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Fact-checking Biden’s NBC remarks about Vance’s views on abortion, climate and classified documents

President Joe Biden speaks July 9, 2024, on the 75th anniversary of NATO at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington. (AP)

By Amy Sherman July 16, 2024

As Republicans railed against him at their convention in Milwaukee, President Joe Biden sat for a counterprogramming interview with NBC’s Lester Holt. Biden criticized his 2024 opponent, former President Donald Trump, and Trump’s choice of running mate, Sen. JD.Vance of Ohio, whose nomination was announced on the Republican National Convention’s first day.

When asked for his reaction to the attempted assassination of Trump, Biden called out incendiary political rhetoric, saying, "There’s no place at all for violence in politics in America."

When Holt pressed Biden about his comment to donors a week ago that "it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye," Biden said that using that word was a "mistake" but he wanted to turn the focus to Trump’s statements and policies.

Biden’s candidacy has been questioned by some Democratic colleagues and donors since his widely panned June 27 debate performance. Biden told Holt he "screwed up" at the debate, but felt debate host CNN should have focused on Trump’s falsehoods. (PolitiFact fact-checked statements by both candidates during the debate.)

Biden also responded to the surprise termination of one of Trump’s criminal indictments. Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed the case about Trump’s handling of classified documents, saying the appointment of a special counsel violated the U.S. Constitution.

We fact-checked four of Biden’s statements from the July 15 NBC interview.

"JD Vance has adopted the same policies, no exceptions on abortion … he signed on to the Trump agenda."

This is a misleading framing of Trump’s abortion views. Trump has said he supports some abortion exceptions for rape, incest and the pregnant woman’s life; Vance was inconsistent or vague before moving closer to Trump’s views this year.

When Vance, then a Senate candidate, was asked in a 2021 interview with Spectrum News whether laws should allow women to get abortions if they were victims of rape or incest, he said that society shouldn’t view a pregnancy or birth resulting from rape or incest as "inconvenient" — making it sound as if he didn’t support rape or incest exceptions.

Vance was also asked whether anti-abortion laws should include rape and incest exceptions. "Two wrongs don't make a right," he said in response. "At the end of day, we are talking about an unborn baby. What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?"

When asked again about the exceptions, Vance criticized the question: "It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society." (The Biden campaign highlighted those remarks on the RNC’s first night of the RNC and a Biden campaign spokesperson pointed partly to Vance’s comments in the 2021 interview.)

During a 2022 U.S. Senate debate, Vance said, "I've always believed in reasonable exceptions," according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Vance said the 10-year-old girl who traveled to Indiana for an abortion after she was raped should have been able to get an abortion in Ohio. But the Plain Dealer wrote that "Vance never elaborated on what other ‘reasonable’ exemptions he may support. That's because there aren't any. His campaign has said the only exemption he supports in abortion is to protect the life of the mother."

As a senator, Vance lobbied to defeat Ohio’s 2023 constitutional amendment that enshrined access to abortion. But Vance also wrote on X that "as Donald Trump has said, ‘you've got to have the exceptions."

Vance moved closest to Trump’s known position in a May 19, 2024, interview on CBS’ "Face the Nation." Vance said, "What I've said consistently is the gross majority of policy here is gonna be set by the states. I am pro-life. I wanna save as many babies as possible. And sure, I think it's totally reasonable to say that late-term abortions should not happen with reasonable exceptions. But I think Trump's approach here is trying to settle a very tough issue and actually empower the American people to decide it for themselves."

Vance echoed that point about state policies and "reasonable exceptions" in a July 15 interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity that aired at the same time as Biden’s Holt interview.

Vance "says there’s no climate change that’s happening."

Vance has grown more dubious of climate change in recent years, The New York Times found.

In 2020, Vance said in a speech at Ohio State University, "We have a climate problem in our society."

But in 2022, he told the American Leadership Forum, "I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man."

Vance acknowledged that the climate was changing but said that humans had no role. "It’s been changing, as others pointed out, it’s been changing for millennia," Vance said.

When asked about Vance’s stance on climate change, the Biden campaign cited two statements he made in 2022.

In an interview with "The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show," Vance sounded dismissive about climate change. "And even if there was a climate crisis, I don't know how the way to solve it is to buy more Chinese manufactured electric vehicles. The whole EV (electric vehicle) thing is a scam."

Later that year, Vance said he had "become persuaded that climate change is certainly happening," but that "some of the alarmism is a little overstated."

The League of Conservation Voters gave Vance a "zero" on its 2023 scorecard based on his Senate votes.

In the classified documents investigation, "they looked at me and concluded I didn’t do a damn thing wrong,"

That’s misleading.

A special counsel investigation of Biden’s classified documents handling concluded that no criminal charges were warranted. However, Robert Hur’s report criticized Biden’s practices in handling sensitive documents, saying he had found evidence that Biden had "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials" as a private citizen after he served as vice president.

Hur found evidence that Biden willfully retained classified documents about Afghanistan and notebooks containing Biden’s handwritten notes about security and foreign policy. The report detailed some of Biden’s haphazard storage practices, saying some of the Afghanistan documents were "found in Mr. Biden's Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood."

In a 388-page report, the special counsel also dwelled on Biden’s memory lapses, writing that "Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." Hur concluded that despite the investigators’ concerns about how Biden had handled certain materials, a jury would be unlikely to find Biden guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Trump "talks about there’d be a bloodbath if he loses."

This is missing context.

Trump’s remarks during a March speech in Ohio came in the context of speaking about Biden’s plans for electric vehicles, which Trump said would harm the U.S. auto industry.

Trump’s remarks started with a critique of the United Auto Workers union, which endorsed Biden in January. Trump said that "they want to do this all-electric nonsense where the cars don't go far" and said the cars "cost too much" and are made overseas.

"Let me tell you something to China," Trump said. "If you're listening, President Xi, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal, those big, monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now, and you think you're going to get that, you're going to not hire Americans, and you're going to sell the cars to us, no. We're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you're not going to be able to sell those cars."

"If I get elected. Now, if I don't get elected, it's gonna be a bloodbath for the whole, that's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country. That'll be the least of it. But they're not gonna sell those cars."

PolitiFact Staff Writer Mia Penner contributed to this story.