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| - On Oct. 30, 2024, the website PatriotVoiceNews.com published an article alleging that Doug Emhoff, the husband of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, had tipped off rapper and sex-crimes suspect Sean "Diddy" Combs about a March 2024 government raid. The article also featured a brief video purporting to show a source explaining what had happened.
The rumor spread on X, where several accounts shared the claim in posts that had thousands of likes and hundreds of thousands of views. The article and social media posts claimed Combs paid Harris — the Democratic nominee for president — and Emhoff $500,000 for the tip.
However, there was no evidence publicly available that proved the claim. Investigating PatriotVoiceNews, the site that posted the original article, revealed several reasons why it was not a trustworthy source for information. There was also evidence suggesting that the accompanying video supporting the claim was digitally altered or generated by an artificial intelligence tool. The claim is unfounded.
PatriotVoiceNews
There were several red flags indicating the website that shared the rumor was untrustworthy. First, PatriotVoiceNews did not have any sort of "About Us" or masthead page that gave readers information about who was behind the site. Those pages are standard practice for any trustworthy media website.
Snopes also researched when the site was created and who was operating it. An IP lookup tool revealed the domain name PatriotVoiceNews.com was registered on Aug. 5, 2024, just under three months before the article was published. Although the IP lookup tool did not provide information about who owned the domain, the fact that the site was created in summer 2024 showed it did not have a storied history.
Using a tool called Sitesucker to download the entire website uncovered even more suspicious information: In just three months the website had published more than 1,000 articles, all from a single author. This "prolific" output indicated that this was not a legitimate news operation.
The Article
The article did cite a purported source (who it said asked to remain anonymous) for this rumor: a "lawyer who worked with Emhoff at DLA Piper and has access to the details of Combs' case."
Emhoff was a lawyer at DLA Piper, a large international law firm, from 2017 to 2021. The American Lawyer, a legal news outlet, reported that Emhoff cut ties with the firm by Inauguration Day 2021 in order to avoid potential conflicts of interest.
Given that Emhoff was not working at DLA Piper when Combs was arrested, nor was there any evidence online suggesting that DLA Piper had any connection to the cases against Combs, the legitimacy of the supposed source was tenuous at best.
The Video
The accompanying video did not clear things up. It was shot vertically from a car with a large blur covering the person talking, but the hand gestures made by that person did not line up with any of the audio. Neither of the two voices in the audio sounded particularly realistic. For instance, at the 48-second mark, the "witness" mispronounced Combs' last name.
It was strange, though not disqualifying, that the video was posted to Rumble, a video-sharing platform popular among conservatives and the far right. This may have been on purpose, however: None of the tools commonly used to detect AI-generated content would analyze the video because it was posted to Rumble.
While there was no cut-and-dried proof that the story was fake, there was significant evidence to support that conclusion. Out of an abundance of caution, we rate this claim unfounded.
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