Gripas Yuri/Abaca/Zuma
In the week following the presidential debate, Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have all tweeted in support of a thinly sourced rumor claiming that a “whistleblower” at ABC News came forward to reveal that the event was rigged in favor of Kamala Harris.
The notion has taken on increasingly farcical dimensions, with some sources claiming that the whistleblower died in a car accident soon after revealing his secrets, and others, including Ackman and Musk, circulating a typo-riddled “affidavit” from said whistleblower that is obviously not real.
Fake news peddlers claimed Harris was given debate questions in advance.
Now, thanks to a curious bit of unwitting help from Google News, the name of a real person who recently died—a Virginia plumber and pipefitter who has no connection to ABC—is being tied to the story.
Following Donald Trump’s uninspired performance last Tuesday against Kamala Harris, prominent Trump supporters and fake news peddlers alike began claiming without evidence that the ABC News-hosted debate had somehow been rigged in Harris’ favor or that she’d been given the debate questions in advance. This isn’t new: Trump spent much of 2016 arguing the presidential debates would be rigged against him, claims he repeated in 2020 in regards to his first debate with Joe Biden.
This time, however, the idea has taken on new contours, spread by Twitter users who claim to be independent journalists and researchers. One central player has been a person calling himself Black Insurrectionist, a Trump partisan who specifically says he’s not a journalist, but who claims to get inside information from figures in conservative politics. He’s also paid for his account, @DocNetyoutube, to be verified, meaning his replies and visibility are boosted on the site.
Two days after the debate, Black Insurrectionist claimed to have access to an affidavit from an ABC News whistleblower, outlining the ways in which Harris was given an upper hand.
“I have just signed a non-disclosure agreement with the attorney of the whistleblower,” he wrote. “The affidavit states how the Harris campaign was given sample question [sic] which were essentially the same questions that were given during the debate and separate assurances of fact checking Donald Trump and that she would NOT be fact checked.” He added that he would release the affidavit after the attorney redacted the whistleblower’s name.
A few days later, he did so, producing a clumsily redacted, typo-filled, strangely-formatted document, dated September 9. The affidavit claimed that Harris was promised she wouldn’t be questioned about the health of Joe Biden or her tenure as “Attorney General in San Francisco”—a position that doesn’t exist.
When people pointed out a range of such shortcomings, Black Insurrectionist took to feuding with those arguing the document appears to be obviously fake. After claiming that the document was sent to Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in unredacted form, he signaled a retreat. “I have gone as far with it as I can,” he tweeted on Monday morning. “The rest is up to the whistleblower and Congress.”
None of this makes a lot of sense, and as ABC News told Mother Jones in a statement, “ABC News followed the debate rules that both campaigns agreed on and which clearly state: No topics or questions will be shared in advance with campaigns or candidates.”
Nonetheless, the affidavit story was quickly picked up by a variety of sources, including, as the Daily Beast first pointed out, a fake news site called Leading Report, whose tweet about the affidavit has been viewed nearly two million times. Other people who shared the affidavit include former Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, who did a brief prison stint in 2018 for lying to the FBI, and Republican commentator and plagiarist Benny Johnson, who worked as a commentator for Tenet Media, the company that the DOJ alleges was secretly funded by employees of the state-backed Russian media company RT. (Johnson and other commentators have said they didn’t know about RT’s role.)
Another person promoting the affidavit is hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who tweeted it at Disney CEO Bob Iger on Sunday evening. (Disney is ABC News’ parent company.) “I find the allegations credible as written,” Ackman wrote, adding that he “strongly encourage[s]” Iger to investigate them. “Our democracy depends on transparency, particularly with regard to events which can impact the outcome of the presidential election. I ask on behalf of all voters that you treat these allegations with the seriousness they deserve.” Elon Musk was among those who retweeted Ackman’s post, which has now been viewed 5 million times. Musk also commented “Woah!” to another person sharing images from the supposed affidavit. (By Tuesday, Ackman had declared he planned to alert the SEC about ABC’s supposed debate misconduct.)
As word of the supposed affidavit picked up steam, so too did a tale about the untimely death of the person purportedly behind it. On Sunday, Rep. Taylor Greene tweeted, “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.”
Those “reports” appeared to be a WordPress blog whose URL is “County Local News,” but whose homepage title reads “Bgrnd Search.” The site, which seems to be running malware, ran a gobbledygook story claiming that the unnamed whistleblower died in a car accident on September 13 outside Bethesda, Maryland.
Because of an unfortunate twist of Google News’ algorithms, the car-crash story is being given an unwitting boost. Searches for the words “ABC whistleblower” bring up an article about an unrelated 64-year-old person who died in a car accident on September 11 in Virginia. That story appears to be coming up because it links to another story about whistleblower lawsuits filed against the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) authority.
There’s no indication whatsoever that any ABC News “whistleblower” even exists, and even less that this Virginia man was him. But Google’s algorithm has helped create a link where none exists—at least one fake news site has named the deceased 64-year old as the whistleblower, although most others haven’t followed suit.
A Google spokesperson confirmed that the article on the car crash was likely appearing in unrelated news results because it contained similar keywords. The spokesperson said that in such situations, the company will typically look for ways to improve their algorithm to prevent future occurrences, rather than take immediate action.
While Greene, on the other hand, has since tweeted that the car crash story “appears to be false,” she still doubled down on repeating the earlier unproven claim that gave rise to it: “We need a serious investigation into the whistleblower’s report that Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of time from ABC!”
