fake news general

Cam Harris, a recent college graduate hoping to build a career as a political consultant, received an unwelcome email from a New York Times reporter this month. As the reporter, Scott Shane, recounted on the front page of Thursday’s Times, he had discovered that Harris was the publisher of a fake news site dedicated to smearing Hillary Clinton.

So Harris did what came naturally. He started to spin. First, he admitted that he had written the hoax news articles casting Clinton as a criminal on his site, ChristianTimesNewspaper.com. Eight of his stories attracted enough attention on social networks to merit debunking by Snopes, the fact-checking site, and one of them, published a month before the election, attracted six million readers with the headline, “BREAKING: ‘Tens of thousands’ of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse.”

But when he was asked about his motives for posting elaborate disinformation about Clinton online over the course of 11 months, Harris was a little more economical with the truth. Even though he had attacked Clinton relentlessly on Twitter during the campaign, and voted for Donald Trump, Harris told The Times that his goals were purely financial. He had focused on potentially damaging fabrications about Clinton, he claimed, simply because those pieces generated more clicks and so more ad revenue than attacks on Trump.

“I didn’t really have a political motivation whatsoever,” he told Shane in a subsequent Facebook Live interview. “It was a way to make money.”

What Harris failed to mention to The Times, however, is that during the entire time that he was spreading lies about the Democratic presidential candidate, he was employed as a legislative aide and campaign manager for a Republican member of the Maryland state legislature, David Vogt III.

Harris also concealed from The Times that when he sat down to create his anti-Clinton fiction “at the kitchen table in his apartment,” he was living in Vogt’s basement in Brunswick, Maryland. As Maryland’s Frederick News-Post reported on Wednesday, an FEC filing related to Vogt’s failed race for Congress earlier this year listed the same home address for both the state lawmaker and his young campaign manager, Harris.

Vogt fired Harris Wednesday afternoon, after the Times story went online, and said he had no idea what his young aide and tenant had been up to at that kitchen table. “I was shocked to hear that he could do such a thing,” the legislator told The Washington Post.

Harris backed that account in a text message to the Frederick News-Post. “Delegate Vogt was not involved in any way,” he wrote.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that aired on Thursday night, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway managed to get two huge things wrong in a short, 19-second answer. First, she said that the Obama administration banned Iraqi refugees from entering in the United States for six months in 2011 — which is flatly untrue.

Second, and more significantly, she made up a terrorist attack committed by Iraqi refugees that never happened — the “Bowling Green Massacre”:

.@KellyannePolls says that 2 Iraqi refugees "were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre."
(There was no such massacre.) pic.twitter.com/sD3Nnb5xfE

— Joe Sonka (@joesonka) February 3, 2017
Joe Sonka is, to be clear, 100 percent correct about this. There has never been a terrorist attack in Bowling Green, Kentucky, committed by Iraqi refugees.

Conway claims that “most people don't know that because it didn't get covered.” Most people don’t know about it because it didn’t happen.

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In 2011, two Iraqi refugees, Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, were arrested in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on federal terrorism charges. Allegedly, they had been plotting to send money and weapons back home to Iraqi insurgents.

During the investigation, the FBI found something worrying: fingerprints from Alwan on a roadside bomb in Iraq. This suggested there was a very specific flaw in America’s refugee screening process: Databases of fingerprints from Iraqi militants were not well-integrated into the broader State Department–run refugee admissions process. As a result, the Obama administration initiated a new review of all roughly 57,000 Iraqi refugees who had been recently admitted into the United States.

This process was manpower- and time-intensive, and resulted in a significant slowdown in Iraqi refugee admissions to the United States for six months. But it was not a ban, as Conway, Trump, and many in the conservative media claimed: Refugees from Iraq entered the United States in all six months.