Skip to content

Tuesday, Apr 20, 2021

Did former President Trump pick up the defense legal fees for former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin?

Alan Duke, Lead Stories
no

The claim that Trump paid for Chauvin's defense in his trial for the murder of George Floyd is satire published by a website known for trolling conservatives.

In fact, the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association funded Chauvin's defense.

The site that published the bogus report is part of "America's Last Line of Defense" network of satire websites run by self-professed liberal troll Christopher Blair from Maine along with a loose confederation of friends and allies.

He runs several websites and Facebook pages with visible satire disclaimers everywhere. They mostly publish made-up stories with headlines specifically created to trigger Republicans, conservatives and evangelical Christians into angrily sharing or commenting on the story on Facebook without actually reading the full article, exposing them to mockery and ridicule by fans of the sites and pages.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network.

See all fact briefs

Lead Stories is a fact checking and debunking website at the intersection of big data and journalism that launched in 2015. It scouts for trending stories, images, videos and posts that contain false information in order to fact check them as quickly as possible. It actively monitors the fake-news ecosystem and doesn’t wait for reader tips or reports before getting started on a story.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.