Newsmax Emails Show How It Got A Neo-Nazi Shooting Wrong: ‘I Told Them Not To Run It'

Yahoo

28-01-2025

Internal company emails and a deposition obtained by HuffPost reveal how the right-wing network Newsmax dismissed accurate reports that a mass shooter was a white supremacist and shared an image of a man they incorrectly identified as the killer.
Texas man Mauricio Garcia, 37, filed a libel lawsuit against Newsmax and other media organizations in March after an image of him was used in their coverage of a May 6, 2023, mass shooting at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, that depicted him as the shooter.
The real gunman was a 33-year-old white supremacist who shared the same first and last name as Garcia. The gunman killed eight people and wounded seven others before he was killed in a shootout with police. But it was the innocent Garcia's image that was used to depict a neo-Nazi killer.
'This was a pretty obvious unforced error,' Newsmax News Director Chris Wallacewrote in an email after it became clear the network had connected an innocent man to a mass shooting, according to court records.
Garcia is being represented by Houston attorney Mark Bankston of Farrar & Ball. Bankston previously represented the parents of a child who died in a 2012 school shooting who won a $45 million judgment against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for lies he spread about it.
Entertainment blog Hollywood Unlocked and TelevisaUnivision (the parent company of Spanish-language broadcaster Univision) are also listed as defendants. Fox News was previously listed as a defendant but was dropped from the lawsuit in June. News site Today News Africa and far-right commentators Tim Pool and Steven Crowder settled with Garcia, Bankston told HuffPost.
Andrew Brown, the chief operating officer at Newsmax, gave a deposition as part of the lawsuit on Aug. 20. During it, Brown routinely acknowledged that Newsmax staff failed its internal journalistic practices when reporting on the shooting.
Newsmax 'published an image that we had not verified with the investigators in charge of the shooting,' Brown said in the deposition, which you
The deposition, along with court records that include internal emails from Newsmax executives and employees, give a glimpse into the editorial process of a media empire known for its praise of President Donald Trump and its conspiratorial lies about the 2020 election that Trump lost.
Two days after the shooting, on May 8, media reports began to trickle in about the shooter's ties to the neo-Nazi movement, including his tattoos of a swastika and the SS lightning bolt of Hitler's paramilitary forces. The shooter also had a Russian social media account 'rife with hate-filled rants against women and Black people,' The New York Times reported. And Aric Toler, a former researcher at the open-source research outlet Bellingcat, independently verified the killer's social media website and posted details on X, formerly Twitter.
Following the new details from Toler, prominent right-wing voices — including that of billionaire and X owner Elon Musk — floated conspiracies denying the shooter's neo-Nazi background.
Chris Knowles, the vice president of programming at Newsmax, also questioned the shooter's white supremacist background. Knowles sent an email on May 8 to other high-level staff at Newsmax with the subject line 'White supremacy.'
'Lots of jumping to conclusions by the media, fueled by the Biden group's constant push of this theory that white supremacy is the biggest danger in the country,' Knowles wrote in an email to other executives.
Later that night, on Newsmax's 'Greg Kelly Reports,' the host questioned the shooter's white supremacist background. Kelly was wrong, as authorities would later clarify. Even worse, Kelly aired a photo of the wrong Garcia while making his incorrect point.
'We didn't know anything for a good long time, like a day and a half went by, no information whatsoever, until they told us this guy did it, Mauricio Garcia,' Kelly said on his show.
Next to Kelly was a mugshot of the innocent Garcia with a large graphic titled ''White' Supremacy?' underneath the image. Below that, a title for the segment read 'Here We Go Again With 'White Supremacy.''
'Now, look, this is not a white supremacist,' Kelly said. 'By the way, we abhor white supremacy. But you know what the left does, right? They think anything MAGA must be white supremacists. That is appalling. This is just pathetic, all right?'
In a court declaration, the innocent Garcia described the mental anguish he went through after being incorrectly identified.
'On May 7, 2023, I first began to learn about false accusations made against me in the media,' Garcia said. 'I spent the next week in a total panic. Nobody could calm me down. My physical and mental state completely broke down. As the days passed and the more I learned about all the false accusations, the worse it got.'
Garcia said he couldn't sleep and began to have panic attacks.
'I also spend so much time thinking about the huge number of people across America who believe I committed the worst crime imaginable, being a neo-Nazi murderer of innocent children,' Garcia added. 'It really messes with your head to know that millions of people saw your picture and think you're a monster. I just don't think I'll ever be the same after this.'
A spokesperson for Newsmax declined to answer questions from HuffPost but provided the following statement: 'Newsmax acted responsibly in promptly correcting the error before being asked by plaintiff or anyone else to do so.'
Garcia is seeking more than $1 million in damages.
The origin of the wrong photo that spread across social media — and eventually to people's television screens — appeared to stem from an account on X, the social media platform that has become a hotbed of misinformation under Musk's leadership.
The account's owner, who has more than 60,000 followers, referred to herself as an 'ULTRA-MAGA Business Owner' on her X page. A day after the attack, on May 7, the account posted a photo of the wrong Garcia. HuffPost could not find an earlier example of the photo being used.
