The Right Spread a Wild Story About a Foiled Plot to Bomb a Synagogue. Was It Fake News?
A major scoop about a foiled plot to bomb a Florida synagogue on a Jewish holiday by Tren de Aragua gang members who were also sex trafficking minors has been rocketing across right-wing media for a month.
Pro-Israel news outlets like Anash, Ynet, and Israel National News, influencers like Libs of TikTok, Fox News reporters, and even a conservative commentator on CNN repeated the claim, which was first published by right-wing activist group Project Veritas. “The Brazilian nationals, linked to Tren de Aragua, face charges of underage sex trafficking and planning a terrorist attack on Chabad South Orlando, a Jewish synagogue and school,” Project Veritas posted on Oct. 11, with mug shots of the two culprits as seeming corroboration of the wild claims.
The almost-too-crazy-to-be-true story, however, appears to be the fabrication of a serial forger, fabulist, and federal fugitive allegedly holed up in a Mexico hotel, on the run from the FBI in a major fraud case. The way the flimsy story was filtered through the right-wing news ecosystem is a stark example of how fake news manufactured out of almost nothing can go viral, if it hits the right topical key words and emotional triggers.
There’s no actual evidence of a criminal investigation into this sinister plot: Experts say the narrative is implausible, and the U.S. attorney’s office where this allegedly took place confirmed to Rolling Stone that the two Brazilians identified by Project Veritas are simply on their way to a routine deportation for immigration violations, and that no criminal charges are forthcoming. The only part of the Project Veritas story Rolling Stone could corroborate is that the two Brazilians were indeed taken into custody, but into ICE immigration custody on immigration holds.
So how could a largely false story from a well-known fraudster and forger make it all the way to CNN?
Project Veritas, the activist group founded and formerly run by James O’Keefe known for deceptive undercover videos, has been publishing stories featuring a Brazilian national named Patricia Lélis Bolin for several months now, promoting her bizarre conspiracy theories involving more than a dozen people, including former Attorney General Bill Barr, Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis, the CIA, and Qatar, as well as the federal prosecutor in her own fraud case. Bolin was indicted last year in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) for bilking fellow Brazilian immigrants out of $700,000 by pretending to be an immigration attorney, fabricating entire personas, and forging documents, and is currently wanted by the FBI, with a warrant out for her arrest.
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People from across the political spectrum have for years denied Bolin’s stories about them and called her a liar, from Trump operative Jason Miller, to conservative talk show host Armstrong Williams, to former congressman George Santos, to MAGA publicist Trevian Kutti, who was indicted by Fani Willis for her role in the Georgia election interference case. Kutti, like others, first promoted some of Bolin’s claims against their common enemies, before deciding that Bolin was untrustworthy and her materials were forgeries.
Bolin also has a long history of alleged forgeries and elaborate accusations in her home country of Brazil. She was indicted there for making a false accusation against former Brazilian lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, producing threatening Telegram messages that Brazilian police determined were not authentic. Bolin has even been accused of editing herself into a photograph of a mother and a newborn baby to pretend she had given birth to a special needs child.
But all of this hasn’t stopped Project Veritas from relying on Bolin’s elaborate accusations. The group’s storifes featuring Bolin include alleged texts, WhatsApp messages, and emails that share far-fetched wording, forensic irregularities, and mistakes — such as a person alleged to be Fani Willis spelling her own first name wrong (as “Fabi”) in text messages.
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In October, Project Veritas posted new “leaked texts” allegedly between two EDVA prosecutors, Michael Ben’Ary and Russell Carlberg, discussing their hatred of Trump. Ben’Ary became a target of Trump supporters after he slammed the DOJ for persecuting Trump’s enemies, and was fired for allegedly refusing to participate in weaponized prosecutions days before Project Veritas shared the supposed text conversation.
Carlberg, to whom Ben’Ary was supposedly texting his desire for Trump to die, happens to be the lead prosecutor on Bolin’s own fraud case.
