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Democratic congressman Beto O'Rourke of Texas came to national prominence in 2018 through his high-profile campaign to unseat incumbent Republican U.S. senator Ted Cruz. During the course of his campaign, the Democratic candidate has been confronted with various claims and allegations about himself and his family. One such meme, entitled 'Beto' Reality Check, was shared widely on Facebook in August 2018: A spokesperson for O'Rourke's campaign described the meme as factually incorrect in countless ways and largely referred us to several existing news reports about the allegations. The following is our breakdown of the five sections contained in the meme. The meme claimed: In fact, O'Rourke was known as Beto long before he entered political life, although his birth name is Robert and he appears to use both first names interchangeably. (For example, his July 2018 Federal Election Commission Statement of Candidacy lists his name as Robert Beto O'Rourke.) O'Rourke told CNN that his parents referred to him as Beto from day one, and that it just stuck. Others have noted that the name is likely derived from a pronunciation of the Spanish Roberto, and O'Rourke himself described it as a nickname for Robert in El Paso. (According to the U.S. Census Bureau, around 78 percent of El Paso county residents listed themselves as being of Mexican heritage in 2016.) O'Rourke's family is of Irish heritage. According to the New York Times, his family came over from Ireland four generations ago to work on the railroad. His father Pat O'Rourke was a prominent El Paso County official during the 1980s. A 1986 article about Pat O'Rourke in the El Paso Times referred to his then 14-year-old son as Beto O'Rourke. In 1999, six years before O'Rourke ran for El Paso city council, the same newspaper referred to web site designer Beto O'Rourke in a short article about his I.T. business Stanton Street Design. After checking the archives of the El Paso Times, we found multiple references to Beto O'Rourke between 1986 and 2004, when O'Rourk was either a child or a businessman and had never run for political office. In March, the campaign of O'Rourke's Republican opponent, Ted Cruz, launched a radio jingle that poked fun at the name Beto and included the following lyrics: I remember reading stories/Liberal Robert wanted to fit in/So he changed his name to 'Beto'/And hid it with a grin ...: The next day, O'Rourke posted a photograph of himself as a young boy, wearing a sweater with the nickname Beto stitched into it, establishing that, contrary to false accusation, he did not change his name for political reasons: The meme claimed: O'Rourke has indeed been arrested for burglary and drunk driving, a history which he has discussed several times over the course of his political career, as his spokesperson told us: While charges were dismissed, this is something that Beto has always publicly addressed -- during his initial run for the city council, his run for Congress, in profiles written about him, during dozens of interviews, and at town halls across the state during this campaign. In a 27 August 2018 op-ed for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, O'Rourke himself wrote: According to El Paso county jail records, O'Rourke was arrested for attempted burglary on 19 May 1995, when he was 22 years old. He was released from custody the same day. Court records show that the prosecutor dropped the charge in February 1996. O'Rourke was also arrested for driving while intoxicated on 27 September 1998, the day after his 26th birthday. He completed a misdemeanor diversion program (namely DWI school) in October 1999, and the charge was dropped. In August 2018, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News cited police reports, including a witness account, which suggested that the incident leading to O'Rourke's DWI arrest was relatively serious and involved a collision with another vehicle and a possible attempt by O'Rourke to leave the scene: In the case of his DWI arrest, O'Rourke did not face prison time because he completed an alternative adjudication program. It's not clear why the attempted burglary charge was dropped in 1996 (we asked the O'Rourke campaign about this but didn't receive a response to that particular question in time for publication). However, we could find no evidence that O'Rourke's father had any role in either case, nor did the meme offer any evidence. Congressman O'Rourke's father Pat was the El Paso County judge until 1986 -- a kind of chief executive of the county's governing body, the Commissioners Court -- so he had not held office for nine years by the time of his son's attempted burglary arrest. The meme claimed: Despite the meme's claim, O'Rourke has never been charged with, or convicted of, violating any laws related to insider trading, including the STOCK Act, which bars members of the U.S. Congress from benefiting from financial transactions made on the