FACT CHECK: Did Lin Wood Find Donald Trump In The White House In April 2021?
A post shared on Instagram claims lawyer Lin Wood recently visited the White House and found former President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
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Verdict: False
The image Wood shared on Telegram dates back to 2020. Wood told Newsweek he posted that he found Trump in the White House because he has “a sense of humor.”
Fact Check:
Wood is a pro-Trump lawyer who was been suspended from Twitter permanently for tweets the platform said incited violence, according to The Washington Post. Wood had also spread baseless claims on the platform before his suspension about the 2020 presidential election, including saying Trump won the election, The New York Times reported.
The Instagram image shows a screen grab of text and a photo shared from Wood’s Telegram Channel in April 2021. In the photo, Wood and Trump can be seen posing together in the Oval Office.
“I was right. No Joey in the White House. I did run into our President of the United States,” reads part of text. “President Trump is hanging out and working in the office in which we re-elected him to a serve in a historic landslide victory November 3, 2020.”
Trump is not the current president. President Joe Biden won the Nov. 3 election with 306 electoral votes, according to the National Archives, and the results were certified on Jan. 7. Through a reverse image search, Check Your Fact found that the photo of Trump and Wood in the Oval Office actually dates back to 2020, when Wood tweeted it in September of that year, an archived version of the tweet shows.
“I met with @realDonaldTrump in the Oval Office at White House on March 11, 2020 at President’s request,” the tweet reads. “I have not published photo earlier but thought today was good day to so do for context after leftist & Gannett attack article. Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian.”
Check Your Fact didn’t find any media reports about Wood visiting the White House in April of this year, further adding to the post’s dubiousness. (RELATED: No, This Photo Does Not Show A ‘PsyOp’ White House Event Filmed In Atlanta)
When asked by Newsweek why he posted that he found Trump in the White House in April 2021 on Telegram, Wood responded that he has a “sense of humor.” While Wood allegedly meant the post to be humorous, social media users have shared the information without that context, seemingly believing Wood’s erroneous claims.
Check Your Fact has previously debunked the baseless claim that Biden films White House events at a studio in Atlanta. Other fact-checkers have debunked false claims that Biden lives and works from a Castle Rock film set in Hollywood.
