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Comet Ping Pong shooter drawn by fake Hillary Clinton news, police say

WASHINGTON (AP) — A man who said he was investigating a fake news story about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of a pizza place was arrested after firing a rifle inside the Washington, D.C., restaurant, police said.

Edgar Maddison Welch, 28 of Salisbury, North Carolina, was arrested Sunday afternoon at Comet Ping Pong on Connecticut Avenue in an affluent neighborhood of the nation’s capital, police said. No one was injured in the incident.

Welch told police he’d come to the restaurant to “self-investigate” the fictitious online conspiracy theory that spread online during Clinton’s unsuccessful run for the White House, a police statement said.

Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Aquita Brown said police first received a call Sunday afternoon about a male with a weapon.

Welch walked into the front door of the restaurant and pointed a gun in the direction of an employee, the police statement said. The employee fled and notified police.

Police set up a perimeter and arrested Welch safely, Interim D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham said. Welch was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon.

Bartender Lee Elmore told news outlets that people in the restaurant started to panic as the man walked to the back of the restaurant.

“One of the hosts runs up and says, ‘Did you see that guy? He had a big gun,'” Elmore said.

“His demeanor was bizarre, [now there's one element of this story that's very easy to believe] in that if you come in to a place to eat, you ask for a host or grab a seat at the bar,” Elmore said. “Didn’t make any eye contact, didn’t talk with anybody.”

Two guns were recovered inside the restaurant and an additional weapon was recovered from the suspect’s vehicle, police said.

A phone number listed for Welch in North Carolina was disconnected.

The Comet Ping Pong is in a neighborhood of well-tended private homes and apartment buildings on leafy streets that lead to a mix of shops, restaurants and the Politics and Prose book store.

The restaurant gained notoriety during the presidential campaign after fake news stories stated Clinton and her campaign chief ran a child sex ring out of the restaurant, news organizations have reported.

“For now, I will simply say that we should all condemn the efforts of certain people to spread malicious and utterly false accusations about Comet Ping Pong, a venerated DC institution,” restaurant owner James Alefantis said in a statement. “Let me state unequivocally: these stories are completely and entirely false, and there is no basis in fact to any of them. What happened today demonstrates that promoting false and reckless conspiracy theories comes with consequences.”

Lord Jim wrote:What sort of "thought process" does a person who reads a "story" about Hillary Clinton and John Podesta running a child sex ring out of a DC pizzeria go through that leads them to:

"Well that makes perfectly good sense to me. I'm going to grab my shotgun, drive 200 miles and check it out for myself."....

Lord Jim wrote:Otherwise, why pick this particular restaurant to make this "tie in"?

Like many ridiculous things on the internet, Pizzagate appears to have begun on the troll haven and message board 4chan. After Podesta’s emails were hacked (likely by Russian agents) and WikiLeaks published them, 4chan users in October found emails between Podesta and [pizza shop owner James] Alefantis about a Clinton fundraiser that happened early in the campaign.

From there, people began speculating that the restaurant was part of a broader child trafficking ring run by the Democratic Party — a popular but entirely false conspiracy theory on the fringes of conservative media. And the conspiracy theory jumped over to Reddit, where the popular Trump subreddit r/The_Donald championed it; Twitter, where pro-Trump tweeters have continued to promote it; and Facebook, where fake news outlets have written and shared articles about it.

***

Craig Silverman at BuzzFeed has an exhaustive report on how this ridiculous story got so big.

It appeared to really take off after a white supremacist Twitter account (which uses an avatar of a Jewish lawyer in New York) propped it up. The tweet pointed to a Facebook post that claimed a likely nonexistent “NYPD source” confirmed that police had found evidence on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s devices that the Clinton campaign ran an international child enslavement ring. Again, there’s absolutely no evidence for any of this — but the tweet, which is still up, quickly got thousands of retweets and favorites.

With that, fake news outlets like Your News Wire pushed the story more broadly just days before Election Day. One of the stories even claimed, “IT’S OVER: NYPD Just Raided Hillary’s Property! What They Found Will RUIN HER LIFE.” New York police officers did not raid Clinton’s property, but the story quickly got more than 100,000 engagements — shares, reactions, and comments — on Facebook, and it was quickly plagiarized by multiple fake news outlets to get hundreds of thousands more engagements on social media.

The nonsense just kept building and building, with fake news outlets running more and more false details about this false conspiracy theory — typically alleging that police, particularly the NYPD and FBI, had uncovered even more evidence of this international child abuse ring, even though no such thing had happened.

As all of this spread, pro-Trump supporters went back to the Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks to find more “clues” for Pizzagate. Without any evidence or cause, they quickly began to interpret basic food items as code words for this supposed sex ring. Through this new ridiculous “discovery,” Trump supporters on social media linked even more emails to Pizzagate, which grew from a conspiracy theory about a DC pizzeria to one about a fictitious international child sex ring.

