Mediaboss Marketing

Donald Trump / Getty

BY: Alex Griswold March 15, 2017 12:49 pm

A group of anti-Trump liberals and Democratic operatives were tricked into paying thousands of dollars fordocuments that made explosive claims aboutPresident Donald Trump, butturned out to be forgeries.

Buzzfeed learned of the documents' existence when the operatives tried to sell them on the story. Supposedly, the documents showed$1.6 billion being transferred fromExxonMobil to a Chinese mining companyand then finally to the Trump Organization during the 2016 election. The purported transfers would have taken placeat the same time eventual Exxon Mobil CEO and Secretary of StateRex Tillerson was meeting with Vladimir Putin in Russia.

None of it was true.Anti-Trump activistBrett Kimberlin fronted the $9,000 for the documentswhich wereprovided by an alleged Italian scam artist,and passed them along to Democratic operatives. Kimberlin, now a liberal blogger, was convictedof a 1978 Indiana bombing spreethat eventually led a maimed victim to commit suicide.

But the documents were "rife with spelling and grammatical errors," Buzzfeed noted, at odd with what one would expect from a $340 billion multinational company like Exxon. Among the more blatant errors,the documents falsely identified the president of the Chinese company as its CEO and misspelled his name. The bank statements that came with the documents also contained clear errors, such as getting the fullname of ExxonMobil incorrect.

In addition to Buzzfeed, the groups of Democratic operatives shopped the documents toThe New York Times,The Washington Post, and Bloomberg, all of whom passed. The story was eventually picked up in February by theliberal blog Down With Tyranny,citing "pretty heavy duty, well-sourced rumors."

Original post:
Anti-Donald Trump Liberals Tricked Into Paying $9000 For Fake Documents - Washington Free Beacon