Moates Plot Thickens: Evidence of Federal Election Commission Fraud, Identity Theft, Libel by Michael Moates Exposed on Twitter

By Caitlin Elam, Sr. Contributor

A week passes, and we find ourselves yet again finding out more and more about one Michael S. Moates, verified Twitter user, “chairman of the board” of The Narrative Times (a 501(3)(c) enterprise/non-profit organization that is listed as a charity but disturbingly does no charity work), editor-in-chief of the DC Chronicle (his blog site that characterizes itself as a news organization, though the only legitimate news articles posted are plagiarized from other outlets), and die-hard “Trumpican” to the point where President Donald Trump might want to consider a restraining order.

When last we left the infamous Moates, we found that he had been engaged in many unseemly affairs, to wit: the aforementioned plagiarism (and lying about said plagiarism), fraudulently telling Twitter he was running for Congress and/or President (he is too young to run for either) to get his verification check mark on their platform and, most disturbing of all, actively grooming teenage girls in his employ or whom he is interviewing for a story to believe that flirting with them is normal and okay, which is actually conduct that is, if not illegal, then certainly repulsive, depraved, and unethical, especially from his place of influence and power.

The last article from the Rogue Review, as well as Jared Holt’s story at Right Wing Watch, generated some interest (including a re-telling of Jared Holt’s article by Raw Story). Holt’s account is true and accurate, providing myriad amounts of evidence gleaned through research and interviews. It also goes in-depth into a September 9th podcast of Carl Higbie’s show; the interview is with Higbie, a podcaster under the banner of Moates’ “The Narrative Times,” and Moates wherein Moates denies allegations of sexual harassment and soliciting a minor teenager. In the interview, Moates casts himself in the light of being the victim. Higbie prompts Moates with leading questions that further validate Moates’ claims, at one point calling Moates’ behavior gentlemanly in nature. At one point in the interview, Moates even claims one of his accusers has been sexually harassed before in her life and that it “speaks to her state of mind,” reasoning that because of her history of being sexually harassed, she would supposedly see even innocuous behavior by Moates to be harassment. “If you have a history of it, maybe you’re the one overreacting,” Moates proclaims in the podcast with Higbie. Some might call this “victim shaming” or “victim blaming” wherein the accused or critics of the accuser point out the faults of the accuser to paint them as untrustworthy or invalid in their claims.

Moates also went into an explanation of his actions being protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution, failing to recognize that that amendment extends only to free speech, expression, religion, etc. being protected from infringement by the government and only when that speech is not illegal in nature (i.e. terroristic threatening, yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, et cetera). Since the government has not leveled any charges at Moates for his sexual harassment of two minor females or anything else he has said (some of it libelous), the First Amendment wouldn’t even begin to be an issue up for discussion, much less as a pre-emptive defense stratagem.

As stated above, Raw Story also covered this, but it was merely a retelling of Holt’s article with special interest paid to one specific issue: the fact that conservative media has refused to hold one of their own accountable for his actions. Where the Raw Story fails utterly is not only ultimately just paraphrase what Holt said without doing research of their own, but to also lay the onus on Moates’ conduct at the feet of the conservative media (despite this publication – decidedly conservative – writing about this very issue, conducting research of its own and providing a link to said article under their tweet linking to their article). It is unproductive of Raw Story to provide conservative media as a scapegoat for Moates’ behavior. His customs are not a partisan issue so much as a “decorum and professionalism in general” issue; Moates would have most likely conducted himself in the same exact way, regardless of party affiliation and perhaps without politics as a motivating factor at all. As of this publication, Raw Story has not offered any retraction or apology for their misrepresentation.

To be fair to Raw Story and their attempt at making this a partisan issue rather than the overall human decency issue it really is: the issue of Moates’ conduct and character was addressed by at least one outlet in the conservative realm (Rogue Review), but it was not covered by many more widely-seen right-leaning outlets, many of whom were sought out specifically by Purity Thomas and Hadassah Cohen to cover the issue. Cohen and Thomas are the two teenage girls who state that Michael Moates was extremely sexually inappropriate and unprofessional in his manner with them both. In Holt’s article, Thomas articulates clearly her reason for going to conservative media outlets first: “We decided we should take it to conservative media. I mean, this is a conservative guy being inappropriate to conservative girls, so we have the conservatives handle this. This is their job, right? You would think. They need to man up and own one of their people.”