The texts showed the same hallmarks as the ones Project Veritas shared in August promoting Bolin’s conspiracy theory that Bill Barr orchestrated a scheme with Fani Willis and Jack Smith to criminally prosecute Trump. In both cases, the cell phone number appears above several of the sender’s texts, normally only seen in group text conversations on iPhone. The screenshots also show a FaceTime icon while the iPhone is using its text message service, not iMessage.
Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab who has served as an expert technology witness in cybersecurity criminal cases, says it’s virtually impossible for iPhone messages to appear this way. “My suspicion is that the screenshots have been manipulated,” or created with an app, he says, having reviewed the screenshots shared by Project Veritas.
Bolin also posted, and deleted, screenshots of threatening WhatsApp messages she claimed Carlberg sent her just one week before Project Veritas posted Carlberg’s alleged texts with Ben-Ary. Both Bolin and Project Veritas have denied that Bolin was the source of the EDVA “leaked” texts.
Four days after the EDVA “leak,” on Oct. 11, Project Veritas shared more leaked texts — and these were wilder than ever. “Project Veritas evidence sparks FBI raid & arrest of two illegal immigrants,” text imposed over screenshots of iPhone text messages and two mug shots read. The texts purport to be between a Brazilian couple, Janaina de Toledo and Leonardo Corona Ramos, and a 16-year-old they appear to want to sex traffic. The texts show improbably explicit planning of crimes — ”I think 6 explosives will be enough. I can’t believe we’re so close to wiping out those damn Jews” — as well as the same repeating phone number that appears in screenshots used for other Project Veritas stories featuring Bolin.
Toledo and Ramos are longtime enemies of Bolin. Toledo and Bolin have battled for years over social media, and brought lawsuits against each other in Brazil. Bolin even maintains a Google Drive with 31 folders and over a gigabyte of data tracking the couple’s movements over the last several years that she shares on her social media.
BREAKING NEWS: Following evidence uncovered by Project Veritas, the FBI and Florida police raided the hotel rooms of two illegal immigrants, Janaina Toledo (32) and Leonardo Corona Ramos (42), today. The Brazilian nationals, linked to Tren de Aragua, face charges of underage… pic.twitter.com/5QVKtnpU89— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) October 11, 2025
At first, few influencers repeated the Project Veritas claims, with the exception of Libs of TikTok, which repeated it that night. But when pro-Israel news outlets picked the story up the next day, and reported that the unverifiable claims from Project Veritas actually came from federal authorities, more right-wing influencers began spreading the story.
Some of the news stories were not bylined. Israel National News wrote in an unbylined story: “The FBI and the Florida police revealed on Sunday that they recently arrested two men suspected of planning a serious attack against the Chabad House in Orlando, Florida, motivated by antisemitism. The arrest was carried out in the midst of Sukkot. American authorities claim that the (sic) could have been among the most serious terrorist incidents in the country’s history.” Other details in the story that seemingly only come from Project Veritas are attributed to “investigators.”
“The suspects are expected to be brought to trial before a federal court in Florida on serious charges, including conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack, membership in a foreign terrorist organization, and unlawful presence in the United States,” Israel National News wrote.
Israel National News did not reply to emailed questions.
A reporter on one bylined story, in Ynet, didn’t answer messages from Rolling Stone asking if they had indeed gotten any information from federal authorities. “The two face charges including human trafficking, including trafficking children for sexual exploitation, and conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack against the Chabad in south Orlando,” they reported on Oct. 12.
But the news outlets’ perceived credibility nonetheless furthered the story’s spread among right-wing influencers and pundits. “Crazy this isn’t a bigger story,” Fox News and New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz wrote. The X account Stop Antisemitism and pro-Israel influencer Eyal Yakoby also shared the story. “It appears Project Veritas stopped a massive terrorist attack with their investigation. Incredible,” Robby Starbuck, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, wrote. Influencer posts amplifying the story received millions of views on X.
