Political Tribune

2024, Donald Trump, Opinion

Humiliated MTG Scrambles To Save Face After Being Called Out For Baseless Claim

She had to walk this one back.

570
570 points

DISCLAIMER: This article was first published on September 16, 2024

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is no stranger to making outlandish claims on social media. She doesn’t typically retract them, at least not quickly.

Late last week, a claim emerged on X that a “whistleblower,” claiming to be an ABC News employee, was going to come forward with claims that ABC had rigged last week’s presidential debate in Kamala Harris’ favor, including by sharing the debate questions with her in advance.

A few days later, a second, equally dodgy claim emerged: That this anonymous whistleblower had been killed in a car accident. And that’s the claim that Marjorie Taylor Greene ran with, in an X post on Saturday:

This is a common trick on Musk-era X: making wildly unfounded claims and attributing them to “news reports” or adding the word “BREAKING.”

The “news reports,” in this case, came from a spammy, possibly AI-generated website called CountyLocalNews.com. There wasn’t much about the story that added up, starting with how anyone could know that the whistleblower died, when no one knows the whistleblower’s name.

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About four hours after the original post, Greene walked it back, although she did not delete the original message.

In addition to one of the longer Community Notes in recent history,  the Georgia Congresswoman came in for quite a bit of criticism.

As for the actual report from the “whistleblower,” a purported affidavit did emerge online on Sunday. However, there are quite a few questionable things about it, indicating it could prove a hoax. It’s full of typos, including referring to Kamala Harris’ time as “Attorney General in San Francisco.” The affidavit alleges that Vice President Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, is under investigation for embezzling billions of dollars in public money, and there have been no indications that this is the case.

It’s inconsistent about how long the whistleblower worked for ABC News, first claiming ten years but then referencing changes that have happened at the company since it was bought by Disney in 1996. It also makes little sense why Harris would demand certain questions be off-limits for the moderators, when there was nothing to stop her opponent, Trump, from bringing up the same things. And it’s unclear why a TV news veteran whistleblower would take this explosive information to a random MAGA X user, and not to Fox News, or even to Bari Weiss.

Also, as pointed out in a lively Reddit discussion, there’s no reason for the notary’s name and information to be redacted.

Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery.

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Shay Maz

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Shay Maz has been a political writer for many years. This is a pseudonym for writing; if you need to contact her - you may do so here: https://x.com/SheilaGouldman

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