Follow a misinformation trail about Hunter Biden It started with a tweet on Jan. 12 by an anonymous account — a photo of a rental application by Hunter Biden, plucked from the hard drive of his laptop left behind for repair in a Delaware shop in April 2019. Then it quickly exploded across the internet, into articles posted on right-wing media, onto Tucker Carlson's Fox News evening show and into the talking points of Republican lawmakers who pledged an investigation into why Hunter Biden was paying his father $49,910 a month in rent at the Biden residence where classified documents have been found. But the rental application was misconstrued — an example of how speculation about material from the laptop often lacks context or careful scrutiny. The reality is that Hunter Biden was paying $49,910 every three months for office space in D.C. Some who pushed the embroidered narrative quietly distanced themselves. As The Fact Checker started following the misinformation trail, some stories were corrected or retracted. Please read our full report and watch our video on a narrative that went badly off track. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. A reader-friendly guide to the federal budget and debt ceiling House Republicans are angling for a fight with the White House over raising the debt ceiling, demanding that President Biden first agree to spending cuts. But too often, politicians talk in broad strokes about the federal budget, with big numbers that make little sense to most people. Or they suggest that actual reductions in spending would be relatively easy to accomplish. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), for instance, said she would rule out cuts to Social Security and Medicare, with the rest of the government losing just "five pennies on the dollar" every year. That translates into a five-percent cut every year, without adjusting for inflation or population growth. As a reader guide, we provided a tour through the federal budget, assuming it was just one dollar. It turns out that the part of the budget that Mace says is a "nonstarter" — Social Security and Medicare — is responsible for the growing debt. The federal government keeps borrowing from general revenue to make payments to those programs. That's because most people receive more in benefits than taxes they paid into the system. So unless lawmakers decide to wipe out popular programs like border protection, air traffic control and farm subsidies — or raise taxes — balancing the budget will forever remain out of reach. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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