Other[edit]
In December 2017,
The Gateway Pundit published a Reddit post as evidence that Democratic activists were committing voter fraud in the
2017 Alabama Senate special election.
[39] The redditor behind the post later said that the post was intended "as an obvious troll."
[39] When asked by
The Washington Post, the writer of the
Gateway Pundit post declined to say whether he had contacted the redditor to verify the information; later the
Gateway Pundit story contained an update at the bottom: "Liberals say these are fake Reddit posts(?) Regardless, the posts are still up on Reddit and the posters are still encouraging Democrats to cheat."
[39] Also in December 2017,
Gateway Punditpublished a story falsely saying that
Facebook had taken down a previous
Gateway Pundit story about the Alabama election, when in fact a Facebook algorithm had made it less prevalent after it had been flagged as fake news.
[40]
In April 2018,
The Gateway Pundit falsely claimed in a headline that two prominent African-American conservative video bloggers –
Diamond and Silk – had been censored by Facebook.
[41]
In September 2018, after psychology professor
Christine Blasey Ford alleged that
U.S. Supreme Court nominee
Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when they were teenagers,
The Gateway Pundit published an article
[42] erroneously claiming that Kavanaugh's mother, a district court judge in Maryland, had once ruled in a foreclosure case against Dr. Ford's parents, creating what
The Gateway Pundit called "bad blood" between the two families.
[43] In an update,
The Gateway Pundit noted, "CBS News reports the case was settled amicably and the Blaseys kept their house."
[43]
On October 30, 2018,
NBC News and
The Atlantic published articles detailing a scheme to falsely accuse
Robert Mueller of sexual misconduct in 1974. The articles reported involvement by
Jack Burkman and
Jacob Wohl, the latter a writer for
Gateway Pundit. Hours after these reports,
Gateway Punditpublished on its site "exclusive documents" about a "very credible witness" to support the accusations against Mueller. Each document had in its header the phrase "International Private Intelligence," the business slogan of Surefire Intelligence, a firm created by Wohl. The site removed the documents later that day, stating they were investigating the matter, as well as "serious allegations against Jacob Wohl."
[18] The following day,
Gateway Pundit's owner Jim Hoft retweeted Wohl's comment suggesting Mueller's office was actually behind the scheme. Mueller's office had days earlier referred the scheme to the FBI. Burkman and Wohl convened a press conference outside Washington on November 1, ostensibly to present a woman who they said signed an affidavit, which
Gateway Pundit had published, accusing Mueller of raping her in a New York hotel room in 2010 — on a date he was contemporaneously reported by
The Washington Post to be serving jury duty in Washington.
[44] The men accused Mueller's office of "leaking" the eight year-old
Post story to discredit their allegations. The purported accuser, a Carolyne Cass, did not appear at the press conference, with the men asserting she had panicked in fear of her life and taken a flight to another location. Soon after the press conference, Hoft announced that Gateway Pundit had "suspended our relationship" with Wohl.
[45][46][47][48][49]