We’re not even a week removed from the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, and several Fox News anchors are no longer even pretending to be considering the story in any fair or balanced way (good thing they no longer employ that slogan). Leading the pack is Jesse Watters, who has been pushing the conspiracy theory that the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Palm Beach golf resort/home with the sole purpose of “planting evidence” on the former president since day one.
That said, on Thursday night, Brian Kilmeade sat in for Tucker Carlson and did his best impression of the primetime Fox News host by kicking a hornet’s nest and sharing what was obviously a Photoshopped image of U.S. Magistrate Bruce Reinhart, the judge who signed off on the search warrant for the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, looking awfully cozy on a plane with Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime friend/sometime girlfriend who was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison for helping Epstein sexually assault several young women over a period of years.
Brian Kilmeade, filling in for Tucker Carlson tonight, shared a clearly fake, photoshopped image of the judge involved in approving the Mar-a-Lago warrant pic.twitter.com/W3cxHdy6id
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 12, 2022
Kilmeade, who really struggled to get a full sentence out, told viewers that what they were seeing was a photo of Epstein’s longtime wing-woman and “the judge in charge of the, of the ahhh, of the, ummm, as you know, of the warrant. And we’ll see if he’s going to release it next. He likes Oreos and whiskey.”
First: Who doesn’t like Oreos and whiskey? Is that supposed to be some sort of stain against his character? Life is hard, we should consume Oreos and whiskey when needed to help us get through it.
Holy cow I saw the fake image that Kilmeade posted in the video below on Twitter yesterday and Fox even credited a meme account for it.
It’s this original image below photoshopped onto this image of Ghislaine Maxwell giving Jeffrey Epstein a foot massage. https://t.co/osNATXZ0Z0 pic.twitter.com/BxXt0fmTUG
— Yashar Ali
(@yashar) August 12, 2022
Second: If Kilmeade really wanted to find a photo of Reinhart and Maxwell together, there could very well be one out there, as Politico reports that the judge previously worked as a “defense attorney on behalf of individuals connected to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein” (namely, several pilots and his former scheduler). But, as Snopes reports, all it took to discover the truth was a quick reverse image search, which found that the photo was indeed doctored and the feet being massaged belong to none other than Jeffrey Epstein. The whiskey and the Oreos, however, are all Reinhart’s; the image was pulled from a photo posted to his Facebook page five years ago, when he was sitting down to watch some football.
Case closed.
(Via Spopes)