Update (10/15/20): This article has been updated with additional details.
A user on TheDonald.win, a far-right message board, was hinting at and promoting a series of dubious articles from the New York Post about Hunter Biden days before they were published. The user also claimed to know the people involved with the articles.
On October 14, the New York Post released a series of articles claiming to show emails from the laptop of Hunter Biden -- the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden -- that showed he arranged for a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm to meet with the then-vice president when he was in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. However, the articles falsely claim Joe Biden got a prosecutor fired to help Hunter and make a series of other questionable conclusions. The Post also wrote that it obtained the material from Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.
In the days leading up to October 14 (a Wednesday), an account on TheDonald.win called “Freedom_USA_88” had repeatedly posted threads that claimed that a “massive” story about Biden was coming out that day. As noted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “88” is “a white supremacist numerical code for ‘Heil Hitler.’” The account's username also has exactly 14 characters, a reference to the white nationalist ‘14 Words’ slogan that is often combined with “88,” as noted by the ADL.
The user wrote that a “huge story about Biden will break that will end his campaign” and urged fellow users to tell undecided voters “to wait to vote until after Wednesday.” The user claimed that they had been “authorized to drop a hint about Wednesday’s story” and “know the parties involved.”
In response to skeptical users, the Freedom_USA_88 account wrote that the “parties involved” “know TheDonald is very important” and “so they let me share this.” The user also promised that it was “the real deal” and that it had “been in the works for a while,” with “many parts in motion.”
Following the release of the Post articles, a user lauded and apologized to Freedom_USA_88, writing, “He's been posting everyday for the last week telling us this Biden news was going to drop today. He was a brand new user and all his comments were downvoted into the negatives. I even [messaged] mods to get him banned. I'll now think twice before I deport.”
