is an act of biological and chemical warfare perpetrated on the human race. … [T]his was a financial heist and a financial fraud,” he added — a quote that was later shared in a Twitter post that has been retweeted more than 75,000 times.

Except Martin’s entire argument is bunk. Dr. Susan R. Weiss, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, told us in a phone interview that his statements are full of inaccuracies and completely distort past coronavirus research.

“There is no basis for any of this,” she said. “It makes no scientific sense.”

Martin has pushed several conspiracy theories about the pandemic. In 2020, he was a central figure in the second “Plandemic” video, which also falsely claimed that the pandemic was planned, as we’ve written.

Not European Parliament Testimony

Part of the appeal of Martin’s video — and lending false legitimacy to his claims — is that at first glance, it appears he is speaking in front of the European Parliament and giving official testimony.

“[C]ant believe my ears, what is being said at the europian union,” a Facebook user said, sharing the video, which shows Martin next to a European Parliament flag in what might look to someone like the European Parliament Hemicycle.

“Must watch: This is the opening presentation by Dr David Martin on the origins of Covid in 1965 & Covid Vaccines in 1990!” a Twitter user wrote. “He speaks in front of the European Parliament International Covid Summit III in Brussels on May 3, 2023. Hear and be shocked..!” 

In reality, only five of the 705 members of the European Parliament participated in the event, which took place in a room of the parliament’s building in Brussels, as part of a three-day meeting organized by COVID-19 skeptics and anti-vaccination activists. The five Parliament members have participated in actions opposing COVID-19 vaccines.

Natalie Kontoulis, a press officer for the European Parliament, told us in an email that the meeting “was not an official European Parliament event.” She added, “Members of the Parliament can exercise their mandate freely and bear responsibility for both their activities and their content.”

According to the event’s website, the speaker line-up included some prominent COVID-19 misinformation spreaders, including Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Pierre Kory, and Dr. Ryan Cole. The event content was turned into a book called “ICS 3 – The Whole Truth” and commercialized — a paperback copy sells for $29.99.

SARS-CoV-2 is New, Not Engineered for 56 Years  

During the almost 22-minute video, Martin spins a scientifically impossible story that suggests that SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses are the result of experimentation with common cold coronaviruses that were discovered in the 1960s.

“This is actually something that’s been long in the making,” he said of the COVID-19 pandemic (mark 5:31). “In 1967, the year I was born, we did the first human trials on inoculating people with modified coronavirus. Isn’t that amazing? 56 years ago — the overnight success of a pathogen that’s been 56 years in engineering.”

But Martin, who misleads throughout by implying all coronaviruses might be the same, is misrepresenting a study that involved infecting people with a coronavirus that causes a cold. The virus had not been modified. More important, the notion that a common coronavirus could have been manipulated or engineered to create SARS-CoV-2 is incorrect.

“They’re too different,” Weiss said. “We don’t have the ability to turn one into the other.”

About a minute later, he said, “Ironically, the common cold was turned into a chimera in the 1970s. And in 1975, 1976, and 1977 we started figuring out how to modify coronavirus by putting it into different animals, pigs and dogs.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Weiss told us. 

First, as we said, there are multiple kinds of coronaviruses. Some infect animals and others infect humans — and a few can cross from one species to another one, Weiss told us. “It turns out, the human virus … at least the cold virus, as far as I know, only replicates in humans.” The viruses couldn’t be genetically modified at that time, either, she explained. “We couldn’t engineer viruses at that time,” she said of the 1970s, since the technology to do it, such as cloning, didn’t yet exist. 

Martin continues to mislead by saying the inoculation of those supposedly modified common coronaviruses created a huge problem in the pig and dog industry, which led Pfizer to patent its “first spike protein vaccine” in 1990. “Isn’t that fascinating? Isn’t it fascinating that we were, we were told that, ‘Well, the spike protein is a new thing,’” he said (mark 7:44).

Except, that patent was for a canine coronavirus vaccine, which targets an entirely different virus from SARS-CoV-2. In 2020, we debunked related claims that also confused canine coronavirus with the virus that caused the pandemic.

Moreover, scientists have never said that coronavirus spike proteins are “new.” The specific SARS-CoV-2 spike was new, and the genetic sequence was needed to design the vaccines. But one reason why the COVID-19 vaccines could be made so rapidly is because scientists already knew the virus’s spike proteins would be good vaccine targets. The existence of that previous knowledge is not evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was created as a bioweapon or as part of a ploy to sell vaccines.

Martin also falsely claims that SARS-CoV-1 was created in an American lab.

“Are you suggesting that SARS … might have come from a laboratory in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill? No, I’m not suggesting it. I’m telling you that’s the facts — we engineered SARS,” he said. “SARS is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. The naturally occurring phenomenon is called the common cold … SARS is the research developed by humans weaponizing a life system model to actually attack human beings.”

There is no evidence SARS-CoV-1 was engineered or came from any lab. The virus naturally appeared in 2002 in China, when it likely jumped from civets to humans, and its origins are linked to bats.

Martin pointed to a 2002 patent as supposed proof. But the patent, which is for a method for creating viral vectors, focuses on a pig coronavirus (viral vectors are used to deliver genetic information to cells). As before, the patent is not evidence that the SARS virus was engineered.

Martin also distorted the meaning of a line of the patent that says the method could help produce “an infectious, replication defective, coronavirus particle.”

“Listen to those words: infectious replication defective,” Martin said suggestively (mark 10:18). “What does that phrase actually mean for those of you not familiar with language? Let me unpack it for you. Infectious replication defective means a weapon. It means something meant to target an individual but not have collateral damage to other individuals.” 

But he’s wrong again. Replication-defective simply means that a viral particle would be incapable of replicating itself.

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Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are 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.

Sources

Payne, Susan. “Family Coronaviridae.” Viruses. 1 Sep 2017. 

“Virology: Coronaviruses.” Nature. Vol. 220. 16 Nov 1968. 

“Coronavirus: Detailed taxonomy.” AVMA.  Accessed 13 Jun 2023. 

“Human Coronavirus Types.” CDC. Updated 15 Feb 2020.

“Common Human Coronaviruses.” CDC. Updated 13 Feb 2020.

“Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).” CDC. 6 Dec 2017.

“Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).” CDC. Updated 2 Aug 2019

Spencer, Saranac H., et al. “New ‘Plandemic’ Video Peddles Misinformation, Conspiracies.” FactCheck.org. Updated 29 Jun 2021. 

Weiss, Susan R. Vice Chair, Department of Microbiology, University of Pennsylvania. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 5 Jun 2023. 

Malone, Robert. “Videos: The International Covid Summit III in the European Parliament, Brussels.” Substack. 15 May 2023. 

Alexander, Lorraine K., et al. “An Experimental Model for Dilated Cardiomyopathy after Rabbit Coronavirus Infection.” The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Vol. 166. 1 Nov 1992.

Kontoulis, Natalie. Press officer for the European Parliament. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 9 Jun 2023. 

Curtis, Kristopher, et al. “Methods for Producing Recombinant Coronavirus.” International Patent Number WO 02/086068 A2. 31 Oct 2002. Robertson, Lori. “Still No Determination on COVID-19 Origin.” FactCheck.org. 20 Mar 2023.

Even before cyclone Biparjoy (literally, ‘disaster’) made landfall in Gujarat, news anchor Sweta Tripathi took Indian television news by storm on Wednesday night. Republic Bharat, the channel where she works, was in the eye of that storm. The show that she put up was another disaster in itself.

Cyclone Biparjoy made landfall over the coastal areas of Saurashtra and the Gulf of Kutch on Thursday evening around 7 pm in the form of a very severe cyclonic storm causing extremely heavy rainfall, strong winds and tidal waves. BBC reports that more than 150,000 people in the two countries were evacuated from the path of the storm before its landfall.

Reporting on the weather conditions in Gujarat hours before the landfall, Republic Bharat anchor Sweta Tripathi hosted a bulletin that has since gone viral on social media. (Barely) Standing with an umbrella in the studio, she twisted and turned, ducked and swerved, stuttered and stumbled under the imagined influence of stormy winds to present a simulacrum of the actual scenario. The result was both hilarious and pathetic. Hilarious because of its absurdity, and pathetic because it ended up making a caricature of what is essentially a natural disaster affecting thousands in potentially life-transforming ways.