'So the media is stating that the Allen Texas Mall shooter (Mauricio Garcia) was a right wing, white supremacist. Really?' the user wrote.
In an internal investigation by Newsmax researcher John McGrory following the network's blunder, he pointed out the conspiracies that began to take shape under the account's post.
'A quick look at the replies to her tweet show the fever swamps, some proposing the liberals set up the shooting to discredit whites,' McGrory emailed other Newsmax executives, according to court records.
The false post about Garcia remains up on X. And while Musk has often lauded X's Community Notes — a tool that allows users to add corrections or additional context to misleading or untrue posts — no such note has been added to the false post about Garcia. It has been viewed more than 1 million times, according to X's own metrics.
As the photo spread across social media, it found its way into online outlets. In his deposition, Brown said it was Chris Tamas, an associate producer at Newsmax TV, who found the incorrect photo on the website Today News Africa and in an aggregated story on Yahoo.com and put it on Newsmax's shared photo drive.
'Let me make sure I understand this,' Bankston said during the deposition. 'So the producers on Greg Kelly's show, the only thing driving their decision to use the photo was the fact that it was on the system?'
'It was on the shared drive that the newsdesk uses to put approved photos,' Brown said in part.
Brown further explained that a different producer, Megan Ilievski, saw the wrong photo on a local ABC affiliate's website in Kansas. Ilievski checked Newsmax's shared photo drive, saw the same image and assumed it was correct, Brown said.
More from the deposition:
Q: Did the company know when this photo was taken?
A: No.
Q: Did the company know where this photo was taken?
A: No.
Q: Does the company, or did the company on May 8th know why this photo was taken?
A: I don't – no. No they didn't.
Besides Kelly's show, Newsmax aired the image of the wrong Garcia on five other programs. In his deposition, Brown acknowledged the wrong photo would have gone through at least 12 producers who could have caught the error.
'If we have six shows, we're talking about at least 12 producers, right?' attorney Bankston asked in the deposition.
'At least, yeah,' Brown responded.
The image of the wrong Garcia used by Newsmax contained a watermark for the website Mugshots.Zone. If someone at Newsmax had checked the website first, the lawsuit alleges, they would have seen that the age of the innocent Garcia did not match that of the shooter.
'To the people that I talked to who were involved in this case, nobody visited the mugshots website, no,' Brown testified.
Backlash to the Kelly segment was swift. Publications including Forbes, Mediaite and The Daily Beast all wrote stories pointing out that Kelly had shown a photo of the wrong man. And The Associated Press released a fact-check about the wrong image, but did not mention Newsmax.
Kelly had also — along with Knowles, the vice president of programming at Newsmax — questioned whether the shooting had been motivated by white supremacy. On May 9, authorities made clear the shooter had a history of racial hatred.
'We do know that he had neo-Nazi ideation. He had patches. He had tattoos. Even his signature verified that,' Hank Sibley, North Texas regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a press conference a day after Kelly's segment.
As the reports came in, Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy forwarded executives an email that a Daily Beast reporter sent asking about the error.
'[Newsmax Vice President] Elliot, let's follow up on this right away he needs to if he did do the wrong photo,' Ruddy said of Kelly. 'He needs to say that ... Their team needs to be very careful on this obviously ... I'll speak to bill about some simple thing to get back once you confirm, they did make the wrong photo.'
Wallace, the news director, expressed frustration at the mistake in a separate email to executives.
'For my part: [producers] Valenti and Julia came to me yesterday and asked me about it and I told them not to run it,' Wallace wrote. 'Despite the list of shows below - I had not seen it on air so I didn't blast during the day. I honestly just figured folks wouldn't fall for this. My bad. I'll churn out a network wide blast next time earlier. But I also want the shows to come to me - like Valenti did. This was a pretty obvious unforced error. Just check our convo below.'
The 'convo below' Wallace referred to was a back-and-forth between Wallace and producer Michael Valenti on May 8 about the unverified photo that was spreading across social media. Wallace cautioned against using it.
'This photo is circulating on social media and nowhere else to my knowledge–so no I can't confirm it's him,' Wallace wrote. 'Have you seen it on any news sites? I only find it on social and blogs and no sourcing.'
While Wallace appeared to be one of the few who urged caution in running the wrong image, a new court filing from Bankston accuses Wallace of altering his email to other executives.
'Interestingly, the original email sent by Wallace to Valenti did not contain the words 'and no sourcing,'' a court filing from Bankston alleges. 'Wallace added those words when forwarding it to his bosses to make it appear he said 'and no sourcing' to Valenti, but he did not.'
On the next episode of 'Greg Kelly Reports'on May 9th, Kelly issued a quick apology.
'We got to clear up something from last night,' Kelly said. 'At this time last night, we showed a picture of what we thought was the guy involved in the shooting in Allen, Texas. Now, a lot of media organizations showed this picture. Turned out not to be the guy. So we're sorry about that.'
As he spoke, an on-air graphic read: 'Fake News Never Acknowledges Its Mistakes.'
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