In addition to this, well-known journalist Luke O’Brien, who retweeted Holt’s article on October 10th, added the following observation about the conservative media blackout in regards to Moates:

Mike Cernovich, mentioned explicitly in the tweet, is a far-right activist/author who is well-known for revealing shocking and pedophilic “joke” tweets written by the director of Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2, James Gunn; the tweets by Gunn had been posted about a decade ago. The divulging of these tweets by Cernovich via Gunn’s Twitter account later became Disney’s reason for firing Gunn from the third Guardians of the Galaxy installment, prompting an outcry from fans of the films and the stars of the movie itself. O’Brien specifically uses Cernovich as an example rather than conservative media figures in general for two reasons: 1.) because of Cernovich’s previous interest in “taking down” pedophiles or those who make light of pedophilia and 2.) because, after O’Brien had written a critical piece on Cernovich himself, Moates accused O’Brien of being someone who “supports pedophiles who want to sexually touch children.”

There is not a shred of proof that would lend to any credibility to Moates’ reckless and malicious allegation. Moates was simply angry that O’Brien wrote something unflattering about Cernovich and fired back at O’Brien, not with facts, but in his usual style: libel. O’Brien attempted to explain to Moates that his tweet was libelous and that O’Brien had received hundreds of threats of violence from people like Moates. O’Brien further explained to Moates that he considered the tweet to be part of a campaign to harass O’Brien and possibly incite violence against him, especially considering that false allegations of pedophilia have resulted in actual violence against people in the past. Moates refused to take down the tweet.

When Twitter was contacted about this, they did nothing. This is egregious, particularly because O’Brien is frequently on the tail-end of threats for his journalistic work in general. These threats are primarily by conspiracy theorists and “QAnon” types that subscribe to Moates’ brand of unverified, incendiary, hyperbolic, and often fictitious rantings on the internet. Moates’ following was, at the time, at around a couple of hundred thousand followers and Moates had a “blue checkmark” of verification, making the range of his voice larger and more high-volume than your average blogger on Twitter.

Though it might look like a personal crusade against Moates and Cernovich by O’Brien, it is not: O’Brien is correct in his statement that there is nary a “peep out of Mike Cernovich,” and, in addition to that claim, Cernovich knew about Cohen and Thomas’ grievances since early September 2018, almost a month before Holt or Rogue Review published their articles. He also says, in his several messages to Thomas, that he had seen things about Moates on Twitter and was confirming the story with Thomas. It is unknown whether Cernovich knew Moates ahead of time or not, but the language in the messages (shared by Thomas to this reporter) suggests Moates is an unknown entity to Cernovich. There is no evidence to suggest Cernovich was acting on Moates’ behalf to glean “inside knowledge” from the 16-year-old Thomas. There is, however, a myriad of evidence to confirm Cernovich knew of Moates conduct for months, doing nothing about it.

In said conversation, Thomas clearly outlined everything that Michael Moates had done and said to both herself and Cohen, as well as other conservative women. Cernovich said that Moates’ lawsuit threat towards the girls was “shitty of him” and advised Thomas not to worry about it because the threat was “silly.” Cernovich also asked Thomas if an apology would suffice as appropriate compensation for what Moates had done, which is a far cry from his reaction to Gunn’s past pedophilic tweets. Thomas stated to Cernovich that she felt an apology from Moates would not be good enough because “he [Moates] believes he did nothing wrong.” She further explained to Cernovich why an apology would not be acceptable because “He’s said we are liars. If we were to get an apology from him it’d have to be public [sic] so people know what he’s done and what he’s said and an apology towards each individual girl for what he said specifically.” She admits that an apology would be okay only if Moates takes full accountability for what he has done, citing specifically what he did in detail and why it is wrong, as well as apologizing directly to each girl/woman.

