Fact-checking night 2 of the Republican National Convention

(CNN) — Speakers at the second night of the Republican National Convention made many false and misleading claims throughout the night which focused heavily on immigration and crime.

Here is a list of fact checks from CNN’s Facts First team.

Speaker Mike Johnson makes false claim about crime under Biden

After criticizing President Joe Biden as weak, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed in his Tuesday speech at the Republican National Convention that Democrats’ policies have brought communities “dramatic increases” in “violence, crime and drugs.”

Similarly, House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik referred to “Biden’s violent crime crisis,” and a video played near the beginning of the Tuesday evening proceedings featured a narrator saying, “It’s not just big cities. Rising crime is a problem everywhere.”

Facts First: Johnson’s claims about dramatic increases in violence and crime are false, as is the convention video’s claim that there is a problem “everywhere” with “rising crime.” Official data published by the FBI shows violent crime dropped significantly in the US in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, though there were increases in some communities; violent crime is now lower than it was in 2020, President Donald Trump’s last calendar year in office.

Stefanik’s claim of a “violent crime crisis” under Biden is subjective, but she certainly did not acknowledge that the current numbers under Biden are superior to final Trump-era numbers.

Preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% national decline in murder and a roughly 6% national decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in 2020. And preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.

There are limitations to the FBI-published data, which comes from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data, and the submitted data usually has some initial errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime. But these statistics and other data sources make it clear crime has indeed declined to some extent nationally, though not everywhere.

Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Scalise claims Biden has ‘erode’ American ‘energy dominance’

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise claimed Tuesday in his Republican National Convention speech that the Biden administration has “eroded the American energy dominance that President Trump delivered.” He also claimed that Democrats are waging an “assault on American energy.”

Facts First: Scalise’s claims are misleading. The US under President Joe Biden is producing more crude oil than any country ever has. The world record was set by the US in 2023, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, averaging about 12.9 million barrels per day – exceeding the Trump-era record, an average of about 12.3 million barrels per day in 2019. US production of dry natural gas also hit a new high in 2023. So did US crude oil exports.

CNN’s Matt Egan reported in December that the US was exporting the same amount of crude oil, refined products and natural gas liquids as Saudi Arabia or Russia were producing, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights.

None of this is to say that Biden is the reason that domestic oil production has increased; market factors are the key driver of companies’ investment and production decisions, and the Energy Information Administration has credited technological improvements in fracking and horizontal drilling technology that have made oil wells more productive. Egan reported in August: “The American Petroleum Institute, an oil trade group that has been critical of the Biden administration’s regulatory efforts, noted that approved federal permits and new federal acres leased have both fallen sharply under Biden.”

Still, despite Biden’s often-critical rhetoric about fossil fuel companies, some policy moves to get tougher on those companies and his major investments in initiatives to fight climate change, he certainly has not come close to stopping fossil fuel production as Trump has claimed.

Biden has also approved some significant and controversial fossil fuel projects, including the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska and the Mountain Valley gas pipeline from West Virginia to Virginia.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn 

Scalise on migrants coming to the US

Scalise said Tuesday that migrants are arriving in the US after having been deliberately freed from prison.

“On the border, Biden and Harris opened it up to the entire world. Prisons are being emptied,” said Scalise, a Louisiana Republican.

Facts first: There is no evidence for Scalise’s claim that “prisons of being emptied” so that prisoners can travel to the US as migrants.

“I do a daily news search to see what’s going on in prisons around the world and have seen absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending them all to the US,” said Helen Fair, who is co-author of the World Prison Population List, which tracks the global prison population, and a research fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London.

Trump, now the Republican presidential nominee, has repeatedly made such claims in his own speeches and interviews. But Trump has never provided any proof for the claim.

Trump’s campaign has provided CNN with only a vague 2022 article from right-wing website Breitbart about a supposed federal intelligence report warning Border Patrol agents about Venezuela freeing violent prisoners who had then joined migrant caravans.

But this supposed claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated, and experts have told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they know of no proof of any such thing having happened.

The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale 

Lara Trump’s claims about unemployment records under Trump

Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee and the former president’s daughter-in-law, hailed the state of the country during the Trump administration. Among other things, she said there were “record low unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and women.”

Facts First: These claims need context. Lara Trump didn’t mention that the Trump-era record lows for African American unemployment, Hispanic Americans unemployment and women’s unemployment were all beaten or matched during President Joe Biden’s presidency, though the Trump-era record for Asian American unemployment still stands.

The current record low for the Black or African American unemployment rate, 4.8%, was set under Biden in April 2023.
That beat the Trump-era low that was a record at the time, 5.3% in August 2019 and September 2019. (A cautionary note: This official data series goes back only to 1972.)

The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate hit 3.9% under Biden in September 2022, tying the record low first set in 2019 under Trump.

The unemployment rate among women hit 3.4% under Trump in September 2019 and October 2019, the lowest since the 1950s, but it fell to 3.3% under Biden in January 2023.

