In another sign of Russian influence, posts falsely attempt to link Kamala Harris to Sean Diddy Combs

A patriotic website is making a wild allegation about Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff receiving a kickback from rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs.

Not only is it fictitious, but US officials have said it is linked to Russia’s attempts to influence the US election.

“Harris and Emhoff awarded $500,000 for tipping off Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs on upcoming March 2024 police raids,” said an October 30 headline on Voice of the Patriot.

The headline was repeated on social media, inclusive on X and Instagram.

The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat fake news and misinformation in its news feed. (Read more about our partnership with Metawhich owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

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

The agencies also said Russian influence led to a fake video which showed Haitians claiming to vote for Harris in several Georgia counties. Patriot Voice published the false Haitian narrative as a legit looking story.

The agencies’ statement said: “This Russian activity is part of a broader effort by Moscow to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of US elections and fuel divisions among Americans.” Officials expect similar Russian activity up until election day and beyond.

Combs was CHARGED in September in Manhattan federal court on sex trafficking and related offenses. The indictment said law enforcement “in or around March 2024” searched his homes in Miami and Los Angeles.

The Patriot Voice story said the anonymous author “was able to obtain a confession that Harris and Emhoff contacted Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs prior to his arrest and received a cash payment from him for a tip” about an impending raid. It said the tip came from an attorney who worked with Emhoff at his former law firm, but did not disclose the attorney’s name. Emhoff is a former entertainment attorney.

The article contains a two-minute video showing what appears to be a man talking to a camera in a car, his face blurred. Before the man speaks, text in the video says that “a New York attorney known to 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 edited with technology to be deceptive, but it’s not a “deepfake” that was created entirely with generative artificial intelligence.

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

I checked a similar example of “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 false. PatriotVoiceNews.com does not have the standard features of a legitimate news site. For example, it lacks an “about us” page that explains the publication’s basic information and provides a way to contact staff members. I clicked on several articles and found no reference; all were written by “Patriot Voice”. The site was creator August 5, 2024, about three months before Election Day, according to its domain registration information on Whois.com.

Snopes too verified this claimnoting that in three months the site had published over 1,000 articles, all by the same author.

NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, he wrote in a 2024 US Election Disinformation Monitoring Center summary that “the site’s features, including appearance, content and use of artificial intelligence, closely resemble a pro-Kremlin network of fake local news sites led by John Mark Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff who fled to Russia in 2016.”

This statement is false. We rate Pants on Fire!