PolitiFact checked claims on prisons, leaked emails and Ossoff donors

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

Last week PolitiFact checked out a Senator's claim about the U.S. prison population, a former House Speaker's claim about leaked Democratic Party emails and a murder victim, and an ad about donations from California to Jon Ossoff's campaign for the 6th Congressional District of Georgia. Here are abbreviated versions of our fact checks. Full versions can be found at www.politifact.com.

“President Obama became the first president since Carter to leave the White House with a smaller federal prison population than when he took office.”

— Charles Schumer on Thursday, May 18th, 2017 in a Senate floor speech

When we checked with Schumer's office, a spokesman pointed us to research by the Pew Research Center, a widely trusted independent source.

Pew looked at federal Bureau of Prisons data going back to the 1920s. It found that not only was Obama the first president to see a drop in the federal prison population since Carter, but only four other presidents (Johnson, Kennedy, Truman and Hoover) saw a decline during their terms. Most of the presidents studied — nine, starting with Coolidge and ending with George W. Bush — saw the number of inmates increase.

We wondered whether Schumer was cherry-picking data from the much smaller pool of federal inmates. In 2015, the number of inmates in state-run prisons was almost seven times larger than the number of federal inmates, and the total of inmates in state and local facilities was more than than 10 times larger than the number in federal custody.

However, we found that the same trends held for state and local inmate populations: The number declined under Obama for the first time since at least the Carter years.

Our ruling

The statistics bear out Schumer's assertion, so we rate it True.

Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich “apparently was assassinated at 4 in the morning, having given WikiLeaks something like 53,000 emails and 17,000 attachments. … It turns out, it wasn’t the Russians.”

— Newt Gingrich on Sunday, May 21st, 2017 in an episode of “Fox and Friends”

An unfounded conspiracy theory persists that WikiLeaks got the stolen emails from a Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot and killed in July 2016.

Seth Rich, who worked on voter access projects for the DNC, was killed early in the morning near his Washington home. Ten months later, the case remains unsolved. Washington police have said they believe it was likely a botched robbery.

On May 15, private investigator Rod Wheeler said he had evidence to prove the theorists right. But Wheeler backtracked on his claims the next day, and the Rich family has sent him a cease-and-desist letter, saying their son was not WikiLeaks’ source.

Two days after Gingrich made this claim, Fox News retracted its report promoting this conspiracy theory.

Wheeler told CNN that he hadn’t seen the evidence himself, and his knowledge of Rich’s alleged email contact with WikiLeaks came from the national Fox News reporter, not his own investigative work.

Fox retracted its own May 16 article, saying “the article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.”

The intelligence community and private cybersecurity professionals have widely concluded that the DNC hack and WikiLeaks dump are covered with Russian fingerprints.

Our ruling

There is no trustworthy evidence that Rich was WikiLeaks’ source for thousands of DNC emails. The police believe his death was the result of a botched robbery. The intelligence community and cybersecurity experts have reached a broad conclusion that all the available evidence points to Russia as the actual perpetrators.

Gingrich and others are talking about an unfounded conspiracy theory as if it's fact. It is far from it. We rate his claim Pants on Fire.

“Bay Area liberals have given more to Jon Ossoff’s campaign than people in Georgia.”

— Congressional Leadership Fund on Monday, May 22nd, 2017 in an attack ad

The Congressional Leadership Fund said it got its information from the Mercury News, a prominent local paper. An April 12 article said, "Ossoff reported 2,628 individual donations from people living in the nine Bay Area counties, significantly more than from all of Georgia — although of a smaller total value."

The article doesn’t back up what the ad said, that people in the Bay Area gave more to Ossoff than people in Georgia. The number of donors was higher, but they did not give more than donors in Georgia.

Our ruling

Bay Area donors outnumber Ossoff’s Georgia donors, but the ad did not describe the donations in those terms.

We rate this claim False.