If you are unfamiliar with Rebekah Jones, she’s the alleged whistleblower who claimed she was pressured to “fudge” (her word) the Florida COVID numbers in order to make Governor Ron DeSantis look good on a national stage. As Cooke ably points out, her claim is nonsense on stilts.

It was noted that the knives were out on DeSantis before the Wuhan Flu emerged from the lab or wet market or whatever. He did far better with minorities than a Republican is allowed to do and if he were able to take his electoral alchemy national he’d be a damn good bet for the Presidency. The Democrats can’t abide anyone leaving their plantation so he had to be taken down.

She gave the Left something they had no power to resist. She gave them exactly what they wanted to hear.

Never mind that it made no sense. From Cooke’s article, “Rebekah Jones, the COVID Whistleblower Who Wasn’t”:

“But it’s not true. Indeed, it’s nonsense from start to finish. Jones isn’t a martyr; she’s a myth-peddler. She isn’t a scientist; she’s a fabulist. She’s not a whistleblower; she’s a good old-fashioned confidence trickster. And, like any confidence trickster, she understands her marks better than they understand themselves. On Twitter, on cable news, in Cosmopolitan, and beyond, Jones knows exactly which buttons to push in order to rally the gullible and get out her message. Sober Democrats have tried to inform their party about her: “You may see a conspiracy theory and you want it to be true and you believe it to be true and you forward it to try to make it be true, but that doesn’t make it true,” warns Jared Moskowitz, the progressive Democrat who has led Florida’s fight against COVID. But his warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Since she first made her claims a little under a year ago, Jones has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through multiple GoFundMe accounts (and, once she realized that she was losing a percentage to credit-card fees, through paper checks); she has become a darling of the online Left; and, by pointing to her own, privately run dashboard, which shows numbers that make Florida’s COVID response look worse than it has been, she has caused millions of people to believe quite sincerely that the state’s many successes during the pandemic have been built atop fraud. Stephen Glass, the famous writer-turned-liar who spent years inventing stories but got caught when he pushed it too far, could only have dreamed of such a result.”

She claimed that the “Gestapo tactics” used in the “raid” of her house were in retaliation for her political bravery. What actually happened was that a data breach was noted. Someone went into the Florida Department of Health system and stole the personal information of 19,000 government employees. You’ll never guess who’s IPv6 address the investigation led authorities to.

Her version of “Gestapo tactics” is suspect as well:

“Jones now claims that she was “terrified” by the police’s visit. But even this seems to be highly questionable. Not only did she prepare for the visit by creating a made-for-the-cameras sign that read “Biden hire me!”—hardly the instantaneous work of someone who is surprised that the cops are at the door—but she subsequently spread a host of extraordinary claims about the conduct of the police that, after festering online for a while and spawning a swiftly dropped lawsuit from Jones, were flatly disproven by the release of the body-camera footage. As the Tampa Bay Times recently noted, despite Jones’s having “claimed on Twitter that the agents ‘pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids,’” the bodycam video “does not appear to show police pointing their guns at anyone in the house.” On the contrary: It shows the police waiting outside patiently for 22 minutes; it shows them trying to minimize the disruption to her children by encouraging her to come and talk to them at the door; and it shows them repeatedly calling Jones to find out why she wasn’t cooperating. After the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) had released the footage, a spokesman confirmed what anyone who watches it can see: that at no point during the search did the agents point their guns at anyone in the house.”

Next Cooke put up a blog post titled “Rebekah Jones’s Trail of Deception.” It ably details what Jones is accustomed to leaving in her wake.

In response to Cooke, Jones posted a rambling 9500 word (I didn’t count – someone else wrote that it was 9500 words and that seems about right) rant chock full of weasel phrases, credential and award flashing, and clumsy attempts at legerdemain – “I guess I have to read that National Review thing now…”

My favorite slight of hand is her response to Cooke’s statement “There is an extremely good reason that nobody in the Florida Department of Health has sided with Jones.” She answers “More than 70 employees in state government have come forward,” as if no one would notice that Cooke said FDOH employees and she answered with government employees. So ham-fisted.

Her response prompted this Tweet from Cooke.

Hilariously, the pictured text in Cooke’s Tweet seems to have been altered to make it look like she was talking about the blog post all along rather than the article. Of course there is no notice that her published attempt to defend herself has been changed, at least not as of this writing. Who knows what tomorrow holds.

Just to show how Jones operates, Cooke published one more blog post about her – “Rebekah Jones Smears Governor DeSantis’s New Press Secretary.”

Apparently, before she was named Florida Press Secretary, Christina Pushaw made an enemy of Rebekah Jones when in Maryland. La Jones applied for a peace order (that seems to be Marylandese for restraining order.)

I Maryland apparently upon application the order is granted and adjudicated at a later date. Jones got the order without Pushaw’s knowledge and then reported a violation committed by Pushaw before Pushaw had been notified that such an order existed. She was made aware that she had been on double secret probation a few days later. Unfortunately a reported violation triggers an automatic criminal court date.

When the initial order was adjudicated the judge threw it out. Jones is playing on the fact that there is still a criminal charge pending against Pushaw because the bureaucracy has yet to get around to drop the charge for breaking a peace order that has been struck down. The mendacity is childish and certain to be exposed, but that’s how she operates.

This is a great story to watch if you’re a fan of train wrecks. Check out a few MSNBC interviews if you want to see how much they learned from their Avanatti crush a while back. (SPOILERS: Nothing. They learned nothing.)

Update: She is just insane. Rebekah Jones Admits She Was Never Asked to Delete COVID Deaths in Florida. Insane.