In another sign of Russian influence, reports are falsely trying to link Kamala Harris to Sean “Diddy” Combs

A website with a patriotic name is making a wild accusation that Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff are receiving a payout from rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs.

Not only is it fictional, but U.S. officials said it is linked to Russian efforts to influence the U.S. election.

“Harris and Emhoff received $500,000 for tipping Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs about upcoming police raids in March 2024,” read the headline on October 30. Patriotic voice.

The headline was repeated on social media: included on X And Instagram.

The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its news feed. (Read more about our collaboration with Metaowner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

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A joint Declaration of November 1 by the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said that “Russian influence actors” “created a video falsely accusing an individual associated with the Democratic presidential ticket of taking bribes of an American entertainer.”

The agencies also said Russian influence was a driver fake video which showed that Haitians in multiple Georgia counties claimed to vote for Harris. Patriot Voice published the fake Haitian story as a legitimate looking story.

The agencies’ statement said: “This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US elections and to stoke division among Americans.” Officials expect similar Russian activity on Election Day and beyond.

Combing laundry charged in September in Manhattan federal court on sex trafficking and related crimes. The indictment stated that law enforcement officers searched his homes in Miami and Los Angeles “in or about March 2024.”

The Patriot Voice story stated that the anonymous author “succeeded in obtaining a confession that Harris and Emhoff had contacted Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs prior to his arrest and received a cash payment from him for the tip” about a upcoming raid. It says the information comes from an attorney who worked with Emhoff at his former law firm, but is not disclosing the attorney’s name. Emhoff is a former entertainment lawyer.

The article includes a two-minute video showing what appears to be a man speaking to a camera from a car, his face blurred out. Before the man says anything, text on the video says that “a New York attorney familiar with Emhoff shared the details of the deal.” Another person asks the man questions.

The video is likely a “cheap fake,” said Manjeet Rege, director of the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence at the University of St. Thomas. That means it’s been engineered to be deceptive, but it’s not a “deepfake” created entirely with generative artificial intelligence.

The voice and hand gestures don’t match, which is a sign that the voice was modified and added to an existing video of a person in a car, Rege said. The audio of the person asking the questions was probably taken with a real person, but converted via software so that it is difficult to detect the speaker.

We have a similar example of a “cheap fake video in social media posts claiming Harris was involved in a 2011 collision.

There are other signs that this claim about Combs, Harris and Emhoff is bogus. PatriotVoiceNews.com lacks the standard features of a legitimate news website. For example, there is no “about us” page that explains the publication’s background information and provides a way to contact contributors. We clicked on multiple articles and found no bylines; they are all written by “Patriot Voice.” The website was made August 5, 2024, about three months before Election Day, according to the domain registration information on Whois.com.

Candy too fact checked this claimfinding that the website published more than 1,000 articles in three months, all by the same author.

NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, wrote A 2024 report by the US Election Misinformation Monitoring Center states that the site’s features, including its layout, content and use of AI, closely resemble a pro-Kremlin network of fake local news sites run by John Mark Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff who fled to Russia in 2016.”

This claim is bogus. We review the Pants on Fire!