Pompeo's unreported deals with foreign-government companies Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has gone through the Senate confirmation process twice in recent years, first to become CIA director and then for his current Cabinet job. Pompeo said "no" in 2016 when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked on a form whether he had "any financial or business transactions with a foreign government or an entity controlled by a foreign government" in the previous 10 years. In 2018, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he stood by his answer two years earlier. Reporters from McClatchy previously found that Pompeo's company in Kansas imported oil-field equipment from Sinopec, a business owned by the Chinese government. The Fact Checker's Glenn Kessler uncovered at least one more Pompeo deal with a company owned by a foreign government. In September 2009 and January 2010, Pompeo's Shores-Sentry company purchased equipment from Dagang Oilfield Group, a subsidiary of state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation. We also found records of a deal with a company owned by the Indian government that may fall in the 10-year period covered in Pompeo's Senate disclosure form filed in 2016. It's puzzling to see the secretary of state assert that his 2016 answer was correct when documents and records with his signature indicate otherwise in the case of Sinopec, and at least one other business transaction with a foreign government-owned business went unreported. The State Department said that Pompeo "successfully ran several great U.S. businesses that sold products with components made in many different countries" and that "he would have no reason to know the details about the layers of companies that may or may not have had ownership interests in the overseas companies that supplied products or components."  Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. Do 500,000 people a year go bankrupt from medical bills? Campaigning for universal health care, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) claims that half a million people go bankrupt every year from medical bills. When we asked about the number, Sanders's campaign directed us to an editorial published by the American Journal of Public Health in March. The researchers who wrote it polled a sample of debtors and asked whether medical debt or illness contributed "somewhat" or "very much" to their bankruptcy. Sanders quoted from the study incorrectly, and we gave him Three Pinocchios. The study doesn't establish that medical debt or illness caused all half-million bankruptcies. Some of the survey respondents said that medical bills contributed "somewhat," meaning slightly or moderately. That means it's possible some respondents declared bankruptcy regardless of their medical debt. It's also important to note that the research study Sanders cited has been disputed by other scientists. A different, peer-reviewed study looked at the same question of medical bankruptcies and found that the rate was far lower: 30,000 to 50,000. (This study was limited to non-elderly people in California who were admitted to the hospital, so it doesn't cover all people facing medical debt.) The research team Sanders cited once included Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who contributed to earlier versions of their study when she was a Harvard professor. Interestingly, though, Warren doesn't appear to make the same claim about 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year.  We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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