The morning after President Donald Trump ordered an airstrike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Fox News Middle East senior field producer Yonat Friling tweeted an image from a “protected” source that she claimed showed pro-Trump graffiti in Tehran from “this morning.” However, the graffiti was at least six months old. Friling’s false claim was retweeted over 2,600 times and was up for more than four hours before she removed it.
Journalist Yashar Ali was among the first to point out that Trump’s current ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, “tweeted about this months ago” in June 2019. Shortly thereafter, Frilling deleted her tweet and claimed that the image “was sent to me by a person who claimed to be an Iranian Student and asked to be anonymous.”
However, three hours before Friling posted the image on Twitter, an account purporting to be an “activist of Iranian resistance” had tweeted the image with similar false framing. An hour after that tweet, popular far-right account “Imam of Peace” tweeted the same image with the same false framing and credited the other account.