Shared thousands of times since mid-February 2021, social media reports claim that US House President Nancy Pelosi uses a “200-seat Boeing 757” every weekend to fly to her home state. This claim has been in circulation since 2008 and has been repeatedly exposed since then.
Reports that make this claim can be seen: here, here and here. The screenshot reads: “Speaker Pelosi (SIC) flies home to CA every week. She leaves Friday and returns Monday. She used a 200-seat Boeing 757 because the wave current allotted to her had to stop and refuel. The fuel cost for this trip is $ 120,000 per RT. That’s $ 5,760,000 annually, not the crew $. ”
The screenshot, which was recently circulated on Facebook in 2021, appears to be a tweet from 4 December 2019 ( here , archived here ), which has since been repeatedly shared on social media (here, here).
However, this allegation itself has been circulating in other forms since at least 2008, but as explained by Factcheck.org, allegations are traced back to February 2007.
As the New York Times reported here in 2007 and during the beginning of her first term as a home speaker, the Republicans accuse “Ms. Pelosi to tackle the royal air, ”because he allegedly requested a larger military aircraft than her predecessor to fly to her home district in San Francisco.
After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense and the White House agreed that the speaker of the House should fly for military transportation, for security reasons (second place in the series after the Vice President).
The plane used by speaker J. Dennis Hastert (US speaker from January 1999 to January 2007 here) to fly to his home state of Illinois was a C-20 that could carry up to 12 passengers (here), according to a report by an ABC subsidiary KTRE here. Pelosi continued to use the aircraft and sometimes used a slightly larger model (the C-37A (here, also a 12-seater aircraft), ‘subject to availability’, as Factcheck.org reported in December 2008 (here) .
Bill Livingood, then U.S. House Sergeant At Arms, issued a statement explaining that he, not Pelosi, had requested a larger aircraft and that he did so for safety reasons (here). “The fact that Speaker Pelosi lives in California forced me to request an aircraft that can undertake uninterrupted flights for safety reasons,” he said (here).
At the time, Republicans claimed that Pelosi had requested a C-32 aircraft (here), with a capacity for up to 45 passengers, not a 200-seat aircraft as the posts claim.
In 2008, when Factheck.org tackled the allegation here, spokesmen for Pelosi and Andrews Air Force Base said the speaker “once used the large air force jet” (the C-32), but that she normally “a lot smaller aircraft, the same one used by the previous Speaker of the House, Republican Dennis Hastert. Factcheck.org reported at the time for travel other than flying between Washington DC and San Francisco.
In 2020, on the same question, Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill told Politifact that ‘Speaker Pelosi travels by commercial air’ (here) and said that from 2007 to 2011 she would have access to military aircraft, during her first term as Home speaker, but after that “she started flying regularly with commercial flights.”
Asked about the reunion of the meme in February 2021, Hamill told Reuters it was false.
A photo of Pelosi in a commercial flight on 2019 can be seen here , tweeted by CNN’s chief correspondent Jeff Zeleny on national affairs.
VERDICT
Untrue. Nancy Pelosi does not use a 200-seat Boeing 757 to fly to her home state. A Pelosi spokesman told Reuters this allegation was false.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our work to actually check social media posts.