Are there news reports about FBI Director Kash Patel seizing phone and bank records for "everyone on Pelosi's staff on January 6th"? 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.
The meme appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published on March 6, 2025, on a page titled "America's Last Line of Defense" with a comment that read:
The investigation is on, and the low-level aides are afraid. None of them received any of Biden's get-out-of-jail-free card pardons.
The text on the meme read:
FBI Director Kash Patel has Seized Phone and Bank Records for Everyone on Pelosi's Staff on January 6th:
"We believe there's proof there that she set the whole thing up."
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Sat Apr 5 07:58:04 2025 UTC)
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.