Sweta from @Republic_Bharat reporting live from Dwarka, Gujarat. Hope she’s safe. #CycloneBiparjoyUpdate pic.twitter.com/rolXX5Pz4b

— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) June 14, 2023

Standing inside the Noida studio, she says: “See this.. we have reached Dwarka in Gujarat. The wind is blowing so hard that even standing here is difficult.. wind blowing at a speed of 150kmph.. it is tough to be standing or speaking… People have been asked to stay away from ports. How will people face such high-speed wind that is the question. Just imagine what will happen when the actual landfall takes place. That’s why I am asking you to stay safe. Trees are getting uprooted. NDRF teams are prepared….” All the while she continues her antics.

Moreover, the absurdity of the whole thing did not end with the news anchor’s histrionics.

2022 Florida Hurricane Video Shown in Background

The visual that played out behind the anchor all the while was that of Hurricane Ian in Florida from September 2022. We looked at a video of the storm’s destruction uploaded on YouTube by the Washington Post. The red building and the movement of the trees match those in the Republic Bharat video to a tee.

The description of the Washington Post video says: “Video taken on Sept. 29, shows Hurricane Ian slamming Fort Myers, Fla., with destructive winds and devastating flooding.”

Here is a side-by-side comparison of two screen-grabs, one from the Republic Bharat show and one from the Washington Post video report:

As it turns out, the bulletin was not only improperly presented, but factually incorrect as well. An old video from Florida was shown as visuals of the cyclone in Gujarat. But how does authenticity or correctness matter compared to sensationalism!

Aerial Survey by Republic Anchor

Just before the above-mentioned part in the bulletin, the same anchor was shown with the help of VFX inside a helicopter surveying tumultuous sea waters below.

She says: “The storm will also pass over Karachi, but Gujarat will bear the maximum brunt. I’ll now tell you where the landfall will be. We are now passing over the Jakhau port area. This is where the cyclone will hit land. And then, its speed will be 150kmph. If it loses speed, the cyclone will weaken. But if the wind speed goes up, what are the preparations for that? I’ll tell you.”

In the next frame, she ‘storms’ into the screen holding an umbrella as the Florida hurricane video plays out in the backdrop. Watching the entire bulletin is a severe test of the audience’s ability for the willing suspension of disbelief, a faculty that was thus far considered necessary to enjoy a work of creative art.

Not a One-off Instance of Mindless Sensationalism

This is not the first time anchor Sweta Tripathi has seemingly thrown all journalistic decorum to the wind. As part of Republic’s months-long ‘investigation’ into the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, she was seen hounding and bullying a watchman and others outside actor Rhea Chakraborty’s house.

They are innocent Watchmen of the building where #RheaChakrobarty stays. They have nothing to do with the case. Now just watch the video what type of journalism is this? Forget journalism what kind behaviour is this? pic.twitter.com/6aK8Ky58gE

— Saurabh Vaktania (@saurabhv99) August 27, 2020

In another part of the bulletin, she can be seen reporting from outside the gate of Chakraborty’s house. She says, “Rhea Chakraborty, thoda to sharam kijiye! (Have some shame)… We asked Rhea Chakraborty, “What is your drugs connection?”.

The media trial and witch-hunt of Rhea Chakraborty after her former partner Sushant Singh Rajput’s death was one of lowest points in the history of Indian television journalism.

Again, in September 2020, Sweta Tripathi chased actor Deepika Padukone’s car on the streets of Mumbai to ask her questions about her ‘drug addiction’. This was also related to the channel’s ‘investigation’ into Rajput’s death. In the bulletin, she can be herd screaming, “the black car, the black car…” Then, as the TV channel’s vehicle comes close to the actor’s car, she holds the boom out of the car window and screams at the top of her voice, ‘Deepika Padukone, tell us, do you take drugs’? The other car has its windows rolled up.

Kids, don’t do drugs. Or you may become a reporter for @republic 🤣 pic.twitter.com/QxxKmmgevc

— Danish Aslam (@dan1shaslam) September 25, 2020

Taking the Viewer for Granted

At the heart of this trend to pass off anything as ‘breaking news’ lies the belief that the audience will accept whatever they are fed. Not to be left behind, Times Now Navbharat too put out a video placing presenter Shweta Srivastav inside a helicopter as she reported on the impending disaster.

#EXCLUSIVE: ‘बिपरजाॅय’ तूफान की महाकवरेज.. जमीन से आसमान तक ‘नवभारत’ पर देखिए, तूफान से जुड़ी हर अपडेट@NAINAYADAV_06 @PreetiNegi_ @SwetaSri27 #CycloneBiparjoy #Cyclone #CycloneBiparjoyUpdate pic.twitter.com/9Xt6Q7PZXK

— Times Now Navbharat (@TNNavbharat) June 15, 2023

The same confidence to take the audience for granted left Republic editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami red-faced after he had claimed on his show in 2021 that he had intelligence inputs about the goings-on on the fifth floor of Kabul’s two-storeyed Serena Hotel. And the same no-holds-barred craving for sensationalism had made top Times Now editors Navika Kumar and Rahul Shivshankar fall for a fake WhatsApp forward when they read out 30 names of ‘dead Chinese soldiers’ after the Galwan clash in 2020.

Related

On June 9, the Department of Justice unsealed a 44-page indictment against former President Donald Trump detailing allegations not only of mishandling sensitive classified documents after he left office, but of obstructing federal officials who tried to get them back.

In a brief public statement, Jack Smith, the special counsel who is bringing the case, said the indictment charges Trump “with felony violations of our national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.”

“Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced,” Smith said. “Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”

Trump now becomes the first former president to face federal criminal charges. A summons compels him to surrender to authorities in Miami on June 13 for his arraignment.

“We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone,” Smith added.

Smith said his office would seek a “speedy trial … consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused.” (For more on the investigation, see “Timeline of FBI Investigation of Trump’s Handling of Highly Classified Documents.”)

Here, we answer some questions about the indictment. What’s in it? What’s Trump’s response? And more.

What are the charges against Trump?

The indictment contains 37 felony counts – including violating Section 793(e) of Title 18, which is part of the Espionage Act. That section of the law makes it a crime to have “unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over” documents “relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

The 37 charges include 31 counts of “willful retention of national defense information,” a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Additional counts of “conspiracy to obstruct justice,” “withholding a document or record,” “corruptly concealing a document or record,” and “concealing a document in a federal investigation,” all carry a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment.

For the other two counts, a “scheme to conceal” and making “false statements and representations,” Trump, if found guilty, could be incarcerated for five years.

Each of the charges also carries a maximum fine of $250,000, as well as a maximum of three years of “supervised release,” or parole, after imprisonment.

What details are in the indictment?

According to the indictment, Trump had unauthorized possession of “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries,” including the U.S. nuclear programs.

“The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States,” the indictment says, adding that Trump kept the sensitive documents “in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.”

On two occasions in 2021, Trump allegedly showed the classified documents to others. The government has an audio recording of one such instance, which occurred in July 2021 at his golf course in New Jersey, that involved documents about a planned attack on another country, reportedly Iran.

“Trump showed and described a ‘plan of attack’ that Trump said was prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official,” the indictment says of the July 2021 incident. “Trump told the individuals that the plan was ‘highly confidential’ and ‘secret.’ Trump also said, ‘as president I could have declassified it,’ and, ‘Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

About a month or two later, Trump allegedly showed a staffer at his political action committee “a classified map related to a military operation.”

The indictment also accuses Trump of obstructing justice and providing false statements.

It says Trump suggested that “his attorney hide or destroy documents called for by the grand jury subpoena,” as well as falsely claim that he did not have documents sought by the grand jury.

The indictment also describes how Trump hid boxes of documents from his own attorney after receiving the May 11, 2022, grand jury subpoena seeking documents “bearing classification markings.”

On June 2, in response to the subpoena, an attorney for Trump searched boxes in a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home and club, for classified documents. But, prior to the inspection, Trump directed one of his employees, Walt Nauta, “to move boxes of documents to conceal them from Trump’s attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury,” according to the indictment. From May 23 to June 2, “Nauta — at Trump’s direction — moved approximately 64 boxes from the Storage Room to Trump’s residence” and returned “only approximately 30 boxes” for the attorney’s review.

At Mar-a-Lago on June 3, 2022, another Trump attorney — who wasn’t involved in reviewing the boxes — provided government agents with “38 unique documents bearing classification markings,” and a sworn statement that said a “diligent search was conducted” for “all documents that are responsive to the subpoena.”

