Have you ever seen claims that Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO who was shot on Dec. 4 in New York, was killed as a result of he was about to testify in opposition to Rep. Nancy Pelosi for insider buying and selling? It’s gone viral on a number of social media platforms over the previous week. But it surely’s not true.
The oldest instance of this false declare that Gizmodo may discover dates to the evening of Dec. 6, two days after the taking pictures. The X account HustleBitch wrote “BREAKING: Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was set to testify in opposition to Nancy Pelosi for insider buying and selling.”
From that declare round 10:00 p.m. ET, different X accounts that went viral appear to have made their posts about it a few hours later. Politifact additionally discovered the declare being made on Threads and Instagram, although these posts had been made on Dec. 7, the day after the earliest tweets spreading the false story, which had been occurring nicely earlier than the arrest of Luigi Mangione, who’s been charged with the homicide and is at present preventing extradition to New York from Pennsylvania.
However the declare that Thompson was killed over this motive associated to a sitting congresswoman isn’t true. There’s no proof Thompson was going to testify in opposition to Pelosi for insider buying and selling or anything. However, oddly sufficient, Thompson was himself accused of insider buying and selling earlier than he was killed.
The Hollywood Firefighters Pension Fund filed a lawsuit in opposition to Thompson and different executives at UnitedHealth again in Could. The lawsuit alleges that the executives offered about $120 million value of UnitedHealth shares once they realized the U.S. Division of Justice was investigating the corporate for anti-competitive practices. The inventory went down solely after it grew to become publicly recognized the DOJ had opened an investigation. The go well with states Thompson offered about $15 million value of inventory.
Pelosi and different members of Congress have certainly acquired scrutiny over their exercise buying and selling shares, and a few Democrats have referred to as for a ban, together with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wrote again in 2021, “There is no such thing as a purpose members of Congress ought to maintain and commerce particular person inventory after we write main coverage and have entry to delicate data.”
Some variations of the false declare on social media additionally use a video that purports to indicate Thompson speaking about Nancy Pelosi offering assist to UnitedHealth. The one downside, in fact, is that the video doesn’t present the Thompson that was killed, as anybody with eyes can see.
Matt Wallace, a conspiracy theorist who typically spreads disinformation on X, helped unfold the misidentified video together with a number of others. Wallace additionally made a video on Rumble claiming that Nancy Pelosi brainwashed the shooter with strategies from MKUltra, the thoughts management experiments of the CIA from the Nineteen Sixties. There have been additionally claims that the person who took a shot at Donald Trump over the summer time in Butler, Pennsylvania. The CIA instructed Gizmodo after these claims went viral that any claims about MKUltra being concerned within the assassination try had been, “completely false, absurd, and damaging.”
Why are folks on-line spreading this false story about Pelosi? We are able to solely assume they’re both actively or unintentionally spreading false data that helps Trump. Lots of the accounts that had been sharing the false declare in its earliest iteration seem to have bios and pictures selling the previous and incoming president.
HustleBitch, the account that seems to have shared the declare very early (if not probably the primary), has a historical past of sharing lies on the web. That account was additionally one of many first to share a declare {that a} physique double was truly used for Trump’s go to to observe a SpaceX launch with Elon Musk final month. But it surely’s not clear who’s truly behind the account.
All we all know for sure is that there’s no proof that Thompson was killed as a result of he was going to testify. And whereas Mangione’s lawyer has mentioned his consumer intends to plead not responsible, all of the out there proof appears to recommend that he could have been killed as a result of his firm makes billions of {dollars} in income whereas denying life-saving medical protection to People who’re fed up with a damaged healthcare system.
