Did "CBS Investigative News" report that the man arrested after spraying a liquid on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar at a Minneapolis town hall meeting was on the payroll of a winery co-owned by her husband? No, that's not true: There's no record of such a story on CBS' website or in a global index of stories from thousands of news sites. The claim originated on the social media account of an account categorized on Facebook as comedy.
The claim was reposted without satire labeling or a screenshot in a Jan. 28, 2026 Facebook post (archived here). It read:
"CBS Investigative News is now reporting that the alleged attacker, Anthony James Kazmierczak, is actually on Omar's payroll, pulling in $50,000 a year from her phony winery."
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at facebook.com/sharon.chiltonmoser/posts.)
At the time this fact check was written, CBS' coverage of the Jan. 27, 2026 incident included a "What we know" story (archived here) about Kazmierczak, which did not mention any connection between Omar and Kazmierczak. The CBS search bar turned up no matches when using the search terms "winery" and "Kazmierczak."
The Google News index of thousands of websites also turned up no real news reports mentioning Kazmierczak and winery and payroll (archived here).
The sentence in quotation marks is taken from an article (archived here) conservative comedian Jonathan Gregory posted to his Facebook account.
The bio information for that account (archived here) declares its owner is a comedian working for the administration of President Donald Trump:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Facebook.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
Fake news posted under the Jonathan Gregory byline, include "Apple Quietly Tolerates Protest Looting in New Strategy to Signal Progressive Alignment" and "Investigative Report: Claims Emerge That Biden Died in 2020, Presidency Allegedly Run by AI and Deepfake Technology" and "In a shocking turn of events, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a prominent 75-year-old lawmaker, has been linked by DNA evidence to failed presidential assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, her biological son. "