But communications between the Clinton campaign and Comet Ping Pong’s Alefantis were the original source of the conspiracy theory. And the allegations were further emboldened by the pizzeria’s ties to the Clinton campaign, including Alefantis’s former relationship with David Brock, who founded the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters and publicly supported Clinton.

So the DC pizzeria bore the brunt of the damage that came from these widespread conspiracy theories. The restaurant and its staff got hundreds of death threats on their phones and social media — including one that read, “I will kill you personally.” People also began showing up at Comet Ping Pong to investigate Pizzagate. Then, on Sunday, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old from North Carolina, armed himself with an assault rifle and fired at least one shot in the restaurant while investigating the conspiracy theory.

Econoline wrote:You know he's a white Christian dude because (a) the headline didn't say "terrorist" and (b) he's still alive.

• • Incoming national security adviser's son spreads fake news about D.C. pizza shop
    By POLITICO STAFF 12/04/16 : 11:53 PM EST
    
    The son of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, embraced a baseless conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton on Sunday after a man who claimed to be investigating the hoax fired a rifle inside a pizza parlor in Northwest Washington, D.C., on Sunday.
    
    The man, 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, North Carolina, entered the restaurant, D.C. police said, to “self-investigate 'Pizza Gate' (a fictitious online conspiracy theory)." After firing his gun inside the establishment, he was arrested and charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. No one was injured.
    
    The baseless online conspiracy theory in question, spread by supporters of President-elect Donald Trump, holds that the pizza shop, Comet Ping Pong, is actually a front for a child sex ring led by Clinton, the Democratic nominee.
    
    The conspiracy theory got its start when emails from Comet Ping Pong’s owner James Alefantis were hacked from the Gmail account of Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta and released by WikiLeaks.
    
    The New York Times reported: “While Mr. Alefantis has some prominent Democratic friends in Washington and was a supporter of Mrs. Clinton, he has never met her, does not sell or abuse children, and is not being investigated by law enforcement for any of these claims.”
    
    On Sunday, Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr., tweeted, “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many ‘coincidences’ tied to it.”
    
    The younger Flynn, who has served as his father’s adviser*, linked to the account of Jack Posobiec, whose Twitter account describes him as the special projects director of a group called Citizens4Trump.
    
    Posobiec said Welch’s actions were a “false flag,” and claimed he was an actor carrying out an elaborate conspiracy to discredit sites that spread the fabricated #PizzaGate accusations.
    
    “Planted Comet Pizza Gunman will be used to push for censorship of independent news sources that are not corporate owned,” he tweeted.
    
    For weeks, Comet Ping Pong has been the victim of false news stories about Clinton trafficking children in the local D.C. restaurant's back rooms. The stories appeared on Facebook, in addition to such dubious outlets as The New Nationalist and Alex Jones' Infowars.
    
    Since then, a hashtag, #PizzaGate, has been used to defame the restaurant. The owner and employees of the pizzeria have also been victims of harassment. Scurrilous and defamatory posts continue to appear on Twitter on a daily basis even as D.C. police have said the restaurant is not under investigation.
    
    The restaurant, located near Politics & Prose bookstore on a commercial strip in Washington's Northwest section, announced last week that there will be visible police or private security presences at music shows hosted there.
    
    “Comet Ping Pong, like any respectable venue, is dedicated to creating a safe and inviting space for all of our concert-goers,” a statement on the restaurant’s Facebook page reads. “There have been no hostile situations at the venue, and we do not anticipate any altercations as much of the harassment has occurred online, but as a precaution we now have security and police present at every show.”
    
    After Welch’s arrest, Twitter users pointed to a Nov. 2 tweet by Flynn, in which he tied Clinton to “sex crimes with minors.”
    
    “U decide - NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc...MUST READ!,” Flynn tweeted just days before the Nov. 8 election, linking to an article on the website “True Pundit.”
    
    The article, which does not mention Comet Ping Pong, alleges that sources in the New York City Police Department had found new evidence linking “Clinton herself and associates” to a series of crimes, including: “money laundering, child exploitation, sex crimes with minors (children), perjury, pay to play through Clinton Foundation, obstruction of justice” and other unspecified “felony crimes.”
    
    No such evidence ever surfaced, and the FBI said that its review of the emails found nothing to alter its recommendation that Clinton not be prosecuted.
    
    Days later, on Nov. 4, the retired lieutenant general tweeted the hashtag #spiritcooking, referring to a conspiracy theory tying Podesta to satanic rituals.

The younger Flynn, who has served as his father’s adviser