Since its inception in 2007, PolitiFact has covered Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, who announced her retirement in January 2027.
We first fact-checked the former House speaker on August 25, 2008, when she characterized then-presidential candidate Barack Obama as a state legislator with a history of bipartisanship, a claim we rated as half-true. We rated Pelosi’s statements a total of 56 times on the Truth-O-Meter, with the median rating being “half-truth.”
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Political analysts consider Pelosi, 85, one of the most effective legislative leaders in recent U.S. history. Despite her narrow margin, Pelosi was able to largely keep her caucus united around her legislative goals on health care, the environment and other issues.
Her ability to raise money for Democrats was one of the reasons she remained minority leader when she lost the speaker’s gavel after the 2010 midterm elections but rose again in 2018 when Democrats won a majority. Pelosi will lose the speakership if Republicans win the chamber in 2022. She left the leadership position but remained as a rank-and-file member.
Pelosi was known for her effectiveness outside of public life, including in the Capitol cloakroom and at private dinner parties. Republicans targeted her sometimes awkward rhetorical style in front of television cameras, along with her representation of San Francisco, one of the nation’s most liberal districts.
On the internet, Pelosi has been falsely accused (many times) of being drunk. Spend extravagantly on your hair. To fall. Crying in public. to be arrested. Hanging out with drug lord El Chapo. Calling Americans stupid. To be expelled from the House of Commons. divorced from her husband. Disappeared after being arrested by a U.S. marshal. having committed treason. and be executed.
When her husband, Paul, was attacked in their home in 2022 by an intruder wielding a hammer, conspiracy theories were fueled by President Donald Trump and others that the entire incident was a “false flag” incident.
Here’s a look at some of Pelosi’s most memorable moments in recent fact-checking history.
Pelosi vs. Trump: Torn Speech, Policy Battle, January 6th
Pelosi and Trump have a long-standing rhetorical feud. When a reporter asked Trump a question hours after Pelosi announced her retirement, Trump called her an “evil woman.”
In 2018, President Trump falsely claimed that Pelosi supported the criminal organization MS-13. Pelosi criticized President Trump’s use of the word “animal” at the immigration conference, but did not speak positively about MS-13.
In 2020, when Pelosi boldly tore the paper copy of President Trump’s State of the Union address from the seat behind the president, Trump said, “I thought it was terrible when she tore up the speech. Number one, this is an official document. It’s not authorized. What she did was illegal. She broke the law.”
We rated it “False”. Pelosi destroyed a duplicate copy of Trump’s speech herself, 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 said in 2017 that President Trump’s first tax bill would “reduce taxes by $30 million in 2005,” and was judged to be mostly correct.
However, she was falsely convicted in 2020 when she said President Trump was “morbidly obese.” President Trump told reporters he was taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent coronavirus infection, but mainstream doctors called the approach questionable. She said that’s not a healthy idea for “someone in his weight group.” Even if President Trump had lied about his official height and weight, he would have needed to be significantly heavier to meet the morbidly obese level.
The most acrimonious exchange between the two revolved around January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol as Congress was formally counting the 2020 election results. The rioters entered Pelosi’s office and chanted for her as they marched through the Capitol.
President Trump has repeatedly said that Pelosi “refused” to request “10,000 National Guard troops” to provide security for his January 6, 2021 rally. As of February 28, 2021, we rated it False. A subsequent fact check found no new information to support Trump’s claims about Pelosi and National Guard troops.
Pelosi played a central role in enacting landmark health care legislation.
One of her greatest policy legacies was the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which was President Obama’s top policy priority in 2009. The bill dominated political debate early in his presidency, and as speaker, Pelosi played a key role in securing Democratic support for Obama’s vision.
Pelosi accurately discussed the policy differences between the Democratic and Republican health care bills, including the Democratic proposal’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
But there was some truth in one Republican criticism of the bill — Pelosi said Democrats “have to pass a terrible health care bill so the American people actually know what’s in it.” That was close to what Pelosi actually said, but the Texas Republican Party’s brief ignored her comments about why the bill would make her proud.
Pelosi was a star fundraiser, but one of her financial claims turned out to be misleading
Between 2000 and 2024, Pelosi raised $86.6 million for her campaign committee and an additional $51 million for her party’s political action committee, according to OpenSecret, a nonprofit that tracks campaign finance information.
Despite her fundraising abilities, she overstated the amount of Wall Street money raised by Republicans and Democrats in 2017. “Wall Street dumps money en masse on House Democrats every election,” she said. But she cherry-picked the three election cycles in which Republicans held the House majority, while ignoring those in which Democrats took control, including two when Ms. Pelosi served as speaker. We rated this statement as Mostly False.
Pelosi’s false statements
Ms. Pelosi’s erroneous assessments include four things:
In her 2010 blog post, she said then-House Minority Leader John Boehner “admitted that ‘nothing will ever be the same'” by returning to “the same failed economic policies” that “destroyed the economy.” We found that Ms. Beyner specifically spoke about social issues, not the economy, and that the video clip she shared removed that context from Ms. Beyner’s statements. In 2011, she made the decision to promote a graph showing that President Obama had “increased debt by 16 percent,” compared to his predecessor, President George W. Bush, who had increased debt by 115 percent. The chart contains a serious miscalculation, ignoring various presidential terms and cherry-picking the most favorable indicators. In 2016, she claimed that right before her statement, China and Russia had “never voted with us at the United Nations on any sanctions against Iran.” We found eight Security Council resolutions over 10 years that threatened, imposed, or continued sanctions against Iran that were approved by Russia and China. She said in 2019 that deleting the state’s voter rolls would mean more than 200,000 registered Wisconsin voters would be barred from voting. We found that the purge could potentially remove more than 200,000 people from voter rolls, but they would not be “barred” from voting. Anyone can re-register, including on Election Day.
When we fact-checked Pelosi in real time
We once fact-checked Ms. Pelosi in person, on television, in real time. And this time it wasn’t based on policy.
In 2018, this reporter served as president of the Washington Press Club Foundation. The Foundation hosts an annual black-tie Congressional Dinner. Pelosi is a frequent guest speaker at the event, and that year she began her remarks by thanking the members of the chair’s table, including “FactCheck.org Chairman Louis Jacobson.”
I interrupted her. “Actually, it’s Politifact.” Pelosi quickly pivoted as the audience burst into laughter.
“It’s okay, staff,” she said. “That was almost true.”
