Snopes declared it was “mostly false” that Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “exaggerated the danger she was in” during the Capitol riot after critics noted she wasn’t even in the Capitol building during the event.
Ocasio-Cortez has repeatedly said she feared for her life during the riot and described her account in detail on live streams. The congresswoman said she hid inside the bathroom in her office during the nearby riot after hearing shouting and banging.
Soon after her story came out, though, critics noted that her office is in a different building than the U.S. Capitol. Ocasio-Cortez has an office in the Cannon building, which is down the street from the Capitol.
After this revelation, Snopes, a fact-checking website, admitted that it was “true” that “Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t in the main Capitol building where the House and Senate Chambers are located” but declared claims that she exaggerated the danger she was in to be “mostly false.”
“AOC was targeted with another round of bad-faith smears after giving an emotional, firsthand account of her experiences during the Capitol riot,” Snopes wrote in its fact-check.
After noting that Ocasio-Cortez was not in the U.S. Capitol when the building was breached, Snopes tried to explain its reason for dubbing the claim as “mostly false.” The website wrote that the following was “false”:
“When the attack on the Capitol began, Ocasio-Cortez was in her congressional office, which is located in a network of office buildings immediately surrounding the Capitol, and her office building was one of the two buildings that were evacuated.”
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— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) February 4, 2021
The fact-check continued on to accuse “the right-wing disinformation machine” of being responsible for minimizing “what Ocasio-Cortez said she had experienced.” The fact-check called it “cyberbullying” launched by “conservative news outlets and social media conspiracy trolls.” (RELATED: Ocasio-Cortez: ‘I’m A Survivor Of Sexual Assault’)
“Ocasio-Cortez was attacked on social media with bad-faith attempts to discredit her story by people who falsely claimed she exaggerated the danger she was in because she wasn’t actually inside the main Capitol building where the House and Senate chambers are located,” the Snopes fact-check reads after describing the story Ocasio-Cortez retold of that day in detail.
“But Ocasio-Cortez never claimed she was in the main building,” the fact-check also notes. “She said [she] was inside her office, which is in just one of the network of buildings containing congressional offices that comprise the Capitol complex. The office buildings and the main Capitol building are interconnected by a series of tunnels known as the Capitol Subway System, which allows members of Congress to traverse underground from their offices to their respective chambers.”
Snopes’ fact-check ends by noting that Ocasio-Cortez “made history” in 2018 “as the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress.” The fact-check, written by Snopes’ Bethania Palma, added that she’s been “the frequent target of smear campaigns and disinformation” that have, according to Ocasio-Cortez, “prompted death threats against her.”
Snopes did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller.