News Reporter: Fact Checker: It wasn’t just the cats. JD Vance tweeted misinfo about Springfield for a week.

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The truth behind the rhetoric.

By Glenn Kessler

For more than a week, Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio tweeted about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. It started with a false rumor on a Facebook post about migrants eating cats.

On the morning of Vance's first tweet, Sept. 9, Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck fielded a call from a Vance staff member asking whether there was any truth to the rumor, the Wall Street Journal later reported. "I told him no," Heck said. "There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless."

Nevertheless, Vance's tweet received 11 million views and has not been taken down. Former president Donald Trump, in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 10, then asserted: "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there."

Amid the backlash, Vance has doubled down, insisting he has raised legitimate issues that were ignored or belittled by the media. We wrote an assessment of the facts — and misinformation — in his many posts about the issue on X.

To read the full fact check, please click the link below.

Read the full fact check

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No, violent crime isn't soaring, but neither is it falling

During the ABC News debate, there was a moment when moderator David Muir fact-checked Trump's claim that crime was soaring. "President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country," he said.

Trump dismissed FBI crime figures. "They were defrauding statements," he said. "They didn't include the worst cities. They didn't include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud."

Then, two days later, he claimed that a new Justice Department report, the 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), showed he was right. "MASSIVE NEWS! The Department of Justice just released brand new Crime Data showing I was absolutely and completely right at the Debate," he wrote on social media. "In fact, the Data is even worse than we could have ever imagined."

In our debate fact check, we noted that Trump relies on NCVS data, but given the new report, the dispute over the numbers seemed worthy of a deeper dive. This is a good example of how politicians highlight government reports — and cherry-pick from them — to shape their rhetoric. There is no perfect metric, as there are flaws in both the FBI report (not all crimes are reported) and the victimization survey (it's an estimate with a margin of error).

To read the full fact check, please click the link below.

Read the full fact check

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