Cam Harris has had a really, really, really bad winter. Harris, you may know, is the guy who was responsible for churning out one of the most notorious fake news stories of the campaign—a report that there were millions of premarked ballots for Hillary Clinton sitting in a Columbus, Ohio warehouse. It earned him over $5,000.
But he hasn’t been able to enjoy it. First, in November, Google yanked its ads from all fake news sites—causing the value of Harris’ site, the badly misnamed Christian Times Newspaper, to drop from as much as $125,000 to mere pennies. Then, earlier this week, hours after he was outed by the NYT, he lost his job as a legislative aide to a Republican state delegate from Maryland.
That shouldn’t be the only pain he faces for this. Election officials in Franklin County, Ohio—home to Columbus—as well as Ohio state election officials put in a decent number of man-hours looking into the claims raised in Harris’ story before finally concluding it was a hoax.
Now that Harris has been so kind as to identify himself, perhaps someone ought to send him the bill for wasting taxpayer money on a wild goose chase. After all, Harris knew the story was bogus and hit “publish” on it anyway.
Harris has already taken two severe hits in the wallet in the last few months. He deserves to get a third.