QUESTION:
Text reveals NRA political contributions to elected officials?
ANSWER:
Yes, it does.
SOURCES:
Resistbot, Center for Responsive Politics, Federal Election Commission
PROCESS:
There’s a lot of discussion online right now about gun control and not all the information out there is real. That’s where Verify comes in. We get to the truth about some of those popular social media posts.
One of the latest post going around right now says if you text “NRA” to a five-digit number, 50409, you can find out if your local politicians get donations from the National Rifle Association.
The WUSA9 Verify team did the work to find out if you can trust that information.
Our researchers texted the number using a Maryland address. This popped up – saying no elected officials representing that area took money from the NRA, but that the NRA spent five thousand ninety dollars against Democratic Senator Ben Cardin.
The text came from a group called, “Resist bot,” so we looked them up. It’s a political service group run by volunteers, that started up shortly after President Trump was sworn into office.
“Resistbot” pulls data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit, non-partisan organization. You can find all their information on opensecrets.org.
To make sure their numbers were legit, we went to the official keepers of campaign finance information – the Federal Election Commission. We compared that Senator Cardin number to their records – and it was a match.
So we can verify the information about the NRA donations and your local politicians is accurate. Depending on where you fall on the issue, resist bot will also allow you to tweet your officials asking to return that money.
