We Found It! The Flimsiest MAGA Conspiracy of All Time.
Folks, please. Check the credibility of your sources. They may be a Brazilian national fugitive wanted by the FBI.
The fraud fugitive running amok in right-wing media
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A SIMPLE Fox News appearance for Bill Barr. On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s former attorney general went on the cable channel to praise his former boss for deciding to take over the District of Columbia’s police force.
What could the Fox audience hate about that? Apparently, a fair bit.
“Why did Fox just bring on TRAITOR Bill Barr?” fumed popular MAGA meme poster Gunther Eagleman. “He should be IN PRISON.”
“Bill Barr is on Fox News instead of a prison cell,” wrote Wendy Patterson, another popular pro-Trump poster.
Numerous other X accounts and YouTube commenters demanded that Fox ban Barr from its airwaves, and expressed hopes that he’ll soon get a prison term for treason.
Why the insistence that Barr has committed a criminal betrayal of the country? Naturally, it’s a conspiracy theory.
This month, huge swaths of the right-wing media audience have latched on to allegations that Barr schemed with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and conservative pundit Armstrong Williams to hatch the Georgia criminal case against Donald Trump and eighteen other people. It’s a very colorful story, complete with gold bars, burner phones, and foreign bribes. And it appears to be based entirely on the word of an accused fraudster whose dishonesty is so legendary that it has become a sort of popular meme in her home country of Brazil.
At the heart of the claims against Barr are some very credulous “reports” from undercover right-wing video operation Project Veritas, formerly the outfit of James O’Keefe. The sole source of the claims is Patrícia Lélis, a Brazilian national fugitive wanted by the FBI and last known to be hiding out in Mexico.
Lélis alleges that as Armstrong Williams’s employee, she became privy to a scheme conceived by Barr to orchestrate Trump’s prosecutions. Those plans were put together in meetings at Williams’s Virginia office, she alleges. Ignoring the fact that Merrick Garland, not Bill Barr, was attorney general at the time, Lélis says that Barr secretly met with Jack Smith and Fani Willis to hatch plans to bring a RICO case against Trump and more than a dozen other defendants, which she described as Barr’s enemies list (more on that later). For good measure, she claims that Barr had prior knowledge of the FBI’s August 2022 raid of Trump’s home.
So far, Project Veritas has released three videos focused on Lélis’s allegations. In those videos, she’s billed as a “whistleblower, who is hiding abroad and fearing for her life.”
Many on the American right have taken these claims at face value. They’ve been promoted by InfoWars chief Alex Jones, pundit Dinesh D’Souza, and Mario Nawfal, the ubiquitous X personality with more than 2 million followers. Lélis has appeared on online politics streamer Real America’s Voice News, the home of prominent right-wing figures like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk.
Lélis’s claims have even been used to settle intra-right disputes. Facing allegations from rivals that he’s a federal informant, white nationalist figure Nick Fuentes cited his own appearance on the supposed Bill Barr enemies list provided by Lélis as proof that he’s the real deal.
IN HER NATIVE BRAZIL, Lélis is seen as a sort of Jacob Wohl-type mischief-maker, albeit on a much grander scale. You could call her the Brazilian George Santos, save for the fact that Santos already is Brazilian.
A former journalist and Brazilian congressional candidate, Lélis has a lengthy record of misadventures in that country’s politics. She accused a Brazilian politician of rape in 2015, only to have police drop the case and request her own arrest, saying she made a false report and tried to extort one of his staffers. At one point, authorities released a psychological report claiming she has a mental condition that causes her to lie on a grand scale (Lélis released a rival report disputing that evaluation).
In 2021, she accused Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s then-president Jair Bolsonaro, of sending text messages threatening to kill her. But police said the text messages were forgeries. She was indicted instead.
Lélis’s frequently suspicious stories have made her a sort of notorious internet star in Brazil, and she’s fueled that fame with a series of smaller misdeeds. In 2019, Brazilian internet sleuths noted that she had stolen a photo of a newborn baby from a Texas family’s social media account and photoshopped her own face onto the real mother’s to make it look like she had her own baby.
All of which raises the question: Why would Project Veritas, though not exactly known for its stringent editorial standards, rely on her? In a statement to me, the outfit defended their exposé by saying that Lélis is only facing the same attacks on her credibility that so many whistleblowers have dealt with before.
“We’ve also independently reviewed Patricia’s psychological profiles, consulted her legal team, and obtained documents from others familiar with her case,” the nonprofit said, promising “much more” to come from Lélis’s revelations.
Project Veritas says it became aware of Lélis’s claims (which had been detailed in a civil lawsuit she filed against Williams in 2024) from what it described in the email as a “senior DOJ official.” In a post on August 7, Project Veritas went further, saying multiple Justice Department “officials troubled by an apparent DOJ cover-up to pin Barr’s actions on Lélis” had told them about the case.
“The source stated, ‘Barr has put the entire FBI after this woman to get the documents she has,’” Project Veritas said in its statement. “We’ve found compelling evidence that appears to corroborate this.”
