Did "DOGE Auditor Joe Barron" uncover that billionaires Mark Cuban, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett each received $250 million in quarterly payments each, for a total of $4 billion? No, that's not true: The story, which also had them donating $1 billion of the money to Joe Biden's campaign, 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 story originally appeared as a Facebook post (archived here) published on a Facebook page named "Reagan Was Right" on May 3, 2025. It opened:
These three billionaires received quarterly payments from Biden's Treasury Department in what looks like the largest pay-for-play scandal yet.
"Mark Cuban, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett each donated over a billion dollars to the Biden 2020 campaign," said DOGE Auditor Joe Barron, "Then they were paid $250 million quarterly for four years, or $4 billion. The taxpayer subsidized their donation four times over."
Without DOGE, nobody would have ever known.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu May 8 11:13:58 2025 UTC)
The image included in the post had a satire disclaimer that said, "Nothing on the page is real":
Additionally the description of "Reagan Was Right" page on Facebook read:
An authorized dumping ground for profitable right-wing propaganda and confirmation bias-based nonsense courtesy of America's Last Line of Defense. Nothing on this page is real.
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.
