Missouri attorney general's scathing letter to Biden begins with false claim

President Joe Biden visited Missouri on Wednesday to promote the infrastructure law he signed in November. And Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also a US Senate candidate in the 2022 election, greeted Biden with a scathing letter -- one which began with a false claim.

Schmitt's first paragraph in the letter, which he printed on attorney general letterhead and posted on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, read as follows: "Welcome to Missouri. This is reportedly your first visit as president to one of the 25 states that cast its electoral votes for President Trump in 2020. It took almost one year. Welcome to the rest of the country."

Facts First: Biden's trip to Missouri was not even close to his first visit as president to a state Trump carried in the 2020 election. In fact, Missouri was the eighth Trump 2020 state to which Biden has made a visit since his January inauguration. The others are Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Florida and Idaho.

Biden landed at an airport in northern Kentucky in July, and spoke to the state's governor there, before traveling to neighboring Ohio for official events. (Former CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller, a longtime tracker of presidential travel, noted the Kentucky stop in a November tweet.) People can decide for themselves whether a brief airport stop means Biden has visited nine Trump 2020 states. Regardless, Biden participated in more extensive activities in the other eight.