As suggested in the Direct Messages (DMs) over Twitter, Thomas was given Cernovich’s email address, which she emailed immediately, providing evidence and write-ups by Aaron Holtzman and Cohen as attachments:

After the final email from Ms. Thomas, the correspondence with Cernovich stopped on his end. It is possible that Cernovich was conducting further research of his own and waiting to gather enough to bring the story to light, but it is unlikely since he did not comment upon anything having to do with Moates after the Right Wing Watch and Rogue Review stories were published about Moates.

As stated in the above emails between Thomas and Cernovich, The Daily Wire (TDW) and its staff (particularly Kassy Dillion, who had been on the receiving end of harassment by Moates and were contacted specifically for this reason by Cohen and Thomas) were aware of Moates and the story surrounding him, but did not report on it. According to Thomas, in the above emails to Cernovich, the reason Dillion gave for TDW not being interested in a story on Moates or what he had done was due to TDW’s fear of litigation by Moates for libel (or slander, if stated on an audio/video podcast).

When asked about this in an interview by Jared Holt, Jeremy Boering, Chief Operating Officer at TDW, said he and Ben Shapiro, editor-in-chief and host of The Ben Shapiro Show (a conservative podcast), felt it was a situation better left to another outlet “because originating an investigation into claims of this sensitive and incendiary a nature requires an investigatory and legal infrastructure that is beyond our current construction.”

Boering further noted to Holt in an interview that, “To be clear, this instruction had nothing to do with Moates himself, neither Ben nor I recall ever having met, or even heard of, Moates before the allegations began to surface on Twitter. It also has nothing to do with any opinion about the veracity of the claims themselves. We have none. It is certainly not the position of myself, Ben, or any of the editors at the site that this was a ‘hit piece.’ As I said, we have no opinion about the story at all other than that it is a serious one that merits a deeper and more sensitive probe than we areconstructed to provide.”

This seems to be a perfectly judicious reason, but one must wonder why Ben Shapiro, a lawyer who often deals with issues of impropriety both legally and morally concerning conservatives and “leftists” alike on his podcast, would not want to actively pursue the story of Moates’ conduct, especially when Moates has made conservatives look depraved with his abhorrent behavior.

Shapiro has stated many times in various podcasts that he believed Roy Moore of Alabama to be guilty of the accusations against him (statutory rape/sexual misconduct) and attributed this to the fact that there was enough evidentiary material from multiple corroborative witnesses to prove the claim. Shapiro was also in support of the call by many prominent Republicans in government that Moore exit the special election political race in which he was running at the time (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama). Moore did not withdraw candidacy and was easily beaten by his opponent, Doug Jones, in November 2017. Seemingly and in hindsight, the reason for the lack of exposure by TDW might owe to the fact that, mentioned above, Kassy Dillion (a staff writer) has had a negative personal experience with Moates; TDW might have wanted to take a more “hands-off” approach either at her request or as to not seem to have a vendetta against Moates due to the conflict of interest.

Enough comments were posted to Moates on Twitter, either calling him a creep (and other variations thereof) or referencing Holt’s article directly, that it caused Moates to rapid-fire block anyone who wrote anything slightly critical about his various imprudent activities. He set his profile to private briefly, apparently to quell the tide and rest his “blocking button finger,” but he later set his profile to public again. In the interim of his private status on Twitter, many of his followers, much like the last time Moates set his account to private, accused Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter) and Twitter Support employees of “shadow banning” or restricting Moates’ content, specifically the ability to retweet his tweets. Retweeting is not something one can do with the tweets of those who have set their account to private. Moates made no attempt to suppress these allegations of shadow banning, just as he failed to do the last time such accusations were brought up by his incensed followers when they could not retweet his statements. Moates then decided to strike a different tone, making his account public again, and posted the following on October 10th:

