After President Joe Biden took a veiled swipe at him during the State of the Union address, Sen. Rick Scott released an ad labeling Biden a “tax cheat.” The White House defends the tax maneuver, one it says the IRS blessed, though some tax experts remain unconvinced.
A day after several Republicans interrupted President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union address with loud jeering, a Democratic leader said he couldn’t “remember a Democrat ever heckling a president in a State of the Union.” But the Democrats have voiced displeasure with a Republican president at such events on several occasions, dating to at least 2005.
The IRS has proposed a voluntary program that employers could choose to use in order to manage the taxes owed on employees’ tips. The program would replace similar existing programs. But some partisan social media accounts have wrongly suggested that the program indicates either new taxes or increased enforcement. Neither is true.
Hearst Television — one of our media partners — produced this fact-checking video segment featuring our article on President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
In an email to a Twitter lawyer in February 2021, an unidentified Twitter employee wrote that the company had received over $3.4 million from the FBI since October 2019 as reimbursement for Twitter’s processing of legal requests for user information. That is not evidence that the FBI paid Twitter to “censor” or “suppress” content.
The U.S. spent more than $849 billion in the 20-year war in Afghanistan and has spent about $113 billion to support Ukraine since Russia invaded in 2022. But a video on social media falsely claims that the aid for Ukraine is “double the U.S. expenditure for its own war in Afghanistan.”
At the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ winter meeting, President Joe Biden left the false impression that unemployment declined by more than 16 million people on his watch, when the decline was under 5 million.
The warming trend in global temperature continued in 2022, which was the sixth-warmest year on record, according to a recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But a viral tweet — using just a small segment of a NOAA graph — wrongly claimed the agency had announced a “global cooling” trend.
Government health agencies disclosed a potential safety concern for strokes in those 65 and older with one of the COVID-19 vaccines, but the agencies haven’t found any causal relationship and the concern was flagged by just one of several monitoring systems. Anti-vaccine campaigners, however, have wrongly claimed the agencies have found a link between the boosters and strokes.
Here we provide readers with a refresher about special counsels, including their authority and responsibilities. We also provide some information about the men selected to head the investigations of the current and former presidents.