But, shortly after the visit, “the FBI uncovered multiple sources of evidence indicating” that Trump’s “response to the May 11 grand jury subpoena was incomplete and that classified documents remained at the Premises,” a court filing said. That evidence — including surveillance video showing Nauta moving boxes — resulted in the FBI obtaining a court-approved search warrant, which was executed on Aug. 8, 2022.

“During the execution of the warrant at The Mar-a-Lago Club, the FBI seized 102 documents with classification markings in Trump’s office and the Storage Room,” including 17 top secret documents, the indictment says.

The indictment also uses Trump’s own words against him. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump frequently attacked Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information. The indictment includes several examples of Trump promising during the campaign to “enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information.”

“No one will be above the law,” Trump said at that time.

Who is Walt Nauta?

Nauta, a member of the U.S. Navy who served as a valet in Trump’s White House and later as Trump’s personal aide, has also been indicted in the documents case.

According to the indictment, Nauta served as Trump’s “body man” starting in August 2021, and he was personally involved in moving around boxes of records at Mar-a-Lago — at Trump’s direction — to avoid their detection by not only the Department of Justice, but also Trump’s own attorneys.

Trump and Nauta “misled” a Trump attorney “by moving boxes that contained documents with classification markings so that [the attorney] would not find the documents and produce them to a federal grand jury,” according to the indictment. As we said, Nauta helped move approximately 64 boxes from a storage room to Trump’s residence, the indictment says.

The indictment says that under questioning by the FBI, Nauta also lied about that.

Nauta has been charged with violating federal codes related to conspiring to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheming to conceal, and making false statements and representations. The first four carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and the last two carry a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

What about Biden?

In a Truth Social post announcing his indictment, Trump quickly turned to whataboutism, lashing out at what he perceives as unequal Department of Justice treatment of Biden for doing what Trump says is the same or worse. But it’s not the same, and Trump’s claims are false and misleading.

Trump said he had been indicted, “even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is ‘secured’ by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time.”

As we have explained, in 2012 Biden donated more than 1,850 boxes of records from his years in the U.S. Senate to the University of Delaware. The documents are not available for public access following an agreement between Biden and the university at the time of the donation not to provide public access to any of the materials until “two years after the donor [Biden] retires from public life.” In October, a Delaware Superior Court judge upheld the University of Delaware’s refusal to provide access to the documents after the nonprofit Judicial Watch sought them through a Freedom of Information Act request.

However, the Justice Department, with Biden’s consent, reviewed the documents in February and did not find any with classified markings, although some were taken for further review, CBS News has reported.

As for the “additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C.,” Trump is referring to the revelation from Biden aide Kathy Chung that the boxes of documents taken from Biden’s vice presidential offices that ended up at the Penn Biden Center — and were later determined to contain classified documents — were previously and temporarily kept at two other locations, including one in Chinatown.

“He had seven or eight boxes in Chinatown in Washington, D.C., where nobody even speaks English in Chinatown,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall on June 1. “Chinatown is very — it’s in favor of China and he has boxes in Chinatown.”

Testifying before the House Oversight Committee in April, Chung said after the materials were initially boxed up at the end of Biden’s term as vice president, they were stored for six months at a space rented by the General Services Administration. The boxes were then moved temporarily — for about a month she said — to a private office space in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The boxes, which she said were unopened at both of the temporary storage locations, were then permanently moved to the Penn Biden Center in D.C. So despite Trump’s post, there are no longer any Biden documents being stored at the location in Chinatown.

It’s also misleading for Trump to say “even more” boxes were stored at the University of Pennsylvania. Those are the same boxes that were stored temporarily in Chinatown.

As we detailed in our Jan. 19 story, “Timeline of Biden’s Classified Documents,” Richard Sauber, special counsel to Biden, said in a Jan. 9 statement that on Nov. 2, while packing files in preparation for vacating office space used by the former vice president at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., personal attorneys for Biden came across “what appear to be Obama-Biden Administration records, including a small number of documents with classified markings.” The University of Pennsylvania-affiliated think tank was established in 2017, after Biden was no longer vice president, and its offices opened in February 2018, about a year before Biden took a leave of absence to run for president. 

The office of the Penn Biden Center “was not authorized for storage of classified documents,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in remarks on Jan. 12. Garland said that on Nov. 9 the FBI began “an assessment, consistent with standard protocols, to understand whether classified information had been mishandled in violation of federal law.” Garland also noted that on Nov. 14, he tapped U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John R. Lausch Jr. to conduct an initial review related to “the possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records” at the Penn Biden Center.

With Biden’s consent, the FBI searched the Penn Biden Center in mid-November. But the existence of even more classified documents came to light a month later when Biden’s personal counsel informed Lausch that additional documents from Biden’s time as vice president bearing classification markings were found in the garage of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. The FBI took possession of the documents.

Still more documents with classified markings were found by Biden attorneys in Biden’s home and garage in mid-January. At various points, the FBI searched the Penn Biden Center, as well as Biden’s homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, all with the consent and cooperation of Biden. According to CBS News’ reporting and what we know from statements by Biden’s lawyers, less than 30 classified documents were found in Biden’s possession at different locations.

On Jan. 12, Garland announced the appointment of Robert Hur as a special counsel “to investigate whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with this matter.” So the Biden mishandling of classified documents is not being ignored. The investigation has not concluded.

As we have written, there are significant differences between Biden’s situation and Trump’s. In Trump’s case, the search warrant was issued after months of negotiations and a grand jury subpoena resulted in only a partial return of classified documents.

We should note that Trump has repeatedly claimed that he is being held to a double standard compared with other past presidents who he says have done the same thing. But as we have written, that’s not accurate.

Do presidents have the authority to declassify documents?

On Truth Social, Trump shared a June 9 post from Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, who wrote: “The former president will be indicted for ‘mishandling’ his own government’s classified info. Yet everyone agrees the president has the authority to declassify anything.”

Yes, the president has the ultimate authority to declassify a document. As we’ve written: “The legal authority for classifying national security information rests in the president’s power afforded as commander-in-chief and is guided by a series of presidential executive orders, beginning with one issued by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. The latest of such orders, Executive Order 13526, issued in late 2009 by then-President Barack Obama, lays out in detail the procedures to declassify information, and the various officials who are to be included in such decisions.”

However, Trump’s representatives have made the dubious claim that he previously declassified all of the Mar-a-Lago documents via a “standing order” that said “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”

Multiple experts on national security and the law surrounding classified documents said that explanation isn’t plausible, and a number of former Trump administration officials said they had no knowledge of the former president issuing such an order when he was in office.

John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told the New York Times in 2022 that the claim is “almost certainly a lie.”

Bolton told the Times he “was never briefed on any such order, procedure, policy” when he worked at the White House or after. “If he [Trump] were to say something like that, you would have to memorialize that, so that people would know it existed,” Bolton said.

In a phone interview, Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel for the National Security Agency during the Obama and Trump administrations, told us the standard procedure for declassifying information is “quite detailed.” He said a determination has to be made that the information is significant and in the public interest, followed by a determination that declassification wouldn’t pose a security threat if the information was revealed. The agency that initiated the classification would also be consulted for input on whether the information should remain classified. The agency’s recommendation would be considered by the president, who would then make a final decision, Gerstell said.

In addition, according to the indictment, Trump, in a July 2021 meeting at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf resort, admitted that he had not declassified at least one classified Pentagon document in his possession about attacking another country, reportedly Iran.

“[A]s president, I could have declassified. … Now I can’t,” a transcript of a recording of the conversation says. At another point, Trump tells those in the room, who did not have security clearances, that the document had been classified by the military. “Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump reportedly said.

Can Trump continue to run for, or legally serve as, president if convicted?

“Yes, someone can run for president while under indictment or even having been convicted and serving prison time,” Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown University law professor, told us in March. “The reason is that the Constitution lays out the qualifications for being president.”

According to Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, there are three qualifications to serve as president: He or she must be at least 35 years old upon taking office, a U.S. resident for at least 14 years and a “natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States.”

“These qualifications are understood to be exclusive,” Chafetz said. “Anyone can be president so long as they meet the constitutional qualifications and do not trigger any constitutional disqualifications.”

The 22nd Amendment states that “[n]o person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” But that wouldn’t apply to Trump, who has been elected only once.

Insider surveyed nine other legal scholars who reached the same conclusion. One of them, Harvard University Professor Laurence Tribe, told the news site: “Some presidents have described the White House as a prison, but the Constitution doesn’t specify that that’s the only prison you could occupy in order to serve as president.”