This is a pretty incredible claim. Again: Barr was out of office by the time Lélis started working for Williams, and the FBI didn’t start investigating her until years after that. Yet Project Veritas believes Barr could still control the FBI long after he was no longer attorney general.
As for how Lélis came to find out her alleged intel on Barr’s scheming against Trump, she said it was because she sat in on meetings with him while working for Williams, a conservative commentator and businessman who owns several TV stations and is a part owner of the Baltimore Sun. And she really did work for him. Williams himself said Lélis was an employee from 2021 to 2023. But he also claims she lied about being an immigration lawyer in order to get a job with him in Virginia.
As for why he hired an accused prolific liar, Williams claims he didn’t bother to google her.
Williams’s relationship with Lélis soured when he began to suspect she wasn’t a lawyer, and in fact was just taking money from his clients and spending it herself, according to comments Williams made on a conservative YouTube show. At one point, Williams claimed on the show, he even had people track her to the courthouse to see if she was actually working.
In January 2024, federal prosecutors indicted Lélis for wire fraud, claiming she had duped several clients hoping to secure legal residency in the United States, and instead stole nearly $700,000 to spend it on her own house down payment, remodeling, and a credit card bill. Lélis fled the country, and, according to her civil lawsuit filed last year, now lives in Mexico City.
On the run, she began a campaign against her former boss, providing documents to Venezuelan news outlets that claimed to prove Williams was involved in a scheme to funnel cash to an opposition leader there. An analysis of those supposedly damning documents showed numerous signs of forgery, including signatures from public figures that appeared to be lifted from their Wikipedia pages.
Reached by direct message over X, Lélis was initially open to sharing information with me about her allegations regarding Barr and Williams. She stopped responding when I asked about past claims regarding her dishonesty. Williams declined to comment, saying he’s traveling this week.
THERE ARE PLENTY OF REASONS to suspect Lélis is making up her allegations against Barr. For one, her story is based nearly entirely on notes created by Lélis herself, and she’s faced forgery claims in the past.
The Bill Barr enemies list she provided purports to name people the ex-attorney general, alongside Fani Willis, wanted to frame for trying to steal the 2020 election. Some are names of Trump loyalists that you’d expect to see on a list involving election chicanery—lawyers John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and Nick Fuentes. But Lélis’s list of the people she says Barr was trying to frame for stealing the election also includes names that make no sense at all. For example, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are included.
If Barr is an anti-Trump puppeteer who engineered the charges against Trump, why would he want to indict Raffensperger, who famously stood up to Trump’s attempts to sway the election? And why would he want to frame Freeman and Moss, who were targeted by conspiracy theorists on the grounds that they had supposedly helped steal the vote for Joe Biden?
The rest of the Project Veritas series comes from a cache of text messages and emails provided by Lélis that purportedly show Williams and his associates threatening her. These aren’t subtle. For example, to bolster her claim that Williams is involved in money laundering, she provided a text where he allegedly says: “Where is the gold bar you stole?”
Trevian Kutti, the ex-Kanye West publicist who actually was indicted as part of Willis’s election-fraud investigation, initially embraced Lélis’s claims way back in December 2024 in social media posts. But after communicating more with Lélis, Kutti became disenchanted. As Project Veritas unrolled its series last week, Kutti begged Project Veritas in an X post to realize that Lélis is “THE BIGGEST SCAMMER ON X.”
“I’ve never seen this type of career liar,” Kutti wrote. “She spends her entire life opening fake accounts, doctoring photos and making fake emails and correspondence. She stole from so many people and continues to do nothing but scam daily.”
Kutti didn’t respond to requests for comment.
BRAZILIANS FAMILIAR with Lélis have watched, aghast, as Project Veritas took her as a credible source.
“She is a diagnosed mythomaniac!” one wrote to Project Veritas on X. “For God’s sake.”
For a communications mogul, Williams has proved surprisingly helpless at rebutting Lélis’s claims. In December, when Lélis’s allegations were first circulating on the right, Williams appeared on a popular right-wing YouTube show called “Professor Nez” to rebut them. It went well at first, but when the host announced he was about to bring in Lélis as a surprise guest to confront Williams, he bailed.
“Oh no you’re not, you’re not going to bring her up here with me!” Williams said, telling staffers offscreen to cut the feed.
The fact that examples of Lélis’s prolific dishonesty are just a google away has been an endless source of frustration for Williams’s camp. At one point during the December interview, Williams’s social-media director—who said in the video that Lélis personally owes him thousands of dollars as well—begged viewers to just look up Lélis’s name before taking her claims seriously.
“Research her name,” the social-media staffer said. “Like literally, type her name into Google.”
Whether Project Veritas—or anyone else jumping on its Barr report—has taken that advice remains unclear.
Is there any proof that Patricia Lélis isn’t George Santos? Inquiring minds want to know.
Bill Barr's "enemies list" look like a note that was passed between 9th grade girls rating the upperclass fascists by how dreamy they are.