Did President Trump order the military prison at Guantanamo Bay to prepare for "high level" prisoners? No, that's not true: The original publisher of the story posted in 2018 determined it was an "unreliable conspiracy" theory and retracted it. In the two years after the claim was first made, there have no arrests of American politicians as was predicted.
The story originated on January 1, 2018, in an article published by Your News Wire on the website Newspunch.com (archived here) titled "President Trump Orders Guantanamo Bay To Prepare For 'High Level' Prisoners." It opened:
President Trump has ordered Guantanamo Bay to prepare for incoming 'high level' prisoners, including American politicians, within the next few months.
According to a Military of Defense report, Trump is preparing to transfer an unknown number of 'VIP' American detainees to the notorious prison in preparation for their trials before a US Military Tribunal.
Reports suggest that people connected to the Uranium One scandal are being placed in custody in preparation for the trials.
Hundreds of US Army Military Police have also been deployed to Cuba to help oversee the process.
The original publisher, Sean Adl, explained:
When I closed YourNewsWire down in late 2019 and moved to NewsPunch, the focus on what we would cover editorially changed and it was decided that we would no longer cover unreliable conspiracies whilst also being much more responsible in fact-checking content before publishing.
This shift in our editorial standards meant that old, outdated conspiratorial content like this no longer had a place on the website. This was one of many articles that got deleted after making the move, primarily due to the fact that the source of the information (Sorcha Faal) is somebody I now consider unreliable.
That article had been copied by several other publishers and turned into a video:
One of the longest running versions of the article (archived here) by the website Goodizen.com was published with the title "Trump Orders Guantanamo Get Ready For 'High Level' Prisoners." The story has no byline or date and is categorized in the conspiracy section of the website. The article opened with the same false claim as the original article:
President Trump has ordered Guantanamo Bay to prepare for incoming 'high level' prisoners, including American politicians, within the next few months.
After this introduction, there are 17 paragraphs of additional text and then 11 more paragraphs of text copied word-for-word from the YourNewsWire story. This part of the prediction is embellishment from Goodizen:
Lastly, there are currently almost 10,000 sealed indictments in federal courts throughout the US. This number is extremely high. This has already been heavily discussed and indicates one thing and one thing only: mass arrests will soon take place.
Anyone who can put 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 together can read the lay of the land and figure out what's about to happen.
A huge bust of many high profile people involved in human rights abuses is about to take place - most likely this month and definitely in the next 9 months. These high profile people are going to be sent to Guantanamo Bay and face military tribunals. Smaller players will be dealt with in the federal court system.
At the end of the article there is some unstructured text which may have been copied from comments from the public when the original article was copied. One comment says, "The Hill just reported..." and the linked Hill article (here) titled, 'Roger Stone retroactively registers lobbying contract,' had been published on January 2, 2018.
In all, the Goodizen article links to 21 other articles most from late 2017, some true and some fiction. The scope of this fact-check is not to sort through or verify any of these linked articles or the events mentioned in them, it is to identify the timeframe of the original prediction and explain that the unrealized January 2018 conspiratorial conclusion, "The Trump administration prepared to send 'high profile' traitors to Gitmo," has been rejected by its original publisher. In the two-and-a-half years since the article was first published, this has not come to pass.
Of interest to establishing a timeframe, a robo-voiced version of a large portion of the article as it was presented by Goodizen, but spun with a word substituter, was posted to YouTube (here) on the channel 'Breaking News Headlines - Wiki Podcast,' on January 4, 2018. Its description read:
Donald Trump's swamp draining is about to begin in earnest, with political crooks around the country concealing ankle monitors, house fires attempting to destroy evidence at an array of high-profile people's houses, and Guantanamo Bay being prepared for the influx of American high-profile prisoners.
