Did a New York State judge order Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to surrender her tax returns and financials? No, that's not true: That yarn appeared on an account labelled "Satire/Parody", which warns readers that everything on the page is made up. There's no record of such a case on Google News' index of thousands of news sites, and with intense interest in AOC, it would have been a major story. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The meme appeared in a May 25, 2025 Facebook post (archived here) on the America's Last Line of Defense page under the caption "It will be interesting to see what her tax returns say about the $29 million she supposedly doesn't have." It opened:
A New York State Judge has ordered Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to surrender her tax returns and financial statements for the past seven years.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Jun 16 16:38:10 2025 UTC)
As one of the most-covered, most prominent members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Ocasio-Cortez is the subject of near-daily reporting by national media outlets in New York City, her hometown, and by conservative and liberal niche news organizations. This Google Trends chart indicates, shows there is usually more interest in her than in the Speaker of the House and the Minority Leader of the Senate.
Just in case America's Last Line of Defense veered sharply off-brand, Lead Stories double-checked the claim.
Using the keywords "New York judge order" AND "tax returns" AND "Rep. Alexandria", Lead Stories found zero examples of evidence-based reporting on such a case in Google News' index of thousands of news sites:
(Source: GoogleNews.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
According to the Facebook page transparency for America's Last Line of Defense, it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair, a self-professed liberal from Maine who, for years, has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives. The page publishes made-up news items in order to get conservatives 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 feature multiple satire disclaimers.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
When fact checkers point this out to the people liking and sharing these copycat stories some of them get mad at the fact checkers instead of directing their anger at the foreign spammers or the liberal satire writers. Others send a polite "thank you" note, which is much appreciated.
Readers interested in Lead Stories' near-weekly debunks - beginning in March of 2017 - of Blair's parodies will find them helpfully collected here.
