Pain from Breitbart.com hoaxes goes bipartisan [View all]
Opponents of Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel are fuming in the aftermath of sloppy work by their allies that has backfired and risks turning their cause into a joke.
The bumble: A thinly sourced claim that Hagel had taken money from a heretofore unheard of group called "Friends of Hamas," floated by the conservative website Breitbart.com, and sourced to Capitol Hill.
The shadowy group "Friends of Hamas," which Hagel was accused of receiving donations from, appears to have originated as a joke from a reporter to his source that the source then spread to others as a fact, according to an account by the reporter, Dan Friedman of the New York Daily News, on Wednesday.
Friedman's joke became went viral when it appeared in a Breitbart News article as information coming from Senate sources. Opponents of Hagel, including former Gov. Mike Huckabee, started picking up on it and publicly citing it to demand that Hagel release more financial records.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/anti-hagel-campaigners-furious-over-friends-of-hamas-blooper
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