Fact check: Old false claim about Nancy Pelosi ordering a 200 seat Boeing 757 to fly to California resurfaces

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi holds weekly news conference with Capitol hill reporters in Washington
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) attends her weekly news conference at the U.S. Capitol in in Washington, U.S., January 15, 2021. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
Shared thousands of times since mid-February 2021, posts on social media claim that U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi uses a “200 seat Boeing 757” to fly to her home state every weekend. This claim has been circulating since 2008 and has repeatedly been debunked since. 
Posts making this claim can be seen:  here ,   here; and  here . The screenshot reads: “Speaker Pelosi (SIC) flys home to CA every week. She leaves on Friday & returns on Monday. She uses a 200 seat Boeing 757 because the gulf stream assigned to her had to stop & refuel. The fuel cost for this trip is $120,000 per RT. That is $5,760,000 annually not including crew $.”   
The screenshot that has been recently circulating on Facebook in 2021 appears to show a tweet from Dec. 4, 2019 (  here , archived  here ), which has since been shared on social media repeatedly ( here  ,  here  ).  
This claim itself, however, has been circulating in other forms since at least 2008, but as explained by Factcheck.org  here  allegations trace back to February 2007.  
As reported by the New York Times  here  in 2007 and during the start of her first term as House Speaker, Republicans accused “Ms. Pelosi of putting on royal airs,” for allegedly requesting a larger military plane than her predecessor’s to fly to her home district in San Francisco.  
After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Department of Defense and the White House had agreed that the Speaker of the House should fly using military transport, for security reasons (being second in line of succession after the vice president).  
The plane that was used by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (U.S. House speaker from Jan. 1999 to Jan. 2007,  here   ) to fly to his home state of Illinois was a C-20 which could carry up to 12 passengers ( here  ), according to a report by an ABC affiliate KTRE   here    . Pelosi continued to use that aircraft and occasionally used a slightly larger model (the C-37A ( here  , also a 12-seat plane), “depending on availability” as reported by Factcheck.org in December 2008 ( here  ).  
Bill Livingood, then U.S. House Sergeant At Arms, issued a statement clarifying that it was him, not Pelosi, who requested a larger plane and that he did so for security reasons ( here ). “The fact that Speaker Pelosi lives in California compelled me to request an aircraft that is capable of making nonstop flights for security reasons,” he said ( here ).  
At the time, Republicans claimed Pelosi had requested a C-32 plane ( here ), which has a capacity for up to 45 passengers, not an aircraft with 200 seats as the posts claim.  
In 2008, when Factheck.org tackled the claim  here  , spokespersons for Pelosi and Andrews Air Force Base said that the speaker had “used the big Air Force jet once” (the C-32), but that she normally used “a much smaller plane, the same one used by previous speaker of the House, Republican Dennis Hastert.”  For trips other than flying between Washington D.C. and San Francisco, the speaker flew with commercial airlines, Factcheck.org reported at the time.  
In 2020, when asked about the same claim, Drew Hammill, spokesman for Pelosi, told Politifact that "Speaker Pelosi travels by commercial air” ( here  ) and said that she had access to military aircraft from 2007 to 2011, during her first term as House Speaker, but after that “she began routinely flying commercial flights.”   
When asked about the meme’s resurfacing in February 2021, Hamill told Reuters it was false. 
A photograph of Pelosi in a commercial flight on 2019 can be seen  here  , tweeted by CNN’s Chief National Affairs Correspondent Jeff Zeleny.    
VERDICT  
False. Nancy Pelosi does not use a 200-seat Boeing 757 to fly to her home state.  A spokesman for Pelosi told Reuters this claim is false.  
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our work to fact-check social media posts  here  .  

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