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FACT: Photo appearing to show Biden asleep in Oval Office is fake

A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

CLAIM: Photo shows President Joe Biden asleep in his seat at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office with a stack of executive orders in front of him.

THE FACTS: A photo that appears to show the newly inaugurated president asleep at his desk is fabricated. Facebook users shared the altered image this week as part of a larger post criticizing the president’s age and work ethic. “AMERICA IN DECLINE,” read the original post, which was screen-grabbed and shared thousands of times on Facebook. “This decrepit old grifter works MAYBE five hours a day. We traded in a work horse, for someone that belonged out to pasture or sent to the glue factory a long time ago. Nothing says we threw in the towel better than this nauseating image, the ‘commander in chief’ can’t even stay awake.”

The image makes it look like Biden was asleep at his desk in the Oval Office on his first day as president, with a stack of executive orders beside him. However, a closer look reveals the photo is a composite image, with an old photo superimposed onto a recent one. Biden’s body and the background in the post match AP images from Biden’s first day in office, when he signed a series of executive orders at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Numerous photos and videos from that event confirm that Biden was awake — and wearing a black face covering — during the signing process. Biden’s head in the post comes from a 2011 photo where he appears to briefly doze off as former President Barack Obama delivered a speech on the national debt.

CLAIM: Shell is eliminating 9,000 jobs because of President Joe Biden.

THE FACTS: A post circulating on Facebook falsely links Shell layoffs to the Biden administration. “Shell oil laying off 9000 workers Thanks Biden,” states the false post. But energy producer Royal Dutch Shell announced in September, before Biden was even elected, that the company would cut up to 9,000 jobs worldwide. At the time, Shell said that around 1,500 employees had agreed to take voluntary redundancy. The cuts follow a drop in oil demand during the pandemic. The false posts emerged weeks after Biden signed an executive order his first day in office revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, halting construction.

The 1,700-mile pipeline was planned to carry roughly 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta in Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. Biden’s executive order cited economic and climate reasons for revoking the permit. Keystone XL President Richard Prior said over 1,000 jobs, the majority unionized, will be eliminated in the coming weeks. “The assertion that Shell is eliminating jobs as a result of moves made by the Biden administration is inaccurate,” Anna Arata, a spokesperson for Shell, told the AP in an email. Arata further stated that “up to 9,000 positions would be eliminated as part of a broader effort to reduce costs, simplify the company’s structure and accelerate investments in lower-carbon energy products.”

CLAIM: Newly discovered video from election night at the TCF Center in Detroit shows tens of thousands of illegal ballots were delivered eight hours after the deadline.

THE FACTS: The video doesn't show anything illicit. It shows the city delivering legal ballots to be counted, as expected. The conservative website The Gateway Pundit is using a new video to recycle old misinformation about Michigan’s presidential election. In an article published Feb. 5, it spins a tale of fraudulent ballots delivered in the early hours of the morning the day after the election. The article quotes Michigan resident Shane Trejo, a writer for the right-leaning website Big League Politics, who claims to have witnessed “thousands of ballots” being delivered to the TCF Center at 3:30 a.m. “well after the 8:00 p.m. deadline for ballots to show up.” The article also claims to show “proof of the fraud” on film, sharing a seven-minute video of testimony from Michigan residents clipped together with footage of a white van delivering ballots to the TCF Center for counting early in the morning. But this article and video don’t show proof of fraud. Contrary to Trejo’s claims, the 8 p.m. deadline on Election Day was for voters to cast their ballots, not for those ballots to be delivered or counted. In big cities such as Detroit, it is customary for ballots to be processed at clerk offices before they are sent to counting boards, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office explained on her website. “In many larger jurisdictions, absentee ballots that arrived on Election Day were marked as received and put through security checks at clerk offices prior to being brought to absent voter counting boards,” Benson’s office said. “If a ballot arrived at a clerk’s office at 8 p.m., it may not move through the process and be sent to the counting board for several hours. This is why, in cities including Detroit, ballots arrived at counting boards several hours after polling places had closed.” It’s true that a white van used by the city arrived at the TCF Center to deliver about 16,000 ballots in the early hours of the morning on Nov. 4, according to a sworn affidavit from Christopher Thomas, a former state elections chief who worked at the TCF Center on election night. But there was nothing fraudulent or illegal about that. Thomas added that no ballots received after 8 p.m. on Nov. 3 “were ever at the TCF Center.” In a Nov. 13 order, Wayne County Circuit Chief Judge Timothy Kenny declined to stop the certification of Detroit-area votes, ruling that allegations of fraud at the TCF Center on election night were “incorrect and not credible.” The Gateway Pundit and Big League Politics did not respond to requests for comment.

— Associated Press writer Ali Swenson in Semora, North Carolina, contributed this report.