As an example, Chafetz cited Eugene V. Debs, the late labor leader, who, in 1920, ran for president from prison on the Socialist Party ticket and got almost 1 million votes.

What is the status of other Trump investigations?

In addition to handling the documents investigation on Trump, Garland has said Smith would also oversee the Justice Department’s ongoing probe of “whether any person or entity unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification of the Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021.”

In addition, the Fulton County district attorney’s office is investigating whether Trump’s efforts to reverse the 2020 election outcome in Georgia amounted to a crime. In February, the jury foreperson of a special grand jury empaneled in Atlanta revealed that the grand jury recommended multiple people be indicted related to activities involving criminal interference in Georgia’s 2020 elections. Although the jury forewoman did not name those recommended for indictment, she said, “You’re not going to be shocked” by whom the list might include.

In mid-May, the Hill reported that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis asked judges in her county not to schedule trials and in-person hearings in the early part of August, in what many took as a sign that Willis will bring charges at that time.

And, of course, Trump faces an indictment in New York accusing him of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. In documents filed at Trump’s arraignment on April 4, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleged the falsified business records were meant to conceal hush money payments to three people alleging extramarital affairs by Trump, in furtherance of helping Trump’s presidential campaign.

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During the wee hours of June 1, almost a dozen of idols of Hindu deities in four temples in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, were vandalized by some miscreants. According to the news reports, the incident happened at Baral village in Bulandshahr district. Ever since the news of the same broke, several users on social media shared a video of the vandalized condition of the idols calling it an attack on Hindus and claiming that this could be an act of the Muslim community. Some news media channels also implied the same.

Twitter user हम लोग We The People (@ajaychauhan41), who frequently shares communal misinformation on social media, shared the said video on June 1 in a Twitter thread made in Hindi. The first tweet can be translated as, “Four temples in Bulandshahr were attacked and idols vandalized last night. Fake reports of attacks on churches/mosques become international news. They start calling Hindus intolerant. When will there be news on the attacks on our temples??” The tweet has been retweeted over 400 times. (Archive)

In the second tweet he mentions that this has been done by ‘Jihadis’, referring to the Muslim community.

यूपी के बुलंदशहर में जिहादियों का नंगा नाच, 5 मंदिरों की मुर्तियां सहित शिवलिंग को तोड़ा। बड़ा सवाल, आखिर हिंदुस्थान में कब बंद होगा हिंदू मंदिरों पर तालिबानी आतंक! pic.twitter.com/jypqpBH5hG

— हम लोग We The People (@ajaychauhan41) June 1, 2023

Twitter Blue user BALA (@erbmjha), who is followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, also shared the same video with the following caption: “More than 12 different idols of Hindu deities were vandalized in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh across four different temples, reportedly over 100 years old, by unknown miscreants. They are attacking our culture, They they area (sic) attacking our temples, They are attacking our daughters, Meanwhile, we are only allowed to seat in the backseat and watch as our destruction unfolds, or else we will be labelled as intolerant, communal and so on!” The tweet has received over 6 lakh views and has been retweeted over 1,000 times. (Archive)

More than 12 different idols of Hindu deities were vandalized in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh across four different temples, reportedly over 100 years old, by unknown miscreants.

They are attacking our culture, They they area attacking our temples, They are attacking our… pic.twitter.com/Sz27sYyolb

— BALA (@erbmjha) June 1, 2023

On June 1, Zee Uttar Pradesh Uttarakhand (@ZEEUPUK) shared on Twitter a video clip of a bulletin where the channel had invited three guests — Alok Awasthi from the BJP, Vivek Pandey from the Samajwadi party and Mohd Atiq from the Indian Union Muslim League — to discuss the matter of idol destruction in four temples in Bulandshahr. The discussion was titled as, “बुलंदशहर में औरंगजेबी गैंग?”, which can be translated to: “Aurangzeb-like gangs in Bulandshahr?”. (Archive)

#UPMaangeUttar

‘आस्था’ का अपमान…बुलंदशहर में ‘घमासान’
बुलंदशहर ‘सुलगाने’ की साज़िश किसकी ?
मठ-मंदिर पर हमला…कौन बिगाड़ रहा फिजा ?#Bulandshahr @samajwadiparty @BJP4UP @priyasi90 pic.twitter.com/MkfKzTgEnP

— Zee Uttar Pradesh Uttarakhand (@ZEEUPUK) June 1, 2023

Sudhir Chaudhuri from Aaj Tak also covered the matter on his show Black and White on June 2. After mentioning that no one yet knows who is behind this act and that the police are looking for the miscreants, at the 2.47 mark of the video Chaudhuri starts providing population data of Bulandshahr on the basis of religion. He further goes on to mention a recent crime where a 20-year-old man, Sahil Khan, had been arrested from the same district for killing his 16-year-old girlfriend by stabbing her 34 times. (Archive)

The Aaj Tak journalist also shared the live stream of the show from the channel with a caption Hindi: “In #Bulandshahar temples Shivling has been broken but there is silence in the country. Now secularism is not in danger?” (Archive)

131 साल पुराने मंदिर पर हमले की कहीं चर्चा क्यों नहीं? #Bulandshahr #BlackAndWhiteOnAajTak | @sudhirchaudhary pic.twitter.com/uYwaA3XORo

— AajTak (@aajtak) June 2, 2023

Several other social media users including Jitendra Pratap Singh, the executive editor of propaganda outlet Sudharshan News, @MithilaWaala and @KreatelyMedia also made posts on the matter with similar claims. Singh, who had directly claimed that ‘Jihadis’ were behind the nuisance, later deleted his tweet.

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Fact Check

A keyword search in Hindi led us to a report by Dainik Bhaskar published on June 8. The headline of the report can be translated as: “Confession by the accused of religious idol vandalization: Damaged idols were being worshipped, we broke them so new ones can be installed, 4 accused arrested”. The report further mentioned that all the four accused were residents of Baral and their names were — Harish Sharma, Shivam, Keshav and Ajay.

We also found a tweet by the Bulandshahr police where SSP Shlok Kumar confirmed that the four accused had been arrested. The SSP also mentioned that this act was spearheaded by Harish Sharma who often hosted the other three and they drank alcohol together. On the day of the act also they were in an inebriated state.

थाना गुलावठी क्षेत्रान्तर्गत मंदिरों की मूर्तियां को खंडित करने वाले 04 अभियुक्तों की गिरफ्तारी के सम्बन्ध में वरिष्ठ पुलिस अधीक्षक की बाइट।@Uppolice @dgpup @adgzonemeerut @igrangemeerut pic.twitter.com/AHLch0hzJr

— Bulandshahr Police (@bulandshahrpol) June 8, 2023

In another tweet, Bulandshahr police shared an official notice of the arrest of the four. The notice also mentions the same names of all four accused as mentioned in the Dainik Bhaskar report.

थाना गुलावठी पुलिस द्वारा मंदिरों की मूर्तियां को खंडित करने वाले 04 अभियुक्त गिरफ्तार।#UPPolice #BulandshahrPolice pic.twitter.com/z479Jzd8nE

— Bulandshahr Police (@bulandshahrpol) June 8, 2023

We found more coverage by some YouTube channels which carried the statement of SSP Shlok Kumar.

After the four accused were arrested Aaj Tak shared an update on the matter that the miscreants were Hindu. Sudhir Chaudhuri reshared the video and tweeted it with the caption, “The ones who vandalized the temples in Bulandshahr are Hindus residing in the same village”.

Therefore, the miscreants who vandalized idols of Hindu deities in four temples at Bulandshahr have been arrested. It was executed by four men all of whom are Hindus.

Related

In a series of public appearances on June 7, Mike Pence formally jumped into the 2024 presidential race, becoming the first vice president in 83 years to challenge a president under whom he served.

Pence had plenty to say about his former boss, Donald Trump, and even more to say about the current president, Joe Biden. He got a few things wrong regarding both men.

