British Intelligence Seizes Clinton Foundation Warehouse, $400 Million In Cash.
The Clinton Foundation, established by former President Bill Clinton, has long been a favorite subject for sites looking to spread questionable news on the Internet. Here’s the latest example making the rounds. It was flagged as possibly providing false information, as part of Facebook’s effort to combat fake news. A website called NRTONLINE posted an article on April 14, 2018, headlined, "BREAKING: British Intelligence Seizes Clinton Foundation Warehouse, $400 Million In Cash." Here are the opening paragraphs: The Clinton Foundation is once again trying to distance itself from a scandal surrounding something they’re involved in. This time, the warehouse they use in the UK to store food and toiletries to make ready for shipping to Africa and Indonesia was raided by MI6. The warehouse, which is leased by the Foundation and one other tenant, is owned by a man known for shady arms deals and exploiting cheap Asian labor for counterfeit goods. The Brits took down his office and storage space, finding 400 Million in US Dollars. Maleek Bin Shalakta has been on the UK terrorist watch list for some time. The problem: None of this ever happened. The article was lifted wholesale from the website Reagan Was Right, which -- before the site was taken down earlier this year -- described itself as a "whimsical playland of conservative satire." Another disclaimer read: "Everything on this website is fiction." You can’t find the Reagan Was Right article on its original web page any more, but a version of the article dated Nov. 10, 2017, is available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Reagan Was Right was affiliated with Christopher Blair, a Maine man we’ve written about previously. Blair told us his websites are a carefully curated social experiment designed to "feed the Hoverounders their daily need for hate and their undying urge to blame everything in the known universe on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama." Among the dubious elements of both the original Reagan Was Right article and the NRTONLINE facsimile is a reference to the nonexistent country of Latkavia, as well as a stray reference to a correspondent for "LLOD." The article doesn’t explain the acronym, but fake news cognoscenti will recognize it as one of Blair’s other fake (and now shuttered) sites, the Last Line of Defense. Meanwhile, the photograph that accompanies the post was published in June 2017 by the Sun newspaper in the United Kingdom to illustrate an entirely different article -- one about police evicting a group of trailer-home residents who had seized a warehouse for 24 hours. As for the publisher of the most recent version, NRTONLINE, a quick click into the site’s "About Us" page shows not an explanation of the site’s background but rather an un-filled-in web page template. So, unlike the Reagan Was Right version, NRTONLINE offered no indication that this article was "satire." The Clinton Foundation confirmed to PolitiFact that the article is "totally false." "We don’t rent a warehouse in the U.K., the quote from ‘Chelsea Clinton’s assistant’ is made up, and nothing in this story seems to be based in reality," spokesman Brian Cookstra told PolitiFact. Fake Clinton Foundation raids are a staple of dubious web posts. For instance, in May 2017, some of our fellow fact-checkers debunked an Internet claim that a Clinton Foundation cargo ship had been caught smuggling people from Syria, drugs and illegal fruit. The source of that claim? The Last Line of Defense. Social media posts linked to an article headlined, "British Intelligence Seizes Clinton Foundation Warehouse, $400 Million In Cash." But that never happened -- the tall tale originated with a self-described satirical post. We rate it Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com
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