STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Satire Post

Did the Saudis give Bill Clinton a helicopter worth $17 million "to use in their airspace" and did he then get to keep it as a "gift" when he left office? No, that's not true: The viral claim originated on two self-described satirical Facebook pages. The owner of the pages is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.

It first appeared as a post (archived here) published on May 13, 2025 on "America Loves Liberty" and it read:

The Saudis gave Bill Clinton a helicopter to use in their airspace, then gave it to him as a gift when he left office. Hypocrites.

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed May 14 08:37:53 2025 UTC)

Another post (archived here) on a page named "America's Last Line of Defense", also made on May 13, had following image:

(Source: image downloaded from America's Last Line of Defense on Facebook)

The caption in the image read:

This is the $17 million helicopter the Saudis gave Bill Clinton to use in their airspace.

They gave it to him as a parting gift when he left office. He still uses it to this day.

Not one single Democrat had anything to say.

The photo of the helicopter seems to have been taken from an image galery on the website of a California helicopter services company (archived here).

A Google News search for stories mentioning "Bill Clinton", "helicopter", "gift" and "Saudi Arabia" did not return any stories confirming this actually happened (archived here).

The page that shared the first post, America Loves Liberty, is self-described as a "Media" page run by "Busta Troll." A details section reads, "Not nearly the real news for today's conservative," as shown in the screenshot below:

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken Tue Jan 28 22:21:20 2025 UTC)

The "Intro" section on the page says "Nothing on this page is real:

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken Wed May 14, 2025)

It also listed "Busta Troll" as the owner of the page, which is the nickname of Christopher Blair. According to the page transparency tab of the Facebook page that published the image meme it was also run by "Busta Troll".

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.