• Pence gave the misleading impression that the Obama administration gave Ukraine no “military resources at all” after Russia’s 2014 invasion. The U.S. provided nonlethal military aid, including training, vehicles and radar equipment.
• He falsely claimed that the Trump administration “continued” a policy of separating families that illegally crossed the border that “began under the Obama administration.” Experts have said that Trump’s new policy was very different from Barack Obama’s.
• Pence claimed a surge in illegal immigration is “all being driven by the cartels and the failed policies of the Biden administration.” But immigration experts say there are more complex push and pull factors that explain the surge.
• The former vice president misleadingly accused the Biden administration of “giving Russia back a Nord Stream 2 deal,” referring to a Russian natural gas pipeline to Germany that remains inoperable and under U.S. sanctions.
• Pence said it took just one day for the FBI to come to his house after being told he had classified material in his home, but it took “80 days” for the Department of Justice to come to Biden’s office after classified documents were found there. But that’s not how things unfolded.
• Pence said “inflation is at a 40-year high” — a statement that was true last summer but no longer. He said “it all started” with a Democratic COVID-19 relief law, but economists point to the pandemic as the main culprit.

Pence kicked off his campaign with a speech in Ankeny, Iowa, which he followed with a CNN town hall.

Obama’s Ukraine Aid

Pence dismissed nonlethal military aid the U.S. gave Ukraine to fight back against Russia in 2014, claiming that the Obama administration provided no “military resources.”

“Our administration ended what was a ban during the Obama-Biden administration on any military resources at all,” Pence said during the town hall. “We provided javelin missiles — all they were providing was military meals and blankets. We corrected that and Ukraine was better situated to be able to deal with this Russian invasion.”

The Obama administration didn’t provide Ukraine with lethal military weaponry, as Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko had requested. However, as we’ve written before, including this week when Chris Christie made a similar claim, the U.S. did supply other military and security aid that was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

In a January 2017 report, the Congressional Research Service said the U.S. had given over $1.3 billion in foreign assistance to Ukraine amid hostilities with Russia in 2014. Over $600 million of that was security aid.

When testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March 2016, Victoria Nuland, who was the assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, detailed some of the security aid to Ukraine, which she said included military training, communications equipment, vehicles, night-vision goggles and counter-mortar radar to detect incoming artillery fire.

Family Separation Policies

Border security policies that separated parents and children who migrated illegally were not the same under Presidents Obama and Trump, contrary to Pence’s claim on CNN.

“Look, the family separation policy actually began under the Obama administration,” Pence said. “And then we continued it until President Trump rightly reversed course.”

That’s not accurate. As we’ve written, Trump signed an executive order that reversed his own “zero tolerance” border policy — not Obama’s.

Initially, the Trump administration’s 2018 policy, which was implemented to deter illegal immigration along the southern border, required the Department of Homeland Security to refer all adults who illegally entered the U.S. for criminal prosecution. If they were traveling with their children, the minors were separated from their parents, who entered the federal court system and were detained in holding centers for adults only.

Immigration experts told us prior administrations didn’t have the same blanket policy to prosecute parents and split them from their kids.

“[George W.] Bush and Obama did not have policies that resulted in the mass separation of parents and children like we’re seeing under the current administration,” Sarah Pierce, a Migration Policy Institute analyst, told us in June 2018. She said child separations under administrations before Trump’s were done in “really limited circumstances” such as suspicion of trafficking or other fraud.

The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Theresa Cardinal Brown and Tim O’Shea wrote an explainer that made a similar point about the different policies. The authors also said pre-Trump administrations often used family detention facilities that allowed relatives to stay together until their deportation cases were resolved. Other times, families were released from custody but were tracked with devices while awaiting their court date.

Blaming Biden for Surge in Illegal Immigration

There has been an unmistakable surge in immigrants attempting to cross the border illegally, a trend Pence blamed squarely on the cartels and what he called “the failed policies of the Biden administration.” But immigration experts say there are more complex push and pull factors that explain the surge.

“Five million people coming across our border in the last two years, all being driven by the cartels and the failed policies of the Biden administration,” Pence said during the CNN town hall.

It’s true there have been nearly 5 million apprehensions of people trying to cross the southern border illegally since Biden took office in January, 2021, according to data compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But as we have explained before, that number is a bit inflated by repeat offenders.

Many of the apprehensions at the border have been illegal border crossings that resulted in immediate expulsions under Title 42, a public health law the Trump administration began invoking at the southwest border in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Instead of being detained for a longer period of time, being criminally prosecuted or having a formal removal order placed on their record, those subject to Title 42 were simply turned around at the border. As a result, experts at the Migration Policy Institute said, it encouraged people to try crossing again and again, driving up the apprehension numbers. CBP data back that up. The recidivism rate — meaning the share of people caught crossing more than once — was 27% in fiscal year 2021, which began under Trump on Oct. 1, 2020, and ended on Sept. 30, 2021, when Biden was president. By comparison, the rate was just 7% in fiscal year 2019. With the pandemic officially over, the Biden administration lifted Title 42 in early May.

Nonetheless, the number of apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border has been historically high during Biden’s presidency. As we noted in our latest installment of “Biden’s Numbers,” apprehensions rose 342% when comparing the 12 months ending in March to Trump’s last year in office.

Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute, said at least some of the surge in immigration has been because the Biden administration has been perceived as being more lenient toward migrants at the border than the Trump administration was, which encouraged more people to attempt to come to the U.S.

But to place the blame overwhelmingly on Biden’s policies, as Pence did, ignores some of the push and pull factors that have driven a surge in migration not just to the U.S., but around the whole region.

“A balanced view of the drivers of migration to the U.S.-Mexico border would look at both the pull factors — which include a strong U.S. economy, a labor market that has more than 10 million job openings, legal pathways that are insufficient to address labor and family reunification needs, and changing U.S. policies – as well as the push factors,” Mittelstadt told us via email.

“And there are many push factors, including political and economic instability in countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua; a country on the brink of failure (Haiti); record humanitarian protection needs around the globe; and climate-induced natural disasters and crop failure,” Mittelstadt said. “While much of this has resulted in record levels of migration within Latin America and the Caribbean, some migration has also headed towards the United States. Finally, there is the pandemic, which chilled mobility of all sorts globally in 2020 and into 2021. No region of the world was more affected economically by the pandemic than Latin America and the Caribbean. So some of the movements being seen to the border today are the result of an artificial, temporary chilling of movement, as well as the economic repercussions of the pandemic, with the strong U.S. economic recovery making the income gap with other countries in the region even wider.”

Russia’s Inoperable Natural Gas Pipeline to Germany

Pence misleadingly accused the Biden administration of “giving Russia back a Nord Stream 2 deal,” referring to a natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. The pipeline is completed, but not operational because it needs Germany’s approval — which the country withheld because of Russian aggression in Ukraine.

We have been over this issue more than once, because Trump has falsely claimed that Biden “approved” Nord Stream 2 and “opened it up.”

A quick rundown of the facts: Nord Stream 2 runs parallel to Nord Stream 1, which has been operational since 2011. Both are owned by Gazprom, a state-owned gas company, as explained in a March 2022 report by the Congressional Research Service. The U.S. has been concerned about Europe’s increasing reliance on Russian energy and tried to stop the pipeline “through progressively more stringent sanctions legislation enacted in 2017, 2019, and 2020” that slowed down construction.

After the 2019 sanctions, which targeted companies involved in the construction of the pipeline, work was suspended for about a year, resuming in December 2020, while Trump and Pence were still in office. At the time, the pipeline was reportedly about 90% complete.

After taking office, the Biden administration indicated that its “ability to prevent the pipeline from becoming operational was limited, even with additional sanctions,” CRS said in its report. The Biden administration also “expressed concern that additional U.S. sanctions could have jeopardized U.S.-German and U.S.-European cooperation,” because Germany saw “the pipeline as an important natural gas corridor,” the report said.

In May 2021, Biden waived sanctions against those involved in the Nord Stream 2 project, which was completed in September 2021. Pence is presumably referring to the sanctions being waived, when he said Biden gave “Russia back a Nord Stream 2 deal.” But, as we said, the pipeline is still not operational and final approval is up to Germany.

In response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, Germany on Feb. 22, 2022, suspended the certification process that Russia needs to operate the pipeline, and the U.S. a day later resumed sanctions against Nord Stream 2 AG, a subsidiary of Gazprom, and its executives. Since the war started, Nord Stream 2 AG has received two court extensions in an effort to stave off bankruptcy. The latest “stay of bankruptcy” lasts until next month.

Classified Documents

During the CNN town hall, Pence said he was “very troubled last summer when, for the first time in history, there was a search warrant executed at the home of a former president of the United States.” Pence argued there are “dozens of ways that could have been handled” differently.

Pence then said justice has been applied unevenly by the FBI in some of its classified documents cases.

“I mean, when I informed the Department of Justice that we had classified materials potentially in our home, they were at my home. The FBI was on my front doorstep the next day,” Pence said. “And what we found out was that, when Joe Biden apparently alerted the Department of Justice, 80 days later, they showed up at his office. That’s not equal treatment under the law.”

That’s not an accurate account of how things unfolded regarding classified documents held by Biden.

But let’s start with Pence’s mishandling of classified documents. After the classified documents investigations emerged for both Biden and Trump, Pence said he “took it upon myself to review our files” at his home in Indiana.

According to NBC News, a team of lawyers for Pence discovered a “small number of documents that could potentially contain sensitive or classified information” in Pence’s residence on Jan. 16, and they immediately notified the National Archives. The National Archives alerted the Department of Justice, and three days later, on Jan. 19 — with Pence’s blessing — FBI agents came to Pence’s Indiana home and retrieved the documents, NBC reported.

Three weeks later, on Feb. 10, the FBI — with the cooperation of Pence — conducted a five-hour search of Pence’s home and discovered another classified document, NBC News reported.

Last week, Pence was informed that he would not be charged for his mishandling of classified documents, according to a letter obtained by NBC News.

“They concluded that it was an innocent mistake,” Pence said at the CNN town hall.

That’s not dissimilar from the way things were handled in the case involving Biden. The Justice Department quickly retrieved classified documents found by Biden’s attorneys, and later, the FBI conducted its own searches of Biden’s offices and residences.

We laid out the details in our Jan. 19 story, “Timeline of Biden’s Classified Documents.”

Although details were not publicly revealed until early January, attorneys for Biden first discovered what the White House Counsel’s Office called “a small number of documents with classified markings” at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 2. The White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives, which took possession of the documents the following morning.

On Nov. 4, the National Archives Office contacted a prosecutor at the Department of Justice and informs him that documents which bear classified markings are now secured in a National Archives facility.

According to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the FBI on Nov. 9 began “an assessment, consistent with standard protocols, to understand whether classified information had been mishandled in violation of federal law.” In “mid-November,” the FBI also searched the Penn Biden Center offices, according to CBS News’ reporting. The FBI did not seek or need a search warrant, because Biden’s representatives cooperated with the search. So in that case, there were two weeks between the discovery of documents and the FBI search of the offices — not 80 days. And, we would note, that was a shorter time than the gap between first-discovery and the FBI search of Pence’s home.

But that was not the end of Biden’s classified documents problems.

On Dec. 20, Biden’s personal counsel informed the DOJ that additional documents from Biden’s time as vice president bearing classification markings were found in the garage of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. The FBI took possession of the documents, Garland revealed at a Jan. 12 press conference.

Then, on Jan. 11, Biden’s personal attorneys searched his Delaware homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, and in the Wilmington home, they came across a document with classified markings and immediately contacted the Department of Justice. The next day, DOJ came and took those documents from the home.

On Jan. 20, investigators with the Department of Justice – with the cooperation of the Biden team – conducted a “thorough search” of Biden’s Wilmington home and took “possession of materials it [the department] deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials,” according to a statement released by a personal attorney for Biden. On Feb. 1, the FBI searched Biden’s house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. According to an attorney for Biden, “No documents with classified markings were found” in the three-and-a-half-hour search. The Justice Department “took for further review some materials and handwritten notes that appear to relate to his [Biden’s] time as Vice President.”

Contrary to Pence’s statement, there was no 80-day delay between the dates when Biden’s attorneys notified authorities they had discovered classified documents at a location and when the FBI showed up to either pick those documents up, or to conduct an independent search.

As we have written, there are significant differences between Biden’s situation and Trump’s, as we detailed in our story “Classified Documents Found at Former Biden Office, Drawing Comparisons to Trump.” In Trump’s case, the search warrant was issued after months of negotiations and a grand jury subpoena resulted in only a partial return of classified documents.

There is also a matter of scale. According to CBS News’ reporting and what we know from statements by Biden’s lawyers, less than 30 classified documents were found in Biden’s possession at different locations. By contrast, the Department of Justice says that in its search at Mar-a-Lago, officials took possession of 18 government documents marked as top secret, 53 marked as secret and 30 marked as confidential. That’s a total of 101 classified documents.

Inflation

In the town hall, Pence wrongly said that “inflation is at a 40-year high” and “it all started when President Joe Biden and the Democrats passed a $2 trillion bill in the name of COVID.” Inflation was at a 40-year high, but not now. And the legislation he referenced didn’t start it all — economists point to several reasons for high inflation, beginning with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

There’s no doubt inflation has been high in the last few years. The Consumer Price Index rose 9.1% for the 12 months ending in June 2022, the largest increase since November 1981, 41 years prior, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But the figures have dropped since then. Inflation was up 4.9% for the 12 months ending in April. Before Biden took office, inflation last had been that high in September 2008.

Republicans have repeatedly pinned all of the blame for inflation on the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief law passed by Democrats in March 2021 that included $1,400 checks to most Americans, expanded unemployment benefits, and money for schools, small businesses and states. As we’ve written before, many economists say the law played a role in boosting inflation, but it was hardly the only factor — with the economic repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic looming large.  

The pandemic acutely affected supply, demand and labor, as people spent considerably less for months and then began spending considerably more. Also, gas prices were affected by supply/demand pandemic fallout, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions many countries, including the U.S., put on Russian oil.

Economists we interviewed last summer told us that while the ARP contributed some to inflation, the country also needed some level of stimulus to help the economy recover from the pandemic.

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For decades, an unassuming government vaccine safety surveillance system has done its job, quickly flagging possible side effects and allowing scientists and regulators to investigate further. 

But for nearly as long, the ​​Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, has also been exploited by people opposed to vaccination. With a publicly searchable database, full of unverified reports of health problems that occurred sometime after vaccination, VAERS has proven irresistible to the anti-vaccination community, which often falsely claims the number of reported deaths or other issues is proof that vaccines are dangerous.

That’s despite the fact that the reports aren’t vetted for accuracy and don’t mean that a vaccine caused a particular problem.

VAERS is an early warning system used to identify potential safety concerns after a vaccine has been authorized or approved in the U.S. It’s often described as a “frontline” system, since it’s frequently the first vaccine safety system to detect a problem. But it’s also noisy and prone to distortion.

“Most of the anti-vaccine stuff that you hear, when they start to talk about how vaccines caused whatever, they’ll point to VAERS data,” Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us. “It is just manna from heaven to get bad information out there.”

While VAERS distortions were already a staple of vaccine misinformation prior to the pandemic, misuse of VAERS exploded with the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines in late 2020. At FactCheck.org, we’ve written story after story debunking false or misleading claims about the COVID-19 vaccines that were based on misunderstandings about VAERS — and so have our fellow fact-checkers.

And now, one of the most notorious abusers of VAERS data is running for president. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of assassinated President John F. Kennedy and a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, announced his campaign challenging President Joe Biden in April. (Kennedy has stated that he is for safer vaccines and is not “anti-vaccine,” but many of his arguments against vaccination are inaccurate or misleading and typical of the movement.)

In 2016, Kennedy founded a group that would become Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that traffics in anti-vaccine misinformation and disinformation. Hundreds of stories on Kennedy’s website mention VAERS.

Given the misuse and confusion around VAERS, a research team at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center — led by APPC Director Kathleen Hall Jamieson and in partnership with Critica Science — has proposed renaming VAERS “Vaccination Safety Monitor” or “Vaccination Safety Watch.” APPC is FactCheck.org’s parent organization.

Here, we’ll explain how VAERS works and run through five misconceptions that anti-vaccination activists wield to mislead people about vaccines.

A Frontline System, Ripe for Distortion

As we’ve explained before, vaccines given to the public have already been tested in clinical trials, but those trials can only be so big and aren’t expected to be able to identify rare side effects. That’s where VAERS and other post-marketing safety surveillance systems come in.

VAERS, which began in 1990 and is co-run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, collects reports of health problems that occur after vaccination. Anyone can submit a report, regardless of whether it’s likely the vaccine caused the event.

The CDC and FDA then review the reports in a variety of ways, and further investigate any possible safety concerns.

“VAERS is designed to detect unusual or unexpected patterns,” Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, told us in an interview. “It’s really about pattern recognition.”

Key strengths of VAERS are its large size and speed. Because VAERS reports draw from across the country, even a very rare event can be quickly identified as a possible side effect. 

