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  • 2020-12-01 (xsd:date)
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  • Was Gina Haspel Found Dead in November 2020? (en)
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  • In November 2020, rumors circulated about the whereabouts of CIA Director Gina Haspel. An article reproduced on the conspiratorial Rumor Mill News, for example, claimed that Haspel was arrested for treason. Others claimed that Haspel had been found dead from natural causes. Both of these rumors are unsubstantiated and are built upon a debunked conspiracy theory about a fictional raid on an election software company in Germany. In the days following the 2020 election, the internet was flooded with conspiracy theories that falsely claimed the election was rigged or fraudulent in some manner. One of the more outlandish theories held that an election software company in Germany had been used to alter the vote tallies in the United States. This theory reached a wide audience after Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas said during a Zoom call that U.S. Army forces had seized servers from the software company Scytl in Frankfurt, Germany. Gohmert also said that his information was based on a tweet and that he did not know the truth, yet conspiracy theorists picked up this thread and ran with it. On Nov. 15, 2020, The Associated Press published an article investigating the rumor, which they determined to be false: Although this raid did not happen, that didn't stop conspiracy theorists. On Nov. 29, Rumor Mill News reproduced an article (it's not entirely clear where the article originated, but it appears to come from a Q drop — an unsourced rumor penned by a person cosplaying as a government official) claiming that Haspel had been severely injured during this raid and that she was then airlifted to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp (GITMO) where she was arrested for treason. That article, which misspells Haspel's name numerous times, reads in part: Shortly after this article was published, another rumor started to circulate about Haspel claiming that the CIA director had been found dead of natural causes, which led to speculation that the government had actually killed Haspel and that they were now covering up her death. Some social media users also came across an alleged obituary for Haspel. This obituary, however, was not published by a credible national news organization, or even the local newspaper of Haspel's hometown in Ashland, Kentucky. Rather, this obituary — which simply took the aforementioned conspiratorial postings as truth and provided no additional confirmation — was published on Dec. 1 on deaddeath.com, a website that has previously published premature obituaries based on fake news. For example, they wrote an obituary for Carolyn Gombell, a non-existent woman featured in a fictional story about U.S. President Donald Trump being a murderer. These rumors about Haspel's death did not originate with credible sources and no evidence has been provided to support them. These rumors stem from a debunked story about a fictional raid on a German software company. As such, we've marked this rumor as False. (en)
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