In wild late-night posting spree, Trump attacks Obama with imaginary quote

President Donald Trump was at it again.

On Monday night, Trump embarked on one of his periodic late-night social media posting sprees. As usual, his dozens of posts and reposts were littered with debunked conspiracy theories and other wildly inaccurate claims – many of them about past presidential elections and his Democratic foes, notably including former President Barack Obama.

Trump’s posting continued on Tuesday morning. So did his wrongness.

Here’s a brief fact-check breakdown of just some of the content to which readers of his Truth Social feed were treated between about 10pm on Monday and about 8am on Tuesday.

The president shared a pro-Trump commentator’s social media post that featured a supposed attack on Obama from Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. But the “Kennedy” quote is completely imaginary.

In the fake quote, “Kennedy” demanded that Obama return $120 million that the former president supposedly earned (but actually didn’t) in connection with his Obamacare health care law. The fact-check website Lead Stories reported in February that the fake quote “originated with a satire web publisher who baits conservatives into re-posting fake stories” and that the confusingly worded accusation about Obama that the post put in Kennedy’s mouth – “He allocated money under his own laws using taxpayer-generated prestige” – has also been baselessly attributed to various other public figures, from FBI Director Kash Patel to singers Vince Gill and Madonna.

Kennedy told the publication NOTUS after Trump’s post: “Somebody told me there was something floating around on the internet about me accusing President Obama of stealing $120 million or something. I didn’t say that. I don’t know the basis of it.”

False conspiracy theories about Obama have long been a staple of Trump’s reposts on social media. This posting spree featured a bunch more.

Trump shared a post – from an account using the name and image of the late John F. Kennedy Jr. – that said, “Barack Hussein Obama wiretapping Trump Tower during the 2016 election was a million times worse than anything Nixon did during Watergate. It is time to arrest the Renegade.” (“Renegade” is Obama’s Secret Service codename.)

But there is no evidence anybody wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 election, let alone that Obama himself did so. In 2017, during the first Trump presidency, the Justice Department said in a court filing that it had no records to support Trump’s claim earlier that year of Trump Tower having been wiretapped in 2016.

During this posting spree, Trump also shared another false conspiracy post that…