Seven claims, true or not, of the future Biden government

By Andrea López Cruzado

President-elect Joe Biden has already announced several appointments from his cabinet and other top White House positions for his next term.

We took on the task of reviewing and verifying some of the statements made by the most prominent figures of the incoming government, including several Latinos.

From former Secretary of State John Kerry, whom Biden announced as special envoy for the climate, to Hispanics Julie Rodríguez - the next director of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs at the White House - and Alejandro Mayorkas, appointed to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

• “It goes 30 to zero.

  He has filed 30 civil lawsuits, he has lost absolutely all "

In an interview on November 19 on CNN, Ron Klain, appointed chief of staff, had this to say about President Donald Trump's efforts to invalidate the election result: “It goes 30 to zero.

He has filed 30 civil lawsuits, he has lost absolutely all of them ”.

Klain's statement was imprecise.

It's true that the Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits since the Nov.3 election.

In fact, there have been more than 30. But although the judges have rejected most of the demands, technically it has not lost all because several of them were withdrawn.

In other cases, neither was the Trump campaign the litigant.

For example, three voters in Wisconsin filed a lawsuit alleging that their state had counted fraudulent votes.

However, days later they voluntarily withdrew their complaint.

In other cases, it was the same Trump campaign that withdrew the complaint, as it did in Michigan after noting that Detroit authorities had not wanted to certify the vote count in their area, something that was false.

Of 34 lawsuits recorded by The Associated Press news agency, several justices have ruled against Trump 18 times.

• "When I was very young, America gave me and my family a place of refuge."

In his first tweet after being nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas said: "When I was very young, the United States gave me and my family a place of refuge."

That's true.

 Mayorkas was born in Havana, Cuba, but after the Revolution he emigrated with his family as a political refugee.

He was not even one year old when he arrived in the United States.

They first arrived in Miami but later settled in Los Angeles.

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His father was a Cuban of Jewish descent and his mother, a Romanian Jewess who fled Nazi persecution in the 1940s. In June 2009, during his Senate testimony as part of his nomination for Director of the Citizenship Service and Immigration Services, Mayorkas said: “My parents, sister and I were once refugees.

In 1960 we fled Cuba.

My father lost the country of his birth and my mother, for the second time in her young life, was forced to flee a country she considered home.

But our flight to safety gave us the gift of this beautiful new homeland.

I know how lucky I am. " 

• Chinese leaders think that "four years of the Trump administration has accelerated what they call our inevitable decline."

In an October interview on CNN, Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken identified China as the biggest foreign policy challenge for the country and said Chinese leaders believed that “four years of the Trump administration have accelerated which they call our inevitable decline. "

That's true.

 According to various media reports, the Chinese authorities believe that "the last four years have shown that the United States is declining rapidly," as Foreign Affairs reported in its most recent edition.

In October, Rush Doshi, an expert on China, wrote in Foreign Policy: "Although Chinese leaders may want a respite from Trump's recent aggressiveness, they also believe that he has weakened American power and accelerated American decline."

In June, The Economist published a report titled

.

For his part, Robert Lewis, co-founder of the China Going Global think tank, wrote this month in the Asia Times that “the Trump Administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced existing views among Chinese leaders that the United States is dysfunctional. and it is well on its way to decline.

Furthermore, many Chinese officials now see Trump as a key catalyst for accelerating that decline. "

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• "Millions of American families face hunger due to the economic crisis caused by COVID-19."

In a tweet on November 19, Julie Rodriguez, future director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, said that "millions of American families are facing hunger due to the economic crisis caused by COVID-19."

That phrase lacks context.

 It is true that millions of Americans go hungry, but the problem, although it has worsened during the pandemic, precedes the appearance of COVID-19.

Before the arrival of the coronavirus in the United States, more than 35 million people suffered from hunger in the country, including more than 10 million children, according to Feeding America.

However, the organization, which distributes food through food banks, estimates that this year more than 50 million people, including 17 million children, will have experienced food insecurity. 

The problem disproportionately affects minorities, such as the Latino population.

According to data collected by the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, between April and June, during the first wave of the pandemic in the United States, 37% of Hispanic households reported food insecurity.

This despite the fact that Latinos represent only 18% of the total population of the country.

Likewise, 47% of Latino respondents said that “the food is not enough, there is no money to buy more”, compared to 16% who answered the same in 2018.

• It is a lie that the Government of Barack Obama placed an informant in the 2016 Trump campaign

In an interview on Yahoo!

News in 2018, Avril Haines, nominated as Director of National Intelligence, flatly denied an accusation by President Donald Trump that the Barack Obama administration - for which she worked - had placed an informant in her campaign in 2016 with the in order to investigate Russian interference in the elections.

"I think that's ridiculous," Haines said. 

Haines

in saying that there was no such informant. 

Trump's accusation was denied at the time by various sources and media, since although the FBI did investigate Russian ties with the Trump campaign, it did not spy on the then presidential candidate or his team.

The unsubstantiated indictment was dubbed Spygate, and was branded as a conspiracy theory to undermine the validity of the investigation into the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian agents.  

To settle the issue, in December of last year, the Justice Department reported that it had found no evidence that intelligence agencies had tried to plant spies on the Trump campaign.

• "Of the 189 American ambassadors abroad today, only four are black

  .

  "

In an essay titled

, published by Foreign Affairs in its November / December 2020 issue, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, future ambassador to the United Nations, and her colleague William J. Burns noted that of the 189 US ambassadors abroad, only four were black.

That is partially true.

 According to the American Academy of Diplomacy, as of June this year, there were indeed 189 ambassadors, but the number of black ambassadors was even less than that given by Thomas-Greenfield: there are three, not four.

On the other hand, there are four Latino ambassadors who currently represent the United States abroad.

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Barack Obama was the last president to appoint the last two black ambassadors to the United States in 2015: Pamela Spratlen, sent to Uzbekistan, and Marcia Bernicat, who serves in Bangladesh.

• "Even the United States, with all our industrial might, is responsible for only 13% of global emissions

  .

  "

Former Secretary of State John Kerry, who played a crucial role in negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement, will be nominated by Joe Biden as special envoy for the climate.

During the formal presentation of this and other future members of Biden's Cabinet, Kerry said that the fight against climate change must be a commitment of all nations.

"Even the United States, with all our industrial might, is responsible for only 13% of global emissions," he said.

We don't know where Kerry got the 13% figure he cited from.

And although it is close, it

.

The Environmental Protection Agency noted that in 2014 the country was responsible for 15% of global emissions. 

An updated estimate in August 2020 from the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Massachusetts-based nuclear and environmental watchdog group, offers the same figure for the United States: 15% of all emissions in the world.

This represents 5.41 gigatons of carbon (CO2) emissions.

Only China surpasses the United States, with about 30% of global emissions.

[Follow all the verifications carried out by the T Verifica team]

Although the country's carbon emissions are expected to decrease by almost 10% this year - in April 2020 they were the lowest in decades, according to the Energy Information Administration - we cannot ignore the fact that during these months a part of the population was confined to their homes by the coronavirus pandemic.

Experts predict that the effects of the Trump administration's policies will end up skyrocketing the country's emissions in the coming decades.

A study by the Rodhium Group, which specializes in climate research, pointed out in September that the rollback in Obama-era climate regulations ordered by Trump will cause the United States to pump an additional 1.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere between now and now. 2035.

This article was prepared thanks to the FactChat agreement, coordinated by the

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