Buzzfeed fell for a prank Monday morning, and reported incorrectly that Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy had filed a “bizarre” handwritten lawsuit against President Obama in 2014.
“That is a hoax,” a spokesperson for the rancher’s family told the Washington Examiner’s media desk. “Cliven has never filed a lawsuit. He [was] not involved at any point. That article is completely untrue.”
The suit, which was dismissed the same year it was submitted because the $350 filing fee was never paid, was filed by a man named David Rothrock. Bundy was merely included as a plaintiff.
The lawsuit also appears to have been filed from inside a Pennsylvania prison.
The legal document was likely the handiwork of notorious pro se “prankster,” Jonathan Lee Riches, according to popehat.com contributor Adam Steinbaugh.
“This fits his MO: Allegations involving recent news … using another’s name to file (Riches is banned from filing),” Steinbaugh said Monday on social media. “Also, ‘David Rothrock’ was filing similar claims from a PA prison. Riches was also held in PA.”
“David Rothrock also sued the State of Israel, the Balfour Declaration, and a menorah, seeking ‘African diamonds,'” he added.
The original version of the BuzzFeed report made only a brief mention of Rothrock, whose name is also included on a similarly “bizarre” lawsuit filed in 2014 against Jacksonville Jaguars first-round pick Blake Bortles.
Bundy, who first made national headlines in 2014 when he faced off with federal agents over grazing rights in Nevada, supposedly claimed in the lawsuit that Obama was a cross-dressing secret Muslim agent with ties to Iran’s Hezbollah network, BuzzFeed’s Mary Ann Georgantopoulos initially reported.
She also wrote that Bundy alleged the president had threatened GOP front-runner Donald Trump.
The story has since been updated with an editors note to reflect that Bundy had nothing to do with the lawsuit against the president.
The story as it appears now makes no mention of Rothrock’s 2014 lawsuit against Bortles, nor does it mention any of his past involvement in bogus legal filings. The article also fails to mention that the supposed Bundy lawsuit included a return address for a correctional facility in Pennsylvania.
The headline to Georgantopoulos’ story originally read, “Cliven Bundy Claims Obama Threatened Donald Trump In Bizarre Hand-Written Lawsuit.”
The subhead also stated initially that, “The Nevada rancher claimed in a federal lawsuit that Obama threatened Trump to get the businessman to stop questioning whether the president was born in the United States.”
The report’s headline has since been changed so that it now reads, “Bizarre Lawsuit Claims Without Evidence That Cliven Bundy Accused Obama Of Threatening Donald Trump.”
The story’s opening paragraph originally reported that, “Cliven Bundy — the father of Ammon Bundy, who led a militia that took over an Oregon federal building — filed a bizarre hand-written lawsuit against President Obama in 2014, alleging the president threatened Donald Trump.”
It now reads, “Cliven Bundy — the father of Ammon Bundy, who led a militia that took over an Oregon federal building — was named in a 2014 lawsuit apparently filed by another man alleging President Obama threatened Donald Trump.”
BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith did not respond to the Examiner’s request for comment.
Here is the original filing:
Supposed Bundy lawsuit
Here is the dismissal:
