Did a federal judge order Michelle Obama to hand over "her financials from her time as First Lady" to DOGE? No, that's not true: That story originated on a satirical Facebook page. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The image appeared in a post (archived here) with a meme published on May 26, 2025 by a page named "America's Last Line of Defense" with a comment that read:
She refuses to turn over the books from her time in the East Wing, which she simply can't do. It's public information. What is she hiding?
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Jun 4 14:28:12 2025 UTC)
The text in the meme itself read:
A federal judge has ordered Michelle Obama to hand over her financials from her time as First Lady to DOGE:
"A lawful order is a lawful order. Mrs. Obama is NOT above the law."
A first indication the order is not real was the satire disclaimer in the meme itself:
A second clue could be found on the page transparency tab of the Facebook page that published the meme which said 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."
Blair's 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's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Other fact checks
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites Lead Stories debunked over the years.