Most famously, VAERS was the first system to raise concerns about a link between intussusception, a type of intestinal blockage, and RotaShield, the first rotavirus vaccine. In June 1999, just nine months after approval, 10 reports of intussusception had been reported to VAERS in infants who had received the RotaShield vaccine. This triggered further study of the issue and led CDC to temporarily suspend the shot the following month. The manufacturer recalled the vaccine a few months later, after other studies confirmed the safety signal.

Susan S. Ellenberg, a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told us the RotaShield example is the “poster child” for how VAERS can work.

VAERS has successfully flagged other safety concerns, including inflammation of the heart and surrounding tissue, known as myocarditis and pericarditis, which are the primary serious side effects of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The conditions are rare after vaccination and are most frequent in young males after a second dose.

The system is also used to monitor the safety of different vaccine lots and to identify risk factors for developing certain vaccine side effects. VAERS data, for example, contributed to the decision to advise people with a severe immunodeficiency to avoid the RotaTeq and Rotarix rotavirus vaccines.

VAERS is unique in having its data available for anyone to access. In the early years, people had to file Freedom of Information Act requests to access the data. But in 2001, in the spirit of transparency, the agency posted the data online for download, a CDC spokesperson told us. In 2006, the data became searchable in an online tool.

Many of the features of VAERS, however, also make it susceptible to bad actors.

“The minute it was created, you could have argued that this was going to be misused, or at least misunderstood, because you’re asking people to understand the difference between causality and coincidence,” Offit said.

Ellenberg, who oversaw VAERS at FDA between 1993 and 2004, told us the system’s data was misused “from the very beginning.” She recalled one effort by the National Vaccine Information Center, a prominent anti-vaccination group, to use VAERS data to claim that certain vaccine lots, or what it called “hot lots,” were dangerous.

“They would look at VAERS and find vaccine lots that had the most reports associated with them and put them out there as those were potentially more toxic,” she said. “What the truth is, is that vaccine lots are variable sizes” and it’s completely normal for a vaccine lot with 100,000 doses to have more VAERS reports than one with 3,000. Lot sizes are proprietary information and therefore are not publicly available.

As PolitiFact has reported, the National Vaccine Information Center created its own VAERS search tool in 2003 that has become a favorite of anti-vaccination activists, fueling VAERS-based misinformation.

Federal officials have attempted to explain the limitations of VAERS and to discourage misinterpretations of the data, both in disclaimers on the website and in multiple academic articles.

As early as 1997, Ellenberg explained in a journal article that the way VAERS is designed, “sensitivity takes precedence over specificity; reporting of all serious events following vaccination is encouraged, inevitably resulting in large numbers of reports that do not represent vaccine-induced problems.”

“VAERS data must be interpreted with caution due to the inherent limitations of passive surveillance,” Shimabukuro and colleagues wrote in a 2015 article published in Vaccine, noting that VAERS is “primarily a safety signal detection and hypothesis generating system.”

“VAERS data interpreted alone or out of context can lead to erroneous conclusions about cause and effect as well as the risk of adverse events occurring following vaccination,” they added.

Claims involving VAERS have nevertheless figured prominently in anti-vaccine efforts to reduce the reach of a variety of vaccines, including the measles, mumps and rubella, and human papillomavirus vaccines.

With the COVID-19 vaccines, Ellenberg said the problem became “substantially worse.” Offit agreed that claims have “dramatically increased.” And anti-vaccine activists are using the tactics honed during the pandemic to apply them once again to other vaccines.

Common Patterns of Deceptions

1) Inappropriately Assuming Causality (And Accuracy)

Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding about VAERS is that the health issues described in the reports are not necessarily caused by the vaccine — and are often purely coincidental.

“Reports in VAERS simply represent something that happened after you got a vaccine. They don’t tell you the vaccine caused this,” Ellenberg said.

In some cases, it may be reasonable to assume the vaccine was the cause, such as some swelling on an arm just after a shot. But usually, Shimabukuro said, the information provided in a report isn’t enough to know whether a health problem was caused by a vaccine.

“Vaccines protect against a particular thing, a particular disease. They don’t protect against everything bad that might ever happen to you,” Ellenberg said. And so it’s inevitable that bad things will occur by chance right after a vaccine, even when they have nothing to do with the vaccine. 

People are encouraged to file a report for any significant health problem even if they don’t think a vaccine was the cause. Health care workers and vaccine manufacturers are also required to file certain reports, also regardless of the level of suspicion of a vaccine.

And yet, the internet is littered with examples of people incorrectly presenting VAERS reports as events caused by vaccines. Sometimes the health problems are explicitly and inaccurately called side effects or labeled “vaccine-caused.” (Side effects, which are also known as adverse reactions, are considered to be caused by a shot.) Posts will also assume causality, for example, when citing VAERS data to give a supposed number of “COVID vaccine deaths.”

Some posts correctly note that VAERS reports may not have been caused by vaccines, but still mislead by calling the reports “vaccine injuries” or suggesting they are indicative of an important health concern.

Part of the issue, Offit said, is the terminology, including the name of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. In scientific parlance, the term “adverse event” does not imply a causal connection. It simply means the event occurred after vaccination, so there’s a temporal association that could very well be coincidental. To most of the public, though, that nuance is lost.

“Its mere name gives it the imprimatur of a causal association and that’s not what it is,” Offit said of VAERS. “It’s misnamed.”

On top of that, people often incorrectly assume that the reports must be true because they are in a government database.

But as the VAERS website explains in a disclaimer, reports “may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable.” Reports are not vetted before being included in the database.

In a now classic example, Dr. James R. Laidler, an anesthesiologist and autism advocate, said he filed a report in VAERS in the early 2000s that claimed “an influenza vaccine had turned me into The Hulk.” The report went into the database and was removed only after someone from VAERS contacted him, and after a discussion, asked if it could be deleted.

“If I had not agreed, the record would be there still,” Laidler wrote in a 2005 blog post, “showing that any claim can become part of the database, no matter how outrageous or improbable.”

That’s not to say that most VAERS reports are made-up. As we’ve written, the number of obviously false hoax reports is below 1%, and it’s illegal to file a false claim. But it’s not always clear when a report is fraudulent, and research has shown that litigation — even related to health issues that scientists know are not caused by vaccines — can drive up reporting.

2) Misunderstanding or Ignoring How VAERS Works with Other Systems

People opposed to vaccines often focus on VAERS to the exclusion of other vaccine safety systems — ignoring the fact that some of those systems are used to determine whether a possible safety signal from VAERS is indeed a problem.

As Dr. David Gorski, an editor of the blog Science-Based Medicine who has been debunking claims about vaccines for more than a decade, observed on Twitter, the reason these activists “fetishize #VAERS as the ‘definitive’ be-all and end-all of vaccine safety databases is because it is so easily distorted and weaponized.”

“VAERS at its best is a hypothesis-generating system,” Offit said. It’s all about signal detection — it’s not meant to be the final word on vaccine safety. And it doesn’t work in a vacuum.

“It’s important for people to know that VAERS is one of many complementary systems that CDC and FDA and other federal partners use to monitor vaccine safety,” Shimabukuro said.

Statistical methods are used to analyze VAERS reports to quickly pick up on any unusual patterns. “If a possible safety signal is found in VAERS, further analysis is performed with other safety systems, such as the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) and Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) Project, or in the FDA BEST (Biologics Effectiveness and Safety) system,” the VAERS disclaimer explains. “These systems are less impacted by the limitations of spontaneous and voluntary reporting in VAERS and can better assess possible links between vaccination and adverse events.”

Indeed, while VAERS is a passive system, relying on people to submit reports, several of these systems are active, meaning they automatically collect information at regular intervals. And unlike VAERS, some of these systems offer a way of comparing outcomes to a control group. 

The Vaccine Safety Datalink, for example, draws on electronic health records from across the country and contains information about which vaccinations were given and when. The data are updated every week, and can be used to compare the rates of possible side effects in people who received a particular vaccine with a similar group of people who were not vaccinated.

The CDC and FDA use several quantitative methods to probe VAERS data for possible safety signals. This includes disproportionality analysis, which essentially checks to see whether the adverse events reported for one vaccine are significantly different from those reported for other vaccines, which could be indicative of a problem.

Ellenberg likens these approaches to looking for a needle in a haystack. “What these methods do is pull out clumps and then you look for needles in the clumps.” After further investigation, she said, most of them will turn out to be nothing.

