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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,........

© Mother Jones