Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was among the right-wingers to fall for a fake report claiming that an unnamed whistleblower from ABC News—who is fueling accusations of the debate being rigged against President Donald Trump but who hasn’t been confirmed to actually exist—died under suspicious circumstances.
Except the report is entirely untrue and the alleged whistleblower (who may not be real) is not dead.
Some skeptics—a significant share of whom are conservatives themselves—continued to cast doubt on the existence of a whistleblower at all, given that the claim traces back to an X account with the name “Black Insurrectionist–I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS.”
That account alleged last week it had an affidavit from an ABC News whistleblower detailing how the outlet purposely gave Vice President Kamala Harris an advantage.
On Sunday, the account released a document that redacted the whistleblower’s name and information as well as the notary stamp. In it, the alleged whistleblower said they worked at ABC News for over 10 years and believed the outlet had become biased against Trump.
The document stated that ABC News agreed to fact-check Trump but not Harris during the debate, provided the Harris campaign sample questions in advance, and agreed not to broach certain topics such as President Joe Biden’s health.
ABC News denied providing Harris advance questions. Linsey Davis, one of the debate moderators, stated that the rigorous fact-checking of Trump was designed to compensate for the CNN debate, in which his “statements were allowed to just hang and not [be] disputed by the candidate Biden, at the time, or the moderators.”
Some Trump supporters touted the document as overwhelming evidence of a rigged debate—while others have cast doubt on the allegations.
“If we can deep-fake a video and voice in 2024, im pretty sure I could make a fake Word document and black out some lines,” replied one account whose bio declares that the user has never voted Democrat. “I’ll believe it when there is a face attached.”
“As much as it pains me to say this I believe it is a hoax,” said another account named “MAGA American,” who added, “I hope I am wrong but it looks fishy as hell.”
But as the whistleblower allegations blew up, another claim began circulating that similarly left MAGA divided about its veracity: that the supposed whistleblower had been killed in a car crash.
“WOW!” captioned one account of the supposed report in a post that was viewed more than three million times.
The fake report got amplified by Greene, who posted on X Sunday that “the ABC whistleblower who claimed Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of the debate has died in a car crash according to news reports.”
The “news reports” in question, however, appear to trace back to a blog-style fake news site titled “countylocalnews.”
The so-called report, published by an unnamed author, claims that the whistleblower passed away after a Sept. 13 car accident outside Bethesda, Maryland. The post commends the whistleblower for exposing “a breach of trust that undermined the democratic process” and offers no quotes or named sources.
One pro-Trump user concluded that “this is probably a hoax” because the domain information is hidden and the fake outlet has no contact information of any kind.
“I think this is a hoax to get people to click on the Youtube video’s (which seem to be in each article–history of Kamala Harris),” he theorized. “Or possibly to generate ad revenue from the side bar ads.”
Greene later acknowledged that “this story appears to be false,” but left the original post up.
“We need a serious investigation into the whistleblower’s report that Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of time from ABC!” she added.
Critics quickly mocked the car accident claim. One joked, “When an invisible whistleblower is killed by an invisible car in an invisible collision, does it make a sound?”
“The ABC whistleblower who claimed Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of the debate has died in a car crash and eaten by immigrants,” quipped someone else.
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