The dubious claim that Hunter Biden received $3.5 million from Russia Less than 50 days before the 2020 presidential election, the Republican staff of the Senate Finance and Homeland Security Committees issued a joint report with a startling claim — that Joe Biden's son Hunter had received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, a Russian billionaire and the widow of the former mayor of Moscow. Trump keeps bringing it up, as do other Republicans. So we decided to dig deep into this claim. We interviewed people familiar with the transactions, reviewed property and real estate documents and probed for leads in the emails contained on a hard drive copy of the laptop Hunter Biden supposedly left behind for repair in a Delaware shop in April 2019. The GOP report itself does not provide evidence to back up the claim that became a talking point — and our reporting has unearthed the best explanation about what really happened. It's a complicated story, involving a web of corporate entities, that eventually leads to the purchase of millions of dollars worth of real estate in Brooklyn by the Russian billionaire. We found no evidence that Hunter Biden was part of those transactions. Instead, we discovered that Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's former business partner, transferred funds from Baturina to purchase real estate in Brooklyn. Please read the full report. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. The Ginni Thomas texts: support for a 'coup,' 'insurrection' or neither? Many of our fact checks come from reader requests. A reader contacted us recently to alert us to comments by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). Pelosi had said Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was a "contributor to a coup" and Klobuchar said she had been "advocating for an insurrection." The reader said his reading of the texts by Thomas, a prominent conservative activist, was that they were "far-fetched" but did not support the statements. This was an interesting request, so we decided to dig in and see what we discovered. There is no question that the texts — 29 in all — show that Thomas believed in and touted a series of Four Pinocchio claims about alleged election fraud. But a text on Jan 10, four days after the attack on the capitol, contained two notable lines which could either support or negate the notion that she supported a coup. She expresses disgust for Vice President Pence for failing to block the election — but also appears to condemn the attack on the Capitol. We decided that Pelosi's comment, with its weaker language, was on somewhat firmer ground. We left it unrated. But Klobuchar's comments earned Two Pinocchios. It's not as clear-cut that Thomas supported an insurrection. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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