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Welcome back to False Flag!
We’ve got a doozy of a story for you this week—one that hits at a question that’s become all the more pressing now that Trump supporters control the country: Will these people fall for anything? Because, frankly, it seems like the answer is yes.
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–Will
We Found It! The Flimsiest MAGA Conspiracy of All Time.
Folks, please. Check the credibility of your sources. They may be a Brazilian national fugitive wanted by the FBI.
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The fraud fugitive running amok in right-wing media
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A SIMPLE Fox News appearance for Bill Barr. On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s former attorney general went on the cable channel to praise his former boss for deciding to take over the District of Columbia’s police force.
What could the Fox audience hate about that? Apparently, a fair bit.
“Why did Fox just bring on TRAITOR Bill Barr?” fumed popular MAGA meme poster Gunther Eagleman. “He should be IN PRISON.”
“Bill Barr is on Fox News instead of a prison cell,” wrote Wendy Patterson, another popular pro-Trump poster.
Numerous other X accounts and YouTube commenters demanded that Fox ban Barr from its airwaves, and expressed hopes that he’ll soon get a prison term for treason.
Why the insistence that Barr has committed a criminal betrayal of the country? Naturally, it’s a conspiracy theory.
This month, huge swaths of the right-wing media audience have latched on to allegations that Barr schemed with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and conservative pundit Armstrong Williams to hatch the Georgia criminal case against Donald Trump and eighteen other people. It’s a very colorful story, complete with gold bars, burner phones, and foreign bribes. And it appears to be based entirely on the word of an accused fraudster whose dishonesty is so legendary that it has become a sort of popular meme in her home country of Brazil.
At the heart of the claims against Barr are some very credulous “reports” from undercover right-wing video operation Project Veritas, formerly the outfit of James O’Keefe. The sole source of the claims is Patrícia Lélis, a Brazilian national fugitive wanted by the FBI and last known to be hiding out in Mexico.
Lélis alleges that as Armstrong Williams’s employee, she became privy to a scheme conceived by Barr to orchestrate Trump’s prosecutions. Those plans were put together in meetings at Williams’s Virginia office, she alleges. Ignoring the fact that Merrick Garland, not Bill Barr, was attorney general at the time, Lélis says that Barr secretly met with Jack Smith and Fani Willis to hatch plans to bring a RICO case against Trump and more than a dozen other defendants, which she described as Barr’s enemies list (more on that later). For good measure, she claims that Barr had prior knowledge of the FBI’s August 2022 raid of Trump’s home.
So far, Project Veritas has released three videos focused on Lélis’s allegations. In those videos, she’s billed as a “whistleblower, who is hiding abroad and fearing for her life.”
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Many on the American right have taken these claims at face value. They’ve been promoted by InfoWars chief Alex Jones, pundit Dinesh D’Souza, and Mario Nawfal, the ubiquitous X personality with more than 2 million followers. Lélis has