Trolls Attacked A Washington Post Editor After Falsely Accusing Her Of Spying On Trump Nominee Rex Tillerson

As Donald Trump’s “sensual” Inauguration Day grows closer, the circus surrounding him is only growing weirder. Did you ever think that you’d hear about President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden being briefed on “Golden Showers”? Exactly. This week also saw confirmation hearings for multiple Trump cabinet nominees, one of them being the somewhat controversial ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, who’s up for secretary of state.

At Tillerson’s hearing, Marco Rubio aggressively grilled him over Russia (where Tillerson has lots of business ties) and the suspicious deaths of journalists who critically report on Vladimir Putin. And during a break, something odd happened on C-SPAN footage. An unidentified Asian woman appeared to pull her phone out and — possibly — snap photos of Tillerson’s notes. It sort of looked like that, but maybe she was only checking Facebook. You be the judge, but Twitter trolls put out the “Who is this woman?” call, so the unfortunate game was on.

https://twitter.com/America_1st_/status/819346644365754371

A bunch of right-wing trolls concluded that the woman was spying on Tillerson for the Chinese (because they think all Asian people look alike?). They also arbitrarily decided that she must be Washington Post editor Doris Truong, who ended up penning a column about the fallout. In short, she’s now the center of a fake-news conspiracy that’s almost as insane as Pizzagate.

Truong noted that she’s a homepage editor for WaPo, which means that she spends her workdays at the laptop, rather than in the field. She says she was nowhere near the hearing and addresses the disturbing nature of this fake-news conspiracy:

The woman at the hearing wasn’t me. I wasn’t there, and I don’t know who she is. What we have in common is that we’re both women, and we’re both Asian. However, that should not be enough grounds for people to jump to dangerous conclusions.

This logical explanation didn’t matter to the trolls, who began to “investigate” Truong while calling her “despicable.”

https://twitter.com/_0Hour1__/status/819397628542746624

The fake-news conspiracy even made Truong a target of The Drudge Report, and — as you can see below — James Woods (who posted Truong’s photo) and Sarah Palin.

https://twitter.com/jfdulac/status/819545047477747712

Clearly, Truong and the mystery woman look nothing alike, but that didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists from accusing Truong of spying for China (the country that Trump generally fingers for hacking whenever he’s quizzed about Russia). Truong writes that her social media accounts have been overridden by angry messages and rude comments that label her “thief” and “pathetic” while calling for an FBI investigation, despite the coworkers and friends who have argued that Truong was not at Tillerson’s confirmation hearing.

Yeah, 2017 is not going to be any less weird than 2016, is it?

(Via Washington Post)