The next day the story got air time on CNN, on The Lead With Jake Tapper. “There was a story out of Florida that just broke, I believe, either Thursday or Friday of two individuals who are in the country illegally who were planning a terrorist attack against a Jewish synagogue, against a shabbat dinner,” CNN conservative political commentator Shermichael Singleton said on the show. “And you know who broke that story? This is a name you don’t hear often on CNN, Project Veritas, of all places.”
Neither the guest host standing in for Tapper nor the Democrat commentator on the panel with Singleton questioned the claims. Project Veritas then featured the CNN clip in an X post about the story. CNN did not respond to an email.
But a month after Project Veritas’ initial post, it appears the couple are not actually being investigated for the serious crimes of planning a terror attack and sex trafficking minors. There is no evidence the FBI has commented on the allegations, no criminal charges have emerged, and Florida police would not confirm they were involved. A spokesperson for the Middle District of Florida U.S. attorney’s office confirmed to Rolling Stone that the two Brazilians are in ICE custody being processed for removal and that there are no additional criminal investigations or indictments coming. After being briefly held on an immigration hold in Orlando jail, they were both moved to separate ICE detention facilities in Florida, with Ramos currently at Alligator Alcatraz, and Toledo in Arizona, according to Rolling Stone’s monitoring of their detention on the ICE website.
Messages from Ramos’ mother and his attorney — who specializes in routine immigration issues, not criminal defense — viewed by Rolling Stone also indicate that the two were detained only on immigration charges, not criminal charges, and that they expect them to be deported to Brazil soon. Ramos’ attorney told Rolling Stone Ramos could be deported to Brazil this week.
Simply deporting alleged gang members suspected of a hate crime terror plot and underage sex trafficking, rather than criminally prosecuting them here in the U.S., is exceedingly unlikely, experts tell Rolling Stone.
Georgia attorney Eli Bennett specializes in defending clients with both criminal and immigration status legal issues. “It would be pretty unheard of for the feds to just process someone for deportation if they suspected them of those serious crimes,” he says. “I’d also expect something to be on a public docket by this point, or for the FBI to make a big announcement showing off that they stopped this major crime from happening.”
Former federal prosecutor Ken White agrees. “If they ‘face charges of underage sex trafficking and planning a terrorist attack on Chabad South Orlando, a Jewish synagogue and school,’ as Project Veritas claims, they would not be left in ICE custody,” he says.
“Aside from the real risk ICE would deport them (one hand often not knowing what the other hand is doing), ICE custody is less secure in terms of them interacting with other conspirators in custody,” White adds. “If there were a prosecution, they would be in U.S. Marshal custody. I would expect the feds would have charged them — perhaps first in a complaint — and gotten custody of them. The notion that you’d leave a suspected terrorist hanging out in ICE custody on the chance you might pick them up later is absolutely not credible, even for this administration.”
Project Veritas and Bolin separately claimed that Orlando police and the FBI were involved in a raid on the Orlando hotel where Toledo and Ramos were staying. That week, Bolin posted several celebratory TikToks, detailing how she helped find the pair’s location, even doing a gleeful dance recounting the arrests, and taking credit for the bust of her longtime adversaries.
Project Veritas also took credit for the couple’s arrest: “The group’s investigative journalists uncovered evidence that sparked an FBI raid on October 11, 2025, thwarting what authorities call one of Florida’s largest potential terrorist attacks in history,” the group wrote on its website, adding that the text messages they posted spurred “law enforcement (to) obtain a federal search warrant, leading to an immediate raid on the suspects’ hotel rooms that revealed further details of the imminent plot.”
