On Thursday, President Donald Trump posed for an Oval Office photo with one of the leading promoters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that top Democrats are part of a global pedophile cult.
YouTube conspiracy theorist Lionel Lebron was in the White House for an event on Thursday, according to a video Lebron posted online. During the visit, Lebron and his wife posed for a smiling picture with Trump in the Oval Office.
Lebron is one of the internet’s leading promoters of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory based on a series of anonymous clues posted to internet forums. QAnon believers have interpreted the clues, which they claim without evidence are coming from a highly placed source in the Trump administration, to mean that Trump and the military are engaged in a high-stakes shadow war against a supposed globalist pedophile cult. The conspiracy theory has caught on with Trump supporters, who have held up QAnon-related signs and wear QAnon shirts to the president’s rallies.
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Lebron claimed to have received a “special guided tour of the White House” before posing for pictures with Trump. In a video posted Friday, Lebron said he didn’t use the brief encounter with the president to ask Trump about QAnon or its slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.”
“I think we all know he knows about it,” Lebron said in the video, sipping from a coffee mug he claimed to have received as a gift at the White House.
Lebron didn’t respond to a request for comment as of press time. Neither did White House spokespeople.
All four White House officials the Beast did speak with about how Trump, the leader of the free world, ended up in a smiling photo op at the Resolute Desk with a prominent QAnon conspiracy theorist, pleaded ignorance about when this occurred, and why. Two of these West Wing officials audibly could not contain their laughter.
“This president is a president for all Americans,” one joked, including conspiracy theorists.
It is highly unlikely that Lebron and his spouse were simply able to casually stumble into this meeting while on a White House tour, for instance. Those familiar with how this Oval Office operates say that typically the only way that an Oval photo op between President Trump and strangers would even happen is if a senior official vouched for the guests and waved them in.
Lebron, for his part, tweeted a picture of himself in the White House with QAnon-related hashtags. His visit to the White House comes as other prominent Trump supporters in the media try to push back on QAnon’s spread, fearing that it makes Trump voters look ridiculous.
