Eric and Don Jr. each get Four Pinocchios
President Trump left his sons, Eric and Don Jr., in charge of his global business empire upon taking office. Like their father, the sons have been criticizing former vice president Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, for his business dealings in China and Ukraine during the Obama administration. It was all very unseemly and wrong, they charge. But, wait a second, Eric and Don Jr. run a business that profits from foreign deals while their father sits in the Oval Office. Trump's ethics filings show his foreign assets have generated more than $100 million in income since he became president. So what's the big idea? "When my father became commander in chief of this country, we got out of all international business," Eric Trump claimed on Fox News. "The media said, 'Oh, you're enriching yourselves.' We're like, 'We literally stopped,'" Don Jr. said on the same network. Wow. That's a Four Pinocchio claim. Trump properties in Ireland and Scotland are gearing up for large expansions. The Trump Organization sold land in the Dominican Republic for a reported $3.2 million. A Beverly Hills mansion was sold for $13.5 million to an Indonesian billionaire. The list goes on and on. (The Trump Organization says all its foreign business merely builds on deals that were inked before Trump took office. ) 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. Did Stacey Abrams lose to voter suppression?
Many Democrats claim Stacey Abrams lost the Georgia governor's race due to racially motivated voter suppression. Many Republicans claim that there's no evidence for that assertion and that their candidate won fair and square. Recent comments from Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, gave us an opportunity to dig into this claim. "Racially motivated patterns of voter suppression are responsible for Stacey Abrams not being governor of Georgia right now," he said in New Hampshire. We sounded out experts and took a close look at the data. The Republican candidate, Brian Kemp, who is now governor, was basically in charge of running his own election because he was Georgia's secretary of state at the time and declined to recuse himself. Kemp oversaw an aggressive effort to purge voters before the election, with nearly 700,000, or 10 percent, removed from the rolls in the year before the vote. "For an estimated 107,000 of those people, their removal from the voter rolls was triggered not because they moved or died or went to prison, but rather because they had decided not to vote in prior elections," according to a report by American Public Media. But there's a counterargument, too. Even if every provisional ballot not counted and every rejected absentee ballot had been awarded to Abrams, it would not have necessitated a runoff, much less overcome Abrams's 55,000-vote deficit. The 2018 turnout was far greater than any previous midterm, according to FiveThirtyEight, and more African Americans voted in 2018 than in 2016. We did not rate Buttigieg's claim because this is the political version of a Rorschach test — where you land depends on how you view the wide range of pertinent evidence. Buttigieg suggested his statement was a factual claim, not in dispute, though it's really more of an opinion. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK, @SarahCahlan 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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