U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett tried to jail Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, who then exposed Barrett’s association with a military operation that ended with the deaths of U.S. soldiers, leading Barrett to resign from the high court.
A rumor that users circulated online in April 2025 claimed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett tried to jail Rep. Jasmine Crockett. The rumor further claimed the Texas Democrat responded by exposing evidence of Barrett’s connections to a military operation that ended in the deaths of U.S. soldiers, leading Barrett — a conservative appointed by President Donald Trump — to resign from the high court.
However, this rumor about Barrett and Crockett was not true. Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo produced no credible reporting about this matter from news media outlets. A YouTube user first promoted the claim in a popular video with a disclaimer about its “fictional” content.
Representatives for Barrett and Crockett did not yet respond to requests sent via email asking for comment on the matter.
Spreading like wildfire
On April 12, a user managing the Morgan’s Stories YouTube channel uploaded a video (archived) with a title featuring misspellings of both officials’ last names, reading, “Judge Amy Coney Barret Tries to Jail Jasmine Crocket – 7 Minutes Later, She Regrets It Deeply!” The video had more than 236,000 views. Searches of the aforementioned search engines displayed the Morgan’s Stories channel’s video as possibly the first-posted content promoting the rumor.
In the story told in the video, Crockett reveals Barrett authorized a military mission called “Operation Hollow River.” Crockett says the operation led to the deaths of at least three soldiers — including a “Private Elijah Watkins” — after the soldiers used faulty