Some of President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters claime the recent news that the FBI raid at home of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, is “fake news.”
One of the most popular threads on r/The_Donald, a popular pro-Trump subreddit, claims that because the raid–which took place on July 26 according to the Washington Post–wasn’t reported on until Wednesday, it must be “fake news.”
The timing of Washington Post’s story publishing three weeks after the raid was a particular sticking point for many Trump supporters. The Post did not specify when their sources gave them information about the raid—which is common in most news stories. The timing of the article could simply be the newspaper verifying the information among several sources.
In the story, the Post reports that FBI agents seized documents from Manafort’s home, some of which purportedly details the infamous meeting Manafort attended with Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner with a Russian lawyer who promised to deliver damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
The thread on r/The_Donald has several screenshots of major news websites, left-leaning websites, and right-wing sites with highlighted dates of the time of publication and the date of the raid.
“The problem we’re having with this is it happened 3 weeks ago and is only being reported NOW as if it just happened last night,” one user on r/The_Donald wrote. “Many people only read the headlines and the media know that.”
“Lmfao, the fact we are only hearing about this 3 weeks after the fact means that they didn’t find anything,” another Reddit user wrote in the thread.
“Or the WaPo timed it to come out today in continued collusion with the deep state/DNC/Hillary/Obama or Mueller himself,” a user wrote in response.
Other users seemed to think the news was published today because it was a “slow news day” and could do “maximum damage” on Trump, a theory that ignores the flaring tensions between the U.S. and North Korea.
It wasn’t just Reddit’s pro-Trump hive that thought the Post’s story was fake news. People on Twitter had similar feelings about the story.
#WaPo up to their usual #FakeNews headlines on Paul Manafort. Not a raid, not pre-dawn, please…#MAGA Where are #Hillary #Lynch raids.
— Constitutional 📜 Truth (@freedomtospeak) August 9, 2017
Manafort raid is fake news. It actually happened wks ago & u can b damn sure if they found ANYTHING it would have leaked out by now.
— Linda Traitz (@LindaTraitz) August 9, 2017
#WaPo is trying to pretend that their reporting is actually believable. They are cute in that way. @WashingtonPost is #FakeNews
— Kelly (@KLSouth) August 9, 2017
https://twitter.com/sandib1200/status/895300357189844992
https://twitter.com/GetsGreased/status/895279672321122304