Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, posted an extremely excited tweet on Tuesday about Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and a letter announcing his resignation. The only problem? The letter was fake, something that’s previously been a big problem for Lee.
“Powell’s out!” Lee declared in the since-deleted tweet captured by writer Ben Jacobs in a screenshot.
The letter shared by Lee says that “new leadership” was needed to carry on the important work of the Fed, so Powell will be stepping down. “After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, effective at the close of business today, July 22, 2025,” the fake letter reads.
The letter contains typos and formatting errors, including a random comma followed by a capitalized letter as though the idea was to start a new sentence. President Donald Trump will often capitalize random words for no reason, but that’s not typical of educated people like Jerome Powell. The word “institution’s” is also split onto two lines in a way that no normal word processor would attempt. On top of everything, the letter includes a large watermark that features garbled text, a likely sign that it was generated by AI.
Lee seems to have picked up the letter from one of countless accounts on X that were sharing the fake news, though it’s not clear where he got it exactly. When news breaks, people on X often rush to post letters without giving any indication of where they found them. And that was clearly the case here. The big difference between Lee and the fake news peddlers who try to go viral on X is that Lee is a sitting senator, which makes him one of the 100 most powerful people in the country.
But Lee wasn’t the only relatively prominent person to fall for the fake tweet. Benny Johnson, another far-right influencer, also shared a screenshot of the letter. But what makes Tuesday’s mistake particularly funny is that Lee has a history of falling for fake news on X, especially since billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform. Last year, Lee fell for a letter that appeared in a tweet claiming that President Jimmy Carter had died. In fact, that hoax was July 23, 2024, almost to the day that Lee fell for it again.
The Jimmy Carter hoax was even more ridiculous than the Powell resignation hoax, with the Carter letter referring to former First Lady Nancy Reagan by the sexually crude term, “throat goat.” It also referred to Rosalynn Carter as “the original Brat.” President Carter really did die many months later on Dec. 29, 2024.
Why is Lee such an easy mark for fake tweets? That part isn’t clear. The dude went to law school and is supposed to be a smart guy, at least on paper.
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