Did the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rule that 84 of President Joe Biden's last-minute pardons were unconstitutional and did the opinion of "Judge Joe Barron" appear on a court website? No, that's not true: The ruling originated on a satirical Facebook page. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The "ruling" appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published on February 13, 2025, on a Facebook page named "America's Last Line Of Defense." It featured the following text:
The very LIBERAL 9th Circuit Court has ruled that 84 of Biden's last-minute pardons are unconstitutional. Judge Joe Barron wrote in his opinion:
"There is no precedent for pardoning someone who hasn't been charged with a crime. President Biden's pre-emptive pardons are, therefore, outside the constraints of constitutional law.
The Solicitor General is expected to turn the cases over to the Department of Justice for prosecution.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Fri Feb 14 15:13:01 2025 UTC)
The Facebook page (archived here) where the claim originated had a description that read:
The flagship of the ALLOD network of trollery and propaganda for cash.
Nothing on this page is real.
According to the page transparency tab of the page it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair.
Christopher Blair is a self-professed liberal from Maine who for years has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items to get them to share his posts. A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images, or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustration. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites debunked by Lead Stories over the years.
