When it rains it pours.

A day after right-wing site Breitbart had to weather the storm of an absolute blockbuster of a story from BuzzFeed showing how the website solicited the help of white supremacists and let their ideas filter into the site’s content, it had to correct an extremely embarrassing gaffe in one of its stories.

For some reason, one of the biggest media boosters of Donald Trump during the 2016 election published an article that cited an obvious parody Twitter account as the president’s actual words. In a post on the recent deaths of three American Green Berets at the Niger-Mali border, Breitbart’s John Hayward cited the Twitter account @MatureTrumpTwts when claiming Trump had offered condolences for the US soldiers:

“Saddened by the loss of our three U.S. Green Beret soldiers in Niger,” President Donald Trump said on Twitter Thursday morning. “Our thoughts are with the families during this very difficult time.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper grabbed a screenshot of the passage:

Here’s the tweet Hayward referenced:

Saddened by the loss of our three U.S. Green Beret soldiers in Niger. Our thoughts are with the families during this very difficult time. https://t.co/4dUFwpP8qu — PresidentialTrump (@MatureTrumpTwts) October 5, 2017

The account parodies Trump by tweeting out “presidential” messages and tends to quote-tweet many of Trump’s more inflammatory and divisive posts in doing so. And whoever runs the account was elated that it fooled the conservative outlet, stating that maybe Breitbart wished Trump actually tweeted like that.

BREAKING: Breitbart attributed my tweet (last paragragh) re: troop deaths to Trump. Maybe they wish he’d use the medium as I do? #FakeNews? https://t.co/gv0vP473vc — PresidentialTrump (@MatureTrumpTwts) October 6, 2017

After the flub was discovered, the paragraph was removed and a correction was issued:

Correction: the original version of this story included a citation of condolences from President Trump on Twitter that was not, in fact, from the president’s authentic Twitter account. The citation has been removed. Apologies for the error.

Reminder to journalists everywhere — when using a tweet from a very famous person, make sure you are getting it from the VERIFIED account.

[image via Breitbart]

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Follow Justin Baragona on Twitter: @justinbaragona

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