Did Sean "Diddy" Combs pay Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff $500,000 for a tip that alerted him to the police raids that were about to search his homes in Florida and California? No, that's not true: This baseless article was published on a website identified as showing consistent signs of a Russian propaganda network called Storm-1516. Embedded in the article is video with a blur over the face of the anonymous source, purportedly a lawyer who asked not to be named, who has an AI-generated voice -- the only evidence offered that any of this happened.
The narrative appeared in an article (archived here) published by Patriot Voice on October 30, 2024. It began:
In March, 2024 Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff tipped Sean 'Diddy' Combs off on an upcoming Homeland Security raid. Combs has paid Emhoff $500,000 for this information. A New York lawyer acquainted with Emhoff shared the details of the deal.
This is how the article appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: patriotvoicenews.com screenshot taken on Thu Oct 31 20:21:14 2024 UTC)
The article continues:
PATRIOT VOICE managed to obtain a confession that Harris and Emhoff have contacted Sean 'Diddy' Combs prior to his arrest and received from him a cash payment for the tip. The source of this information is a lawyer who worked with Emhoff at DLA Piper and has access to the details of Combs' case. The lawyer, who asked us not to disclose his name, asserts that Emhoff and Combs have been aquatinted for a long time since they met thanks to Emhoff's work as attorney in the field of intellectual rights protection.
PatriotVoiceNews.com is a website with no information on its owners. There is no "about us" or contact page, and there is no footer at the bottom of the page that might contain the typical copyright and privacy policy information, or links to their social media accounts. A search on domaintools.com for PatriotVoiceNews.com (pictured below) shows the domain was registered on August 5, 2024.
(Source: whois.domaintools.com screenshot taken on Thu Oct 31 22:06:38 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories contacted Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub, who had been posting on X (archived here) about this article in real time as it surfaced through disinformation channels he has been following since August 2023. We asked Linvill to explain how he can tell this article is from a Russian propaganda source. His October 31, 2024, response mentions "Storm-1516," a Russian disinformation network featured in a October 30, 2024, CNN report (archived here). Linvill outlined four observations that point to his conclusion:
First, the website operates in a manner consistent with past Storm-1516 affiliated websites. By that I mean it seems to have a majority of content that is stolen from legitimate website and then rewritten using AI with the clear goal of making the website appear to be a regularly updated news page. The page itself was only created recently, however.
Second, the narrative is told in a manner that is very consistent with past Storm-1516 work. They have a short video of an anonymous source with insider information and write the story that appears on Patriot Voice News based off of the content of that video. The video itself, however, is relatively poor quality and of extremely doubtful provenance.
Third, the narrative parallels those being told by the Russian Doppelganger network.
https://x.com/antibot4navalny/status/1849624567683125741Finally, the story was placed online by a anonymous, pro-Russian social media account to be disseminated through a like minded community. This is also consistent with Storm-1516.
Lead Stories noted a strong clue to Russian origin in the headline of the article -- which wrote out the sum paid using the Russian style, with a space, "$500 000," rather than the American style of a comma, $500,000.
The video of the "source" in a car talking to a reporter (who is not on camera) is embedded in the article and is hosted on the video platform Rumble. At the time of writing, the @patriotvoicenews Rumble account has only that one video (archived here), which was posted on October 30, 2024, the same day the account was established. Throughout the video the "source" gestures with his hands, but these gestures do not match or emphasize the words in the audio. This video is the only evidence Patriot Voice offers to confirm this claim about the purported tip-off and payment.
Lead Stories uploaded the Rumble video to the AI detection tools at TrueMedia.org. True Media found there was substantial evidence of manipulation (see full report here). Three of the tools in particular (pictured below) found substantial evidence that the audio was generated with AI; the Audio Transcript Analysis found the audio to be misleading.
(Source: TrueMedia.org screenshot taken on Thu Oct 31 21:30:59 2024 UTC)
The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a press release on October 25, 2024, on a separate incident describing how a video of ballots being destroyed was fabricated, then amplified online and was determined to have been the work of Russian actors. Linvill had posted about this video (archived here) on October 24, 2024, also identifying this as the work of Storm-1516. Lead Stories has reached out to CISA and the law firm mentioned in the Patriot Voice article, DLA Piper, and will update this article if we receive a reply. We also reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice, which declined to comment.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims regarding the 2024 U.S. general election can be found here.
