Fox News aired a doctored photo of the judge who approved the Mar-a-Lago raid during a segment Thursday evening.
Fill-in host Brian Kilmeade showed the photo, which falsely depicted Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart getting his feet rubbed by Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The doctored image was derived from a photo of Maxwell and Epstein, according to a reverse image analysis.
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“This is the judge in charge of the … warrant, and we’ll see if he’s going to release it next. He likes Oreos and whiskey,” Kilmeade said.
Hannity: “I think that’s actually a picture of Jeffrey Epstein with somebody putting his head on there. I’m just guessing, I don’t know.”
Kilmeade: “It might be his plane, who knows?”
Hannity: “I’ll let you determine that in the morning.” pic.twitter.com/F7fnHof7Wr
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) August 12, 2022
Kilmeade’s comments came during a hand-off to Sean Hannity, who chimed in and noted that the image was doctored.
“I think that’s actually a picture of Jeffrey Epstein with somebody putting his head on there,” Hannity said, referring to Reinhart.
“It might be his plane, who knows,” Kilmeade replied.
The original photo of Reinhart came from his Facebook account and showed him with Oreos and whiskey, according to Snopes. The original image of Maxwell giving Epstein a foot rub came to light in Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial.
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
Kilmeade took to Twitter on Friday to address the backlash from displaying the image on the show, saying the photo was shown in “jest.”
“Last night while subbing for Tucker Carlson, we showed you an image of Judge Bruce Reinhart w/ Ghislaine Maxwell that was sourced on screen to a meme pulled from Twitter & wasn’t real. This depiction never took place & we wanted to make clear that we were showing a meme in jest,” Kilmeade tweeted.
Last night while subbing for Tucker Carlson, we showed you an image of Judge Bruce Reinhart w/ Ghislaine Maxwell that was sourced on screen to a meme pulled from Twitter & wasn’t real. This depiction never took place & we wanted to make clear that we were showing a meme in jest.
— Brian Kilmeade (@kilmeade) August 12, 2022
The Washington Examiner reached out to a spokesperson for Fox News for comment.
Reinhart previously did legal defense work for clients who had been employed by Epstein, Politico reported. Reinhart approved the Mar-a-Lago search warrant on Aug. 5, days before the raid on Monday. He is facing an onslaught of threats and antisemitic epithets hurled from far-right social media users who were enraged by the raid of Mar-a-Lago.
Dozens of FBI agents executed a search warrant of former President Donald Trump’s lavish resort in Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday, searching for classified material.
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FBI agents who descended upon Trump’s resort were reportedly seeking documents with information related to nuclear weapons and recovered at least 20 boxes of material, including a clemency order of Roger Stone, according to a review of the inventory by the Wall Street Journal.
Trump denounced the raid as “a surprise attack, POLITICS, and all the while our Country is going to HELL!” in a post to Truth Social. He said he would not oppose the release of documents pertaining to the raid.
The raid came amid a Justice Department investigation into Trump’s handling of classified material that was sparked when the National Archives and Records Administration reportedly discovered classified documents among the 15 boxes it retrieved from Mar-a-Lago in January. The DOJ also reportedly confiscated additional material from Trump’s resort in June.
