The GOP falsehood that Pelosi turned down National Guard before Jan. 6 A committee of House lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol held its first hearing this week, featuring visceral testimony from four police officers who fought the rioters. In a falsehood-filled sideshow, House Republican leaders held a news conference accusing Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) of having left the Capitol grounds unprotected in the days before the attack and demanding that the committee look into her actions and communications. "There's questions into the leadership within the structure of the speaker's office, where they denied the ability to bring the National Guard here," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said. House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) said: "It is a fact that … in December of 2020, Nancy Pelosi was made aware of potential security threats to the Capitol and she failed to act. It is a fact that the U.S. Capitol Police raised concerns and rather than providing them with the support and resources they needed and they deserved, she prioritized her partisan political optics over their safety." We gave Four Pinocchios to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in March for making the same accusation without any proof. Five months later, McCarthy and Stefanik had no proof, either. There are three key players here: Steven A. Sund, the U.S. Capitol Police chief; Paul D. Irving, the House sergeant-at-arms, and Michael C. Stenger, the Senate sergeant-at-arms. All three resigned under pressure after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Sund said he ran the National Guard request by Irving and Stenger on Jan. 4 and neither supported the idea. "On Jan. 4, no, I had no follow-up conversations," Irving said at a Senate hearing Jan. 23. "And it was not until the 6th that I alerted leadership that we might be making a request. And that was the end of the discussion." "For myself, it was Jan. 6 that I mentioned it to Leader [Mitch] McConnell's staff," Stenger said at the hearing. For spreading this baseless accusation, McCarthy and Stefanik earned Four Pinocchios. 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. San Francisco DA exaggerates incarceration rates A reader spotted this intriguing factoid in a PBS interview and sent it our way: "The majority of Americans have an immediate family member who is either currently or formerly incarcerated, so I have that in common with the vast majority of people in this country," the San Francisco district attorney, Chesa Boudin (D), said in an interview this week. Boudin, a former public defender who stopped prosecuting some offenses and began seeking lighter sentences in some cases as district attorney, notes that he grew up with both parents in prison and that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. A 2019 national study from Cornell University and FWD.us found that 45 percent of all Americans had ever had an immediate family member, such as a parent or sibling, in jail or prison for at least one day. That's high, but no majority. The figure grew to 64 percent when including "extended" family such as uncles or grandparents, but Boudin was talking about immediate family in the PBS interview. It's a subtle but important difference that the underlying study makes clear. Boudin earned One Pinocchio. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @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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