Because the number of administered doses was known, regulators also performed an observed versus expected analysis for the COVID-19 vaccines, Shimabukuro said. If the observed rate approaches or exceeds the expected rate, he said, “that may be evidence of a potential safety problem that might require further investigation.”

Agency physicians also do a lot of case review to investigate possible problems.

Importantly, this slicing and dicing of VAERS data can only point to a possible issue — it’s not confirmation of one. 

“Just because you exceed a statistical threshold does not mean you have evidence of an increased risk or evidence of a causal association,” Shimabukuro said, adding that such data mining “findings” are not necessarily safety signals. “There can be other reasons for these findings or they can be spurious findings or in some cases, they can be things that we expect to find.”

VAERS, therefore, must be viewed in the larger context of how safety signals are identified. Insisting that only VAERS has the right answers is illogical and fundamentally misconstrues how vaccine safety surveillance works.

3) Improperly Comparing Vaccines

Much of the misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines using VAERS has focused on improper comparisons between vaccines. Claim after claim alleges that because so many more VAERS reports have been filed for the COVID-19 vaccines than for other vaccines, it must mean that they are dangerous.

This line of argument, however, is faulty. As we’ve previously written, there are several reasons why reporting to VAERS increased for the COVID-19 vaccines — and it doesn’t mean that the vaccines aren’t safe. 

To start, a large number of COVID-19 vaccines were given out in a relatively short period of time, with more doses and priority given to older and more medically vulnerable people. The VAERS reporting requirements are also higher for the COVID-19 vaccines. Health care providers, for example, are required by law to report any vaccine administration error, any serious adverse event following vaccination, and any COVID-19 case that results in hospitalization or death. With other vaccines, providers are only required to report select adverse events. And the incredible amount of publicity and scrutiny of the new vaccines is arguably unprecedented in modern history.

“You really can’t compare what happened during COVID to what’s happened with other vaccines in the past,” Shimabukuro said.

The closest example, he said, is the rollout of an influenza vaccine during the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. With that vaccine, he added, there was also a large increase in the number of reports to VAERS, and public awareness “was nowhere near what it is for COVID-19.”

Shimabukuro noted that the phenomenon of a spike in reporting with a new vaccine, known as the Weber effect, is well documented.

And he added, the COVID-19 vaccines have been following the expected trajectory of the Weber effect quite closely, with very high reporting early on, followed by a peak and then a drop-off to a somewhat normalized level.

“The trend is very similar to what we see for other vaccines — other new vaccines, other pandemic vaccines,” Shimabukuro said, with the extreme attention on the COVID-19 pandemic “accentuating that overall trend.”

How are regulators so confident that the increased reporting in VAERS isn’t a safety concern? Because all of the data — including from VAERS, but also from all the other systems — consistently show that the COVID-19 vaccines have a good safety record.

“It’s data from multiple systems in the United States and data from other systems in other countries in Europe and in Canada and Israel, and really all over the globe,” Shimabukuro said.

Despite all the claims about COVID-19 vaccine-related deaths, VAERS data do not suggest that the vaccines increase mortality.

Of the COVID-19 vaccines ever offered in the U.S., only the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been causally linked to thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS, which can be fatal. TTS is a blood clotting condition combined with low blood platelets and is extremely rare. Six reports of the condition to VAERS led regulators to temporarily suspend the use of the J&J vaccine in April 2021. Through May 2023, monitoring has identified nine deaths from TTS that are considered to be due to the vaccine. The J&J vaccine is no longer available in the U.S., after the last doses expired in May.

“There is no hiding in the world of vaccines when you vaccinate hundreds of thousands and then millions and tens of millions of people,” Offit said. If a vaccine is truly responsible for a serious side effect, he said, it will be apparent.

4) Exaggerating the Issue of Underreporting

Another common anti-vaccine talking point is that because people voluntarily report to VAERS, it invariably is an undercount of vaccine “harms.” Vaccine opponents often try to calculate how much underreporting exists and multiply the number of reports by certain factors to arrive at the “real” number of vaccine side effects. 

But this approach is flawed. It’s true that by design, VAERS can’t capture every side effect that is due to a vaccine. But it’s also the case that many of the health problems in VAERS aren’t caused by a vaccine.

“There’s underreporting and there’s overreporting,” Ellenberg said, referring to both scenarios. 

“The suspected adverse events are underreported. I think that’s probably true. But the keyword there is suspected — they’re not necessarily true, truly caused by vaccines,” Offit said, adding that that’s expected with a passive system. That’s precisely why other, active vaccine safety systems are also used to monitor vaccines. 

And there’s no simple way of determining how much underreporting exists. Anti-vaccine groups commonly cite a 2010 report from Harvard Pilgrim Health Care that stated “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.” 

But Dr. Michael Klompas, a public health surveillance researcher at Harvard Medical School and one of the authors of the report, told us in an email that the 1% number “takes into account that many adverse effects of vaccines are mild and expected so not worth reporting (sore arm, fatigue, local redness, etc.).”

Other researchers have attempted to estimate what’s called the reporting efficiency, or reporting sensitivity, of certain adverse events in VAERS, generally finding that the system more completely collects serious adverse events than mild ones.

An early effort in 1995, for example, found that VAERS detected 68% of vaccine-associated polio cases following the oral polio vaccine, but less than 1% of rashes after the MMR vaccine. (The oral polio vaccine has since been replaced in the U.S. with an injected vaccine that cannot give people the disease.)

Other work has found that for anaphylaxis, a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction that occurs rarely with any vaccine, VAERS captured anywhere from 13% to 76% of cases, depending on the vaccine. Another study estimated that VAERS caught 47% of cases of intussusception after the RotaShield vaccine. 

But as that paper noted, “Although the reporting completeness of VAERS has been evaluated for some specific vaccine-event associations, this information cannot be generalized.”

“The magnitude of underreporting varies widely, depending upon factors such as the severity of the event, proximity in time of the event to vaccination, and preexisting awareness on the possible association of the event to the vaccine,” it reads.

While underreporting is a legitimate limitation of VAERS, the system is not intended to capture everything. And applying ad hoc estimates for underreporting, particularly to all adverse events, or for adverse events that have not been linked to vaccination, is scientifically unsound and misleading.

5) Incorrectly Assuming All Reports Are Serious

Finally, another misconception is the incorrect notion that all reports in VAERS are serious. Again, part of this hinges on the use of technical language. “Adverse event” sounds serious to many people, but it includes minor incidents, such as a sore arm. 

Less than 10% to 15% of U.S. reports in VAERS are considered “serious” — a regulatory term that means the event was life-threatening or involved hospitalization, prolonged hospitalization if someone was already hospitalized, persistent disability, a birth defect, death, or required medical attention to prevent one of these outcomes.

The CDC requests follow-up information for all serious reports, which, like their non-serious counterparts, may be entirely coincidental. As the CDC explains, while serious events happen after vaccination, “they are rarely caused by the vaccine.”

The non-serious and serious classification isn’t perfect. “Some degree of misclassification is inherent,” a 2004 review by government scientists explains, noting that injection site reactions typically are “not of great clinical significance but may be classified as serious if they result in a brief hospitalization.” On the other hand, something like Bell’s palsy, a usually temporary facial paralysis, is medically important, but may not be classified as serious because it involves outpatient care.

Still, it’s clear that many of the health issues reported to VAERS — which again, are not necessarily caused by vaccines — are relatively minor, and people who like to highlight the sheer number of reports to suggest vaccines are dangerous are not being fully transparent.

Imperfect, But Still Necessary

For all of its limitations and susceptibility to distortion, experts generally told us they thought VAERS served an important role.

Ellenberg, for example, said she thought VAERS could be the fastest way to identify a vaccine safety problem. 

Offit, however, was less sure of its utility.

“I would argue that because it’s so massively misused and massively misunderstood,” which has caused “a lot of people to choose not to get a vaccine,” he said, “I think it has done far more harm than good.”

Still, he doesn’t think VAERS should go away. Rather, he thinks VAERS should not be made publicly available. That would limit the misinformation, but still allow the system to do its job.

Putting the genie back in the bottle, though, may be impossible. And for now, the CDC doesn’t agree.

“We understand that there is the potential for misuse and misrepresentation of VAERS data,” Shimabukuro said. “However, we think the benefits of being transparent and providing these data as a public service outweigh the potential harms.”

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Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are 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.