basis of information they received in their capacity as members of Congress. But this section of the meme does contain elements of truth in that -- after the matter was brought to light by a third party -- O'Rourke reported his potential violation of rules to the House Ethics Committee (for stock transactions he maintained were executed by his broker without his knowledge), and the matter was resolved without any charges being brought against him: On 27 November 2013, O'Rourke wrote on Facebook that the ethics committee had informed him they would consider the issue resolved once he sold off any remaining shares that he bought during any IPOs, and sent the U.S. Treasury a check equal to the amount he earned in profits from those IPO-related shares: Records filed with the Clerk of the House of Representatives show that O'Rourke bought between $1,000 and $15,000 worth of shares in Twitter on 7 November 2013 (the first day the company was traded on the stock market), before selling off between $1,000 and $15,000 in shares later that day. Records also indicate that on 27 November 2013, O'Rourke again sold off between $1,000 and $15,000 worth of Twitter shares pursuant to the recommendations made by House Ethics Committee in a letter from 11/27/13. The meme claimed: This section of the meme relates to incidents which took place in 1983, when Beto O'Rourke was 10 years old, and which had absolutely nothing to do with him. Nevertheless, it's true that in February 1983, El Paso County Sheriff's Captain Willie Hill told two police officers to get rid of a condom full of white powder which they had found in Pat O'Rourke's car while they were installing a radio in it. The officers suspected the powder to be heroin or cocaine, but the substance was never tested to determine its true nature. Hill was temporarily suspended but was reinstated after being acquitted on a misdemeanor charge of evidence tampering. (The prosecutor had earlier dropped a charge of misconduct against him.) Hill testified that he made a snap decision about the discovery of the powder, which he strongly suspected had been planted there to embarrass or undermine either O'Rourke or one of the officers installing the radio. O'Rourke and Hill were friends, as O'Rourke (then county judge) told the El Paso Times: Because he's a good man, it would be an injustice if Willie were to suffer grievous consequences from this whole episode. You have an honest and honorable man implicated by pure fluke. And that's just damn right not fair. The meme claimed: The meme got the basic facts right about the federal tax case against Charlotte's, but it falsely claimed that Congressman O'Rourke was personally involved in the company. He was not. In 2010, Charlotte's Inc., an El Paso furniture store company started by O'Rourke's grandmother in 1951, was convicted of structuring transactions to evade reporting requirements, a tax-related felony. The company was charged as a corporate entity, but the Congressman's mother, Melissa O'Rourke, acted as its authorized representative. The company pled guilty to accusations that it had restructured transactions in order to present relatively large cash payments as having been made in installments of less than $10,000. Anti-money laundering provisions of U.S. law require that a business reveal the identity of any individual who makes a cash payment above that threshold. In total, Charlotte's and its employees illegally restructured $630,000 in payments, all from one customer, in this way between May 2005 and October 2006. The identity of that customer is not known. U.S. District Court judge Kathleen Cardone gave a sentence of five years' probation and a $500,000 fine, with $250,000 of that suspended. In 2017, Melissa O'Rourke announced that she intended to close down the business but denied the decision was connected to her son's U.S. Senate campaign or the 2010 conviction. According to Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts records for 2017, Congressman O'Rourke had no formal role with Charlotte's Inc., whose directors were Melissa O'Rourke and the Congressman's sister Charlotte O'Rourke. Records for 2005 and 2006 (when the I.R.S. reporting violations took place) as well as 2010 (when the conviction happened) show that Congressman O'Rourke had no formal role with the company at those times, either. The Congressman is part owner of the property where Charlotte's was located. According to O'Rourke's 2013 congressional financial disclosure, his mother gifted him an ownership stake worth between $1 million and $5 million in Peppertree Square, a shopping center on North Mesa St. in El Paso. However, his part ownership of the Peppertree Square property (which does not appear to entail any management function in any of the businesses located there) did not accrue until 31 December 2012, more than six years after the conclusion of the I.R.S. reporting violations at Charlotte's.
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