The record set under Trump for Asian American unemployment, 2% in June 2019, has not been matched under Biden. The lowest Biden-era rate was 2.3% in July 2023.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Rep. Stefanik claims that Biden presidency has led to the highest inflation of her lifetime

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York claimed in her Republican National Convention speech Tuesday that Biden’s presidency has led to the “highest rate of inflation” in her lifetime.

Facts First: This claim is out of date.

While the year-over-year inflation rate in June 2022, about 9.1%, was the highest since late 1981, inflation has declined sharply since that Biden-era peak, and the most recent available rate, for June 2024, was about 3%. That rate was exceeded as recently as 2011.
Stefanik was born in 1984.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn 

Wisconsin Senate candidate exaggerates the numbers of fentanyl deaths

Eric Hovde, the Republican running for Senate in Wisconsin, claimed in his RNC speech Tuesday that the Biden administration “emboldened drug cartels to flood our streets with fentanyl killing over 100,000 Americans every year” by opening the country’s southern border and allowing “criminals and terrorists to enter the country.”

Facts First: It’s a significant exaggeration that fentanyl kills more than 100,000 Americans every year due to the country’s “open” borders. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2023, including fentanyl, was approximately 75,000, according to estimated and provisional data. 

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in May that roughly 107,500 people in the US died from a drug overdose, but that is the total number of people who died from an overdose from any kind of drug.

Synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, were involved in the majority of those fatalities, making up nearly 70% of overdose deaths in 2023, but they did not account for all of them.

In fact, compared with 2022, there were around 1,500 fewer overdose deaths involving fentanyl and other synthetic opioids in 2023. The estimated number of deaths involving cocaine and psychostimulants such as methamphetamines increased in 2023.

Specifically, in 2023, there were 74,702 deaths from synthetic opioids, and most of those deaths were from fentanyl. By comparison, in 2022 the estimated number was 76,226, according to the CDC.

It is also worth noting that fentanyl is largely smuggled by US citizens through legal ports of entry, rather than by migrants sneaking into the country. Contrary to frequent claims by Republicans, the border is not “open”; border officers have seized an increasing amount of illicit fentanyl, numbering in the hundreds of millions of pills, under Biden.

From CNN’s Jen Christensen

Trump makes false claims about election fraud in RNC video 

For the second consecutive night, the Republican National Convention played a video in which Trump urged Republicans to use “every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats,” including voting by mail. Trump relentlessly disparaged mail-in voting during the 2020 election, falsely claiming it was rife with fraud, and he has continued to sharply criticize it during the current campaign

But Trump’s comments in the convention video also included some of his regular false claims about elections. After claiming he would “once and for all secure our elections” as president, Trump again insinuated the 2020 election was not secure, saying, “We never want what happened in 2020 to happen again.” And he said, “Keep your eyes open, because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and frankly, it’s the only thing they do well.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are nonsense – slightly vaguer versions of his usual lies that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen and that Democrats are serial election cheaters. The 2020 election was highly secure; Trump lost fair and square to Joe Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232; there is no evidence of voter fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state; and there is no basis for claiming that election cheating is the only thing at which Trump’s opponents excel.

The Trump administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a post-election November 2020 statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale 

Kari Lake on her opponent’s record about voting laws

Kari Lake said Tuesday that Democratic Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, her likely opponent in the state’s US Senate race this fall, voted last week to let undocumented immigrants “illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”

“These guys are full, they’re full of bad ideas,” Lake said in her speech. “Just last week Ruben Gallego voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”

Fact First: This claim is false.

The House did not vote on whether to allow noncitizens to vote. The chamber passed a bill on July 10 that would require documentary proof of US citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Gallego voted against the legislation, which is not expected to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and experts say it rarely occurs. When people register to vote, they must provide a driver’s license or Social Security number, and their identity is checked against existing databases. Voters are required to swear under penalty of perjury that they are a US citizen. Noncitizens who vote illegally can face imprisonment or deportation.

Gallego said in a statement that he opposed the bill because its “only purpose is to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Arizonans, and I will not vote to take away the rights of Arizonans to stop something that is already illegal.”

“Of course, only U.S. citizens should vote,” said Gallego. “But this bill isn’t about that, it’s about making it harder for Arizonans to vote, including married women, servicemembers, Native Arizonans, seniors, and people with disabilities.”

From CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Perry Johnson’s incorrect claim about median family income

Perry Johnson, a Michigan business owner who previously ran for governor and president, said Tuesday that income rose consistently under Trump.

“Under Trump, family income went up every year. That is a fact,” Johnson told the crowd.

Facts first: Johnson is incorrect. Median family income fell in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic in both inflation-adjusted and non-adjusted terms.

Typical family income grew by several thousand dollars during each of Trump’s first three years in office, before adjusting for inflation. But it fell by $1,660 in 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the US economy.

After factoring in inflation, typical family income fell by nearly $2,900 in 2020, after rising in each of the first three years of Trump’s administration.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

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