A supposed FBI raid of a home of an infamous Republican dirty trickster appears to have been a ruse—one that began falling apart even as its perpetrators managed to dupe a major national newspaper.

On Monday, a Virginia man who responded to a Craisglist ad seeking actors to play FBI agents for a television pilot came forward to say that he’d been roped into the latest hoax orchestrated by bumbling right-wing smear merchants Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl.

Tommy Abraham told The Daily Beast in an interview on Monday that the Craigslist ad offered $400 cash payments to white male actors who agreed to don FBI badges and windbreakers and film a series of scenes at Burkman’s home in Arlington, Virginia. In the pre-dawn hours of Monday morning, Abraham said that he and a handful of others who responded to the ad converged on Burkman’s home and were filmed acting out an FBI raid there. Abraham supplied documentary evidence to back up his assertions, including emails from an address bearing the name of a company Wohl once ran.

By Monday afternoon, news of the fake raid had already been reported as genuine by The Washington Post, and Burkman was insinuating that high-level government officials were retaliating against him for his efforts to root out corruption in Washington. A person going by he name Bev Donahue sent a series of photos and video clips of the “raid” to reporters, and shared them on an eponymous twitter account created in August. But there’s evidence that “Donahue” is just a pseudonym for Wohl. That Twitter account is associated with an email address beginning with “ja” and a cell phone number that, like Wohl’s, ends with the digits 91.

An Ohio State study of 26 athletes who had tested positive for COVID-19 discovered that four of those athletes showed signs of myocarditis.

The study published Friday was done as there are concerns that myocarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle — can be a longer-term effect of COVID-19. The 15 male and 11 female players at the school in the study came from multiple sports, including football, and none of the athletes had to be hospitalized or received specific treatment for their coronavirus infections.

Doctors ran cardiac magnetic resonance imaging on the athletes in June through August to check the health of their hearts. And while four athletes did have findings “suggestive of myocarditis,” the study notes that “COVID-19-related myocardial injury in competitive athletes and sports participation remains unclear.”

"At least we know he can read," @JoeBiden tells @jaketapper

There is no widespread fraud.
"The lack of proof that elections are rigged or fraudulent should be what governs the parties policies and for the President's words, and for the President to cast doubt on the credibility of the election, by saying that they're fraudulent or that the results are rigged, is simply not backed up by what has been found by the legions of Republican election lawyers in the polling places."

Ginsberg doesn't like it when states mail ballots to every voter.

But that doesn't make Trump correct. "It is a problem because the voter rolls are not always completely accurate. People move and die. So there are live ballots in those states that could create problems. In other states, absent or mail-in balloting, the process is the same between states, is not subject to the same thing the President is talking about. So the rhetoric about cheating and ballots being sent out willy-nilly is not accurate under the facts of the laws of the different states."

He said if you follow Trump's advice to vote by mail and in person, you could go to jail. "Anyone who decides to do that should look to the south of North Carolina to Georgia where the attorney general, a Trump ally, announced today that they actually had caught people who they believe voted twice -- once by the polls and once through absentee balloting -- the attorney general said he's going to prosecute them. Typically these fall away where there are people who just get confused. But the fact that the Georgia attorney general felt the need to prosecute the exact advice that the President has been giving to people should be pause for anyone who does want to follow the President's advice."

Side note: Ginsberg said there's a good chance we won't know who wins the election until December 1. We've written about that before, but this is just another reminder to steel yourself for uncertainty.

Remember when Senate and House Republicans sold all their stock and investments right before news broke about how virulent and deadly #COVID19 was? #TrumpKnew