Conspiracy theorist Jen Moore spent the last months of her life chasing her bizarre ideas around the Washington, D.C., area, attending an event about the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and filming Comet Ping Pong, the target of the Pizzagate fiction.
Now, after her death in a Maryland hotel room last week, Moore has become the star of a new conspiracy theory. Right-wing media personalities have seized on Moore’s death, claiming without any evidence that it’s the latest example of Bill and Hillary Clinton killing off their enemies.
The right’s eagerness to capitalize on Moore’s apparently natural death recalls the rush to blame the Clintons for Rich’s 2016 murder in a botched robbery. Stories about Moore’s death highlighted her gonzo “investigations” into wild accusations of Democratic pedophile rings involving the Clintons and suggested that Moore was on a “Clinton death list.”
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Once again, though, the pro-Trump outlets pushing claims that Moore was murdered for knowing too much have no facts on their side. Although Moore’s exact cause of death has not been determined, with the results of toxicology tests still weeks away, police are not investigating as a homicide.
“At this point, we do not suspect foul play or anything suspicious about her death,” a spokeswoman for the Prince George’s County Police Department told The Daily Beast.
Police discovered Moore’s body in a Capitol Heights hotel on Aug. 13, and within a day, her death had become the latest grist for the conservative content mill online.
True Pundit, a popular right-wing blog that regularly promotes hoaxes, was the first to imply a link between Moore’s death and the Clintons with a blog post saying she was found dead after accusing Bill Clinton of raping a child. Conspiracy theory site Big League Politics, which has loaned its email list out to prominent Republicans, followed up soon afterwards, claiming that Moore was “found dead after investigating Clinton sex crimes.”
On Monday, the conspiracy theory made the jump to cable news, with pro-Trump cable channel One America News reporter Neil W. McCabe standing outside the hotel and wondered aloud whether Moore’s investigations “may have cost her her life.”
Before her death, Moore, a former California police officer, had restyled herself as an anonymous YouTube conspiracy theorist under the screen name “Task Force.” Moore’s career on the fringe right went well enough that she eventually became an associate of George Webb, a prominent conspiracy theorist best known for temporarily shutting down part of a major port in 2017 over a bogus dirty bomb tip.
In her videos, Moore wandered around the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, which she called “the heart of the beast.” In one video, Moore became agitated about a pizza restaurant in Fairfax, Va., claiming it’s also involved in satanic pedophile rituals.
The baseless stories about Moore are riddled with bizarre claims and errors. In one video, Pizzagate booster Liz Crokin claimed that even if Moore appeared to have died from a seizure, it could have been faked by murderous deep-state operatives. The Big League Politics report on Moore’s death, meanwhile, confused her with a Detroit television reporter with the same name who died in 2014.
The Daily Beast was unable to reach Moore’s family for comment.
