Snopes continues to deny Ilhan Omar's father was living in the US illegally or that he was a war criminal. Until last year, @snopes' claims that Ilhan's father was a "teacher educator" presented a block in the information pipeline about the congresswoman. Major news organizations cited the Snopes "fact-check" alleging that claims related to her father's background were false and were motivated by racism and religious bigotry. The verifiably true claim — that her father had served in the Siad Barre regime as a senior military official — was discredited by Snopes as a "conspiracy theory." My piece for @PirateWires in March of last year showed that Snopes' claims were not just evidently false but that English-language Somali news outlets had openly celebrated Omar's father's military service as an officer in the Siad Barre regime army. Instead of investigating the nature of Ilhan father's service in the regime — e.g. whether he was ever tied to targeting of American soldiers in Somalia — news orgs defaulted to "informing" their readers that Nur Omar Mohamed was a teacher. This is what Sahan Journal, a Somali-American publication in Minnesota, wrote upon Mohamed's death: [Nur Omar Mohamed] ended up in Minnesota with his family. Most Americans knew nothing about his prestigious career as a colonel who led a successful regiment in the Somali-Ethiopian war during the late 1970s. To them, he was just another faceless Somali refugee. During the same period that Snopes was busy discrediting this claim, the company's CEO/founder was busy plagiarizing dozens of articles from journalists, which he posted to Snopes as original content. David Mikkelson wrote no less than two dozen articles, which the site posted as reliable, verified content, adjudicating on critical information-related issues. But Mikkelson didn't just publish under some random pseudonym. Instead, he invented an entire back story about the fake journalist of his imagination. Mikkelson wrote under the name "Jeff Zarronandi," who — according to Snopes' own bio for the ersatz writer — is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author. According to the Snopes bio, Zarronandi won the coveted journalism prize for his work on "numismatics," the scientific study of currency. (To quote Congresswoman Omar's comments about about Jewish people: "It's all about the Benjamins, baby!") Of course, the Pulitzer does not award a prize for numismatics, just as it doesn't award a prize for nephology, onomastics, cliodynamics — or any other weirdly obscure scientific field. Snopes is built on the premise that it runs processes that are able to identify this kind of fakery. Despite this, Snopes failed to catch the most flagrantly false information possible, published for months — possibly years — on its own site. Instead, it had to rely on Buzzfeed (yes, Buzzfeed, of cat listicle fame) to out Mikkelson's gambit. Yet, news organizations, government agencies, and public perception rested on this one claim concerning a sitting congresswoman whom Snopes appeared to be dedicated to defending, no matter the cost.