Before the immigration arrest, Toledo messaged a friend in Brazil expressing her fear that Bolin was tracking them down in Orlando, in WhatsApp messages viewed by Rolling Stone. Toledo was also in contact with an FBI agent on Bolin’s case earlier this year, sending him information about a Mexico City hotel where Toledo believed Bolin was hiding. “Thank you for the updated information — it is appreciated,” the agent wrote in an April email viewed by Rolling Stone.
But only several months later, Bolin, a wanted FBI fugitive, claimed that she herself was orchestrating an FBI raid of sex traffickers and would-be Chabad terror bombers. “We started investigating everything this
woman was involved in. It took a significant amount of time, a really long time. We collaborated closely with the local police in Florida, right, in the county where she’s located. And we also collaborated closely with the FBI. And well, she ended up being arrested,” Bolin said in Portuguese in a video she posted to TikTok.
The Orlando police department did not confirm they were involved in the arrests, and instead referred inquiries about the arrests to the FBI or ICE. The FBI did not respond to inquiries, and ICE was unable to provide information about the case in time for publication.
Project Veritas sent a statement to Rolling Stone: “Patricia Lelis Bolin is a whistleblower whom Project Veritas has published four individual reports with, exposing many public figures for alleged illegal activity. That is our relationship with Ms. Bolin.” In response to questions about the source of their claims regarding the terror plot, the group wrote that “a journalist never reveals their sources” and accused us of asking “unethical questions.”
Bolin said in a written statement: “I am happy to know that you are following my case and keeping an eye on what the EDVA, Bill Barr, and Armstrong Williams has tried to do to me and my family. Please stay tuned as a lot more is coming and I’d be happy to give you a heads up before we publish.”
She added: “I hope you do better research on Janaina de Toledo and Leonardo Corona. I am not the only person for whom a judge granted a protective order because of the harassment they were carrying out. Any defamation or baseless accusation attempting to claim that I produced messages or that I am Veritas source will be subject to legal action.”
It’s unclear why Project Veritas would run stories featuring such a dubious source as Bolin, but the stories fit the group’s pattern of publishing pieces targeting figures who oppose Trump. Bolin’s long list of enemies include the prosecutors who indicted her, who also work out of a U.S. attorney’s Office that Trump supporters were angry with for its resistance to Trump’s weaponization of the DOJ.
Project Veritas rose to prominence while headed by James O’Keefe for its hidden camera videos that claimed to catch liberals in instances of bias or wrongdoing. O’Keefe was forced out of the group in 2023, accused by the board of financial malfeasance. Benjamin Wetmore, the board director appointed soon after — who has his own connections to some of O’Keefe’s most notorious stunts — remains in charge. Wetmore was previously an attorney for a Texas group run by an O’Keefe associate that employed similar hidden camera stunts in Texas. He was also implicated in O’Keefe’s infamous 2010 stunt to attempt to “seduce” CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau on a boat. Wetmore recently called himself not only the board director at Veritas, but an “investigative journalist” for the group.
Courtney Hagle, a research director at media watchdog group Media Matters, has been tracking Project Veritas since 2011. She says it’s not surprising to see the group engage in deceptive and unethical practices: “Deception is their bread and butter, and there really isn’t a line they won’t cross when it comes to going after their ideological enemies. They often straddle the legal line, or stop short of illegality, but they’ve created fraudulent identities in the past and engaged in other unethical practices.”
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Hagle added that Project Veritas has experience “weaponizing media” and making mainstream media “take the bait,” by keeping a veneer of being a news outlet.“This recent example, in which it seems like they are reaching new lows, and being even more brazen than before, really shows how misinformation can spread so easily through bad actors,” she says.
Project Veritas still has the Chabad terror “scoop” pinned to the top of their X profile, and they’ve been fundraising off the Bolin connected stories. “Project Veritas thwarts an Orlando terror attack! Support Project Veritas,” the group shared on a recent Instagram story, with a link to donate.
Δημοσιεύτηκε: 2025-11-19 15:00:00
πηγή: www.rollingstone.com
