Have you seen claims that Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO who was shot on Dec. 4 in New York, was killed because he was about to testify against Rep. Nancy Pelosi for insider trading? It’s gone viral on several social media platforms over the past week. But it’s not true.
The oldest example of this false claim that Gizmodo could find dates to the night of Dec. 6, two days after the shooting. The X account HustleBitch wrote “BREAKING: Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was set to testify against Nancy Pelosi for insider trading.”
From that claim around 10:00 p.m. ET, other X accounts that went viral seem to have made their posts about it a couple of hours later. Politifact also found the claim being made on Threads and Instagram, though those posts were made on Dec. 7, the day after the earliest tweets spreading the false story, which were happening well before the arrest of Luigi Mangione, who’s been charged with the murder and is currently fighting extradition to New York from Pennsylvania.
But the claim that Thompson was killed over this motive related to a sitting congresswoman isn’t true. There’s no evidence Thompson was going to testify against Pelosi for insider trading or anything else. But, oddly enough, Thompson was himself accused of insider trading before he was killed.
The Hollywood Firefighters Pension Fund filed a lawsuit against Thompson and other executives at UnitedHealth back in May. The lawsuit alleges that the executives sold about $120 million worth of UnitedHealth shares when they learned the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating the company for anti-competitive practices. The stock went down only after it became publicly known the DOJ had opened an investigation. The suit states Thompson sold about $15 million worth of stock.
Pelosi and other members of Congress have indeed received scrutiny over their activity trading stocks, and some Democrats have called for a ban, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wrote back in 2021, “There is no reason members of Congress should hold and trade individual stock when we write major policy and have access to sensitive information.”
Some versions of the false claim on social media also use a video that purports to show Thompson talking about Nancy Pelosi providing help to UnitedHealth. The only problem, of course, is that the video doesn’t show the Thompson that was killed, as anyone with eyes can see.
Matt Wallace, a conspiracy theorist who often spreads disinformation on X, helped spread the misidentified video along with several others. Wallace also made a video on Rumble claiming that Nancy Pelosi brainwashed the shooter with techniques from MKUltra, the mind control experiments of the CIA from the 1960s. There were also claims that the man who took a shot at Donald Trump over the summer in Butler, Pennsylvania. The CIA told Gizmodo after those claims went viral that any claims about MKUltra being involved in the assassination attempt were, “utterly false, absurd, and damaging.”
Why are people online spreading this false story about Pelosi? We can only assume they’re either actively or unintentionally spreading false information that helps Trump. Many of the accounts that were sharing the false claim in its earliest iteration appear to have bios and images promoting the former and incoming president.
HustleBitch, the account that appears to have shared the claim very early (if not possibly the first), has a history of sharing lies on the internet. That account was also one of the first to share a claim that a body double was actually used for Trump’s visit to watch a SpaceX launch with Elon Musk last month. But it’s not clear who’s actually behind the account.
All we know for certain is that there’s no evidence that Thompson was killed because he was going to testify. And while Mangione’s lawyer has said his client intends to plead not guilty, all the available evidence seems to suggest that he may have been killed because his company makes billions of dollars in profits while denying life-saving medical coverage to Americans who are fed up with a broken healthcare system.
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