In another sign of Russian influence, posts falsely try to tie Kamala Harris to Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs

A website with a patriotic name makes a wild accusation about Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff receiving a payoff from rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs.

Not only is it fictitious, but U.S. officials said it’s connected to Russian attempts to influence the U.S. election. 

"Harris and Emhoff received $500 000 for tipping Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs off on upcoming police raids in March 2024," stated an Oct. 30 headline on Patriot Voice. 

The headline was repeated on social media, including 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 partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

A joint Nov. 1 statement by the FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said "Russian influence actors" had "manufactured a video falsely accusing an individual associated with the Democratic presidential ticket of taking a bribe from a U.S. entertainer." 

The agencies also said Russian influence drove a fake video that showed Haitians claiming to vote for Harris in multiple Georgia counties. Patriot Voice published the fake Haitian narrative 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 U.S. election and stoke divisions among Americans." Officials expect similar Russian activity through Election Day and beyond.

Combs was charged in September in Manhattan federal court with sex trafficking and related offenses. The indictment said that law enforcement "in or about March 2024" searched his homes in Miami and Los Angeles.

The Patriot Voice story said the anonymous author "managed to obtain a confession that Harris and Emhoff have contacted Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs prior to his arrest and received from him a cash payment for the tip" about an impending raid. It said the information came from a lawyer who worked with Emhoff at his former law firm, but doesn’t disclose the lawyer’s name. Emhoff is a former entertainment lawyer.

The article features a two-minute video showing what appears to be a man speaking to a camera from a car, with his face blurred out. Before the man speaks, text on the video says "a New York lawyer acquainted 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 was edited with technology to be deceptive, but it is not a "deepfake" that was wholly created with generative artificial intelligence.

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

We fact-checked a similar example of a "cheap fake" video in social media posts purporting to show Harris was involved in a 2011 hit and run.

There are other signs that this claim about Combs, Harris and Emhoff is fake. PatriotVoiceNews.com lacks the standard features of a legitimate news website. For example, it has no "about us" page that explains the publication’s background information and offers a way to contact staff members. We clicked on multiple articles and found no bylines; they were all written by "Patriot Voice." The website was created Aug. 5, 2024, about three months before Election Day, according to its domain registration information on Whois.com. 

Snopes also fact-checked this claim, finding that in three months the website published more than 1,000 articles, all by the same author. 

NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, wrote in a 2024 U.S. Election Misinformation Monitoring Center brief that the "site’s characteristics, including its layout, content, and use of AI, strongly 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 rate it Pants on Fire!

RELATED: Video shows Haitians who claim they’re voting for Harris in multiple Georgia counties. That’s fake