What is more troubling (besides the appalling grammar from someone claiming to be a journalist) is that Moates thinks the specific words used by others to describe his harassment, “sexual” and “sexist,” are mutually exclusive, stating that his comments were “sexist” but not “sexual.” This is done specifically so he can distance himself from being labeled someone who engages or attempts to engage in illicit/illegal activity with a minor and preferring, rather, to be seen simply as an ignorant guy who made a seemingly chauvinistic comment. This “toning down” has obfuscated the real seriousness of the allegations leveled against him, a seriousness which is supported and reiterated by Boering of TDW in his above comment to Holt. Regardless of his damage control tactic, the words he uses in his statement belies the supposed sincerity. Throughout, he uses his “modus operandi” of casting himself as the victim. It is on par with saying, “I’m sorry you feel the way you feel,” which is otherwise referred to as a “non-apology apology”. As of this publication, he has not offered any specific apology to Cohen, Thomas, or any of the women he reportedly has harassed.

It took less than a day before Moates was back on Twitter again, effectively breaking his promise to “take a step back.” It is possible he was egged on to do so by his followers’ often crass reactions to his apology, including criticism at Moates’ supposedly being “cucked”. Being “cucked” is a new-age spin on the old-world word “cuckolding”, whereby a woman makes her husband look foolish by having an affair; now the word in the mainstream refers to anyone who has shown apparently “weakness” in the face of politically correct (PC) culture or someone who essentially engages in PC behavior. Comments ranged from support such as, “No apology necessary here. #MAGA [“Make America Great Again,” President Trump’s most used slogan and the rallying cry of his fans],” to “Seriously dude, the social justice warrior complicity crap doesn’t look good on you. Grab life by the pussy and carry on brother!” One commenter, going by the handle of “The Charming Consort” suggested obsequiously (and not altogether charmingly) that, if Moates wanted to “spin this back on them [Moates’ critics/accusers],” for Moates to state that none of the myriads of women/girls who had problems with Moates would have come forward if Moates were thinner/more physically and aesthetically appealing, calling the alleged action a “fcked [sic] up form of fat shaming.”

Apologies, their sincerity (or lack thereof), and conservative outlets and figures that refuse to address or censure Moates’ conduct aside, the crux of the issue now seems to be brand new additions to the laundry list of unseemly behavior by Moates: Federal Election Commission (FEC) fraud and identity theft.

In a tweet thread by Samantha Kramer (@sammyjkramer) on Twitter, she exposed that Moates engaged in illegal activity by committing identity theft and FEC fraud. According to evidence provided in the tweet (and posted here with Kramer’s permission), as well as personal research by Rogue Review staff, Moates first filed paperwork on June 24th, 2018, unbeknownst to his staff at the DC Chronicle, and created a website for Hannah Thompson on July 16th, 2018.

When one looks at the actual FEC paperwork for the fictitious version of Hannah Thompson created by Moates, one might view it as simple black-and-white forms that were filed on June 24th, 2018. The date is important because it denotes that Moates filed this paperwork before he created the (now inoperable) hthompson4congress.com site and (now deleted) Twitter account for Hannah Thompson, @EqualityNation, meaning Moates had already committed identity theft and fraudulently filed wrong/inaccurate paperwork with a federal organization before creating his site. This suggests he had more ominous motives than simply “owning the libs,” which is a slang term for making fun of liberals or their political ideology.

Interestingly, the addresses and names of the people he listed on the FEC documents are all fake (besides Hannah Thompson, who exists only in name in real life, not how Moates represents her on the paperwork). Even the address for Hannah Thompson herself does not exist on any map of Alexander City, Alabama.

The website, called hthompson4congress.com, is now inoperable (and comparable in name to his own invalid Congressional bid’s website moates4congress.com, using the numeral “4” in place of the word “for”). The site, identifiable through its “fingerprints” (read: code) on the internet, along with FEC paperwork, proves that Moates specifically made the site:

The fake Hannah Thompson political website is under the same web host as the DC Chronicle, Michael Moates’ political blog.

2. The site was created on July 16th, the same day he wrote the following tweet, boasting about his activity. When a user points out that he has just publicly revealed his ruse, he brags, “They still won’t be able to identify it,” adding an emoticon for a smiley face. This is worth bringing up because it shows his knowledge of what he was doing and his utter lack of regard for the consequences of his actions, much like he handles any scrutiny leveled against him.

