Fact checking Nancy Pelosi statements over the years

Almost since PolitiFact’s 2007 founding, it has been covering Representative Nancy Pelosi, who announced her retirement, effective in January 2027.

We first fact-checked the former House speaker on August 25, 2008, when she characterised then-presidential candidate Barack Obama as a state legislator with a history of bipartisanship, a claim we rated Half True. In all, we have rated Pelosi’s statements 56 times on Truth-O-Meter, with a median rating of Half True.

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Political analysts consider Pelosi, 85, one of the most effective legislative leaders in recent US history. With small margins, Pelosi was mostly able to keep her caucus united behind legislative goals on healthcare, the environment and other issues.

Her ability to raise money for Democrats was one reason she remained as minority leader when she lost her speaker’s gavel after the 2010 midterms and ascended again to speaker in 2018, when the Democrats won the majority. Pelosi lost the speakership when the GOP won the chamber in 2022. She left her leadership position but remained as a rank-and-file member.

Pelosi was known for her effectiveness outside the public eye – in Capitol cloakrooms and private dinners. Republicans targeted her sometimes awkward rhetorical style in front of television cameras, combined with her representation of one of the nation’s most liberal districts, in San Francisco.

On the internet, Pelosi has been falsely accused of being drunk (many, many times); of spending extravagantly on her hair; of falling; of crying in public; of being arrested; of palling around with drug kingpin El Chapo; of calling Americans stupid; of being expelled from the House; of being divorced by her husband; of being arrested and disappeared by US marshals; of committing treason; and of being executed.

When a hammer-wielding intruder attacked her husband, Paul, in their home in 2022, conspiracy theories flourished, fanned by President Donald Trump and others, including that the entire episode was a “false flag” event.

Here’s a rundown of memorable Pelosi moments in recent fact-checking history.

Pelosi v Trump: Ripped speech, policy fights, January 6

Pelosi and Trump have a long-running rhetorical feud. When a reporter asked Trump about Pelosi’s retirement announcement hours after she made it, Trump called her “an evil woman”.

In 2018, Trump falsely said Pelosi “came out in favour of MS-13”, the criminal gang. Pelosi had criticised Trump for using the term “animals” during an immigration meeting, but she hadn’t said anything positive about MS-13.

In 2020, after Pelosi dramatically ripped up a paper copy of Trump’s State of the Union address from her seat behind the president, Trump said: “I thought it was a terrible thing when she ripped up the speech. First of all, it’s an official document. You’re not allowed. It’s illegal what she did. She broke the law.”

We rated that False. Pelosi ripped up her own duplicate copy of Trump’s address, not the official version sent to the National Archives under the Presidential Records Act, so it would not have been illegal to destroy it.

Pelosi earned a Mostly True for saying in 2017 that Trump’s first-term tax bill “would have cut his taxes by $30 million in 2005”.

But she earned a False in 2020 for saying Trump is “morbidly obese”. Trump had told reporters that he was taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19, an approach that mainstream doctors called dubious; she said it was not a sound idea for someone “in his, shall we say, weight group”. Even if Trump was fudging his official height and weight, he would have needed to be substantially heavier to meet a level of morbid obesity.

The pair’s most bitter exchanges revolved around January 6, 2021, the day Trump supporters stormed the Capitol as Congress formally counted the 2020 electoral results. Rioters entered Pelosi’s office and called for her as they marched through the Capitol.

Trump has repeatedly said he requested “10,000 National Guardsmen” to provide security at his supporters’ January 6, 2021, rally, but that Pelosi “rejected it”. As early as February 28, 2021, we rated that False. In subsequent fact-checks, we found no new information to support Trump’s assertion about Pelosi and National Guard troops.

Pelosi played a central role in landmark healthcare legislation

One of her biggest policy legacies is the enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which was Obama’s top policy priority in 2009. The bill dominated the early political debate of his presidency, and Pelosi, as speaker, had a key role in securing Democratic support for Obama’s vision.

Pelosi accurately discussed some policy differences between Democratic and Republican healthcare bills, such as the Democratic proposals’ protection for people with a preexisting condition.

But we also found truth in one Republican criticism involving the bill – that Pelosi had said Democrats “have to pass their terrible healthcare bill so that the American people can actually find out what’s in it”. That was close to what Pelosi really said, though that Republican Party of Texas’s synopsis ignored her comments about why the legislation made her proud.

Pelosi was a star fundraiser, but we found one of her money claims misleading

Between 2000 and 2024, Pelosi raised $86.6m for her campaign committee and an additional $51m for her leadership political action committee, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks campaign finance information.

Despite her fundraising prowess, she exaggerated in 2017 when describing Wall Street money raised by Republicans and Democrats. She said: “Wall Street comes out en masse with its money against House Democrats every election.” But she had cherry-picked three campaign cycles in which Republicans held the House majority while ignoring election cycles in which the Democrats were in control, including two in which Pelosi was speaker. We rated the statement Mostly False.

Pelosi’s False statements

Pelosi’s four False ratings included:

• Her 2010 blog post saying that then-House Minority Leader John Boehner “admits ‘we are not going to be any different than we’ve been'” by returning to “the same failed economic policies” that “wrecked our economy”. We found that Boehner had been talking specifically about social issues, not the economy, and that the video clip she shared removed that context from Boehner’s statement.
• Her decision in 2011 to promote a chart showing Obama had “increased the debt” by 16 percent, compared with his predecessor, President George W Bush, who had increased it by 115 percent. The chart included a major calculation error, ignored different lengths of presidential tenure and cherry-picked the most favourable measure.
• Her 2016 claim that until shortly before her statement, China and Russia had “never voted with us at the UN on any sanctions on Iran”. We found eight Security Council resolutions over a decade threatening, imposing or continuing sanctions against Iran in which Russia and China approved.
• Her 2019 statement that a voter-roll purge in Wisconsin would mean that more than 200,000 registered Wisconsin voters would be prohibited from voting. We found that a purge could have potentially removed more than 200,000 people from the voting rolls, but they would not be “prohibited” from voting; anyone could re-register, including on Election Day.

That one time we fact-checked Pelosi in real time

We once fact-checked Pelosi in person, on television, in real time. And this time, it wasn’t on policy.

In 2018, this reporter was president of the Washington Press Club Foundation, which mounts an annual black-tie congressional dinner. Pelosi has been a frequent guest speaker at the event, and that year, she began her remarks by thanking members of the head table, including “President Louis Jacobson of FactCheck.org”.

I interrupted her. “Actually, PolitiFact.” As the audience laughed, Pelosi quickly pivoted.

“That’s OK, staff,” she said. “It was Mostly True.”