BS BULLETIN:
- A website resembling the Republican Party’s upcoming midterm convention site shot up Google’s search results Friday and redirected visitors to the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein files.
- Rep. Ted Lieu joined the online reaction, saying he tried the link himself and calling the situation “sort of awesome.”
- There was one rather important problem with the viral story: It wasn’t the Republican convention website. The real GOP convention site is
gopconvention.com.
Rep. Ted Lieu thought Republicans had a very awkward website problem Friday.
For a while, much of the internet thought so too.
People searching Google for information about next week’s Republican midterm convention in Dallas encountered gopdallas2026.com, a polished website that looked remarkably like it belonged to the event.
Clicking it produced a surprise.
Visitors were redirected to the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein Library.
The discovery quickly exploded across social media, with posts claiming that the Republican convention website had been hacked or was somehow redirecting people to the Epstein files.
Lieu joined the fun.
The California Democrat said he had personally tried the website and confirmed the redirect, calling it “sort of awesome.”
Except the Republican convention website hadn’t been hacked.
It wasn’t the Republican convention website.
The RNC’s actual website for the Sept. 9-10 gathering at the American Airlines Center is gopconvention.com, which remained online and functioning normally.
The other site was an elaborate look-alike.
It apparently worked extremely well.
Archived versions show gopdallas2026.com had been operating since July and featured convention information and imagery convincing enough to attract links and climb Google’s search rankings. As recently as Monday, it displayed an image of the American Airlines Center decorated with President Donald Trump’s likeness.
By Friday, whoever controlled it had changed course and sent visitors to DOJ’s Epstein archive instead.
The site was later taken offline temporarily. It has since reappeared with a prominent disclaimer acknowledging that it is an “independent informational resource” and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by the RNC or the official convention.
And we now know more about who may be behind it. The Daily Beast reported that the site appears connected to TaskForce, a creative agency co-founded by Yosi Sergant, who was involved in Shepard Fairey’s famous Barack Obama “HOPE” campaign. When questioned by the New York Times about the operation, Sergant responded, “We made you look,” and defended satire as a means of drawing attention to issues.
That makes the episode less of a Republican website disaster than a remarkably successful piece of political trolling and search-engine manipulation.
It also demonstrates how quickly the original claim outran the correction.
The fake site looked real. Google put it where people could find it. People clicked. Politicians reacted. And only afterward came the rather crucial sentence:
That’s not their website.
The actual Republican convention goes ahead Wednesday and Thursday in Dallas, with Trump and Vice President JD Vance among the major figures expected at the party’s first-ever midterm convention.
MY QUICK TAKE
This is exactly why Rush Limbaugh spent so much time teaching people to question the premise before arguing about the story.
The premise racing around the internet was irresistible: LOOK! THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION WEBSITE SENDS YOU TO THE EPSTEIN FILES!
Except it wasn’t the Republican convention website.
Somebody built a convincing imitation, beat the real thing in Google results and apparently managed to fool an awful lot of people. That’s a pretty successful prank.
But Ted Lieu jumping aboard before checking whose website he was actually visiting makes it even better. Washington has apparently reached the point where “I clicked it and it worked” now qualifies as opposition research.
DBS WIRE SOURCES:
- Mediaite — Dummy website redirects people looking for GOP convention information to Epstein files
- Twitchy — Ted Lieu pushed claim about where GOP convention link redirects
- FOX — Fake Dallas GOP convention website sends people to Epstein files
- Official Republican Midterm Convention website
- DOJ — Epstein Library