3. The Federal Election Commission website’s “Statement of Organization” paperwork for “H Thompson 4 Congress” (FEC ID C00681452) shares the same email address that Moates consistently uses and tweets out when trying to recruit new employees, which verifies that Moates is indeed the “brains” behind of the “H Thompson 4 Congress” site and Twitter account.

Moates’ next action was to set up a Twitter account for Hannah Thompson, going by the handle @EqualityNation (now inactive), which is likened in name to one of his many ventures, Nation One News. The Twitter account described Hannah Thompson as “AL [Alabama] Congressional District 03 House Candidate Democrat – Equality and Love 4 [for] All. Proud Transgender Woman” in the biography section, using the real Hannah Thompson’s photograph and a banner photograph of the universally recognized Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual (LGBT) flag.

In addition to this account creation, he had those on his staff follow the account, which has since been deleted. Hadassah Cohen confirms this conversation took place, as well as a subsequent conversation on the phone with Moates, where he admitted to Cohen that he had created the @EqualityNation Twitter account. Cohen had no knowledge of the website or the FEC paperwork. He also followed this account, which caused Kramer to adroitly ask in her tweet thread, “Why would he, an obsessive Trump supporter, follow a trans [transsexual] democrat candidate?” One theory is that he was doing this to “own the libs.”

Another theory by those on Twitter was that Moates wanted to glean the screen names of those that followed the account for nefarious purposes, such as soliciting said persons for funds through the fake website he set up for Thompson’s campaign. Kramer said in her tweet, “So, why do this? Why risk breaking federal law, why commit identity theft, why LIE to create a fake candidate? To own the libs? To solicit money for a non-existent candidate and make a buck? Trolling? WHO FUCKING KNOWS.”

Regardless of his motives, the real Hannah Thompson is not a transsexual woman, nor is she running for any office anywhere in the United States, much less the Democrat ticket for the House of Representative 3rd District seat in Alabama, so all Twitter users would do well to at least do a cursory search of those on Twitter whom they wish to follow. A simple search would disclose that the 3rd district of Alabama had their Democratic primary on June 5th, 2018 and the filing deadline for any election was on February 9th, 2018, before the Twitter or website was created and long before the FEC paperwork was filed. What Moates did, at the very least, is libel a real woman who exists, use her picture without her consent, and file fraudulent federal paperwork on her behalf and in her name without her knowledge.

The blame is squarely on the shoulders of Moates, but it is frightening that the FEC had not picked up on this sooner, especially since the paperwork was filed after the above deadline of February 9th of this year. The apparent oversight of the FEC led Moates to be able to commit identity theft and potentially cause harm to Hannah Thompson and/or her reputation by lying about who she is and how she conducts her affairs, both politically and personally. To wax theoretical, the real Thompson could very well have been harmed/harassed (if she has not been already) by either anti-transsexual extremists and/or supporters of the current Republican incumbent, Mike Rogers. The fire with which Moates has been wielding so casually, had they gone completely unchecked, could have caused great harm to innocent people, on top of the other innocent people Moates has already harmed. Thankfully, research done by Samantha Kramer, a Twitter user named @EerieMom, another Twitter user by the handle @BlitzFrankie, and other investigators (named in Kramer’s tweet thread), have at least prevented and exposed Moates’ conduct for now. “EerieMom” has stated in her own expose Twitter thread (with pertinent information therein), that she has reported this misconduct to the Alabama Board of Elections.

According to Brett Beal, Deputy Attorney General for the Alabama Secretary of State, he is aware of a case involving Moates but stated that the office’s Press Secretary/Deputy Chief of Staff, John C. Bennett, knew more about the case in question and could answer questions more adequately. A message was left for Mr. Bennett and, at the time of publication, has not yet been returned. According to a secretary at the Secretary of State’s general office, Mr. Bennett is out of the office until Monday. Attempts to contact Mr. Bennett on Monday were unsuccessful.

Follow Caitlin on Twitter @CaitE_Writer