Did Representative Jasmine Crockett "conveniently overlook" social security checks going to her dead grandmother for 13 years and did this come out during a DOGE audit? No, that's not true: A meme making that claim originated on a Facebook page with a satire disclaimer. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content and he previously ran identical hoaxes about Ilhan Omar and AOC.
The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published on Friday, April 4, 2025. It read:
Jasmine Crockett's DOGE audit isn't going well for her. The woman who claims Elon Musk is "scamming the people" has been conveniently overlooking her dead grandmother's Social Security checks for 13 years.
"They go into her bank account as a representative payee. To a dead woman."
Once again, the culprit is the person screaming that the auditor is at fault for their fraud.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Sat Apr 5 15:05:05 2025 UTC)
However, a search for articles mentioning "Crockett" "social security" and "grandmother" on Google News only returned links to fact checks pointing out the story was not real (archived here).
The story echoes a similar one about Rep. Ilhan Omar and another almost identical one about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that Lead Stories debunked before and which originated from the same network of Facebook pages and websites.
According to the page transparency tab of the Facebook page that published the meme, 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 in order 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 illustrations. 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 Lead Stories debunked over the years.
