For instance, an email from Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York said the Mississippi law before the Supreme Court was “nearly identical to the one in Texas, banning abortions after 6 weeks,” but Mississippi’s law bans abortion after 15 weeks and does not include the vigilante enforcement mechanism that is a defining characteristic of Texas’ law.Ī spokeswoman for Ms.

The relatively small number of false statements from Democrats were mostly about abortion. But the payments, which are not final and could end up being smaller, would be limited to that small fraction of migrants. Those claims were grounded in news that the Justice Department was negotiating payments to settle lawsuits filed on behalf of immigrant families whom the Trump administration had separated, some of whom have not been reunited.

One of them, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, falsely claimed that President Biden was “giving every illegal immigrant that comes into our country $450,000.” In addition, multiple Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeated one another’s.Īt least eight Republican lawmakers sent fund-raising emails containing a brazen distortion of a potential settlement with migrants separated from their families during the Trump administration.

“could force the whole investigation to end early.”īut Republicans included misinformation far more often: in about 15 percent of their messages, compared with about 2 percent for Democrats. 6 inquiry was at imminent risk because the G.O.P. One Republican, for instance, declared that Democrats wanted to establish a “one-party socialist state,” while a Democrat suggested that the party’s Jan. The New York Times signed up in August for the campaign lists of the 390 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022 whose websites offered that option, and read more than 2,500 emails from those campaigns to track how widely false and misleading statements were being used to help fill political coffers.īoth parties delivered heaps of hyperbole in their emails. But email - one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people - teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice. Lawmakers’ statements on social media and cable news are now routinely fact-checked and scrutinized. Instead, he sent the false message directly to the inboxes of his constituents and supporters in a fund-raising email. Crenshaw’s lie because he didn’t say it on Facebook, or on Fox News. A few weeks ago, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, falsely claimed that the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to battle climate change and extend the nation’s social safety net, would include Medicare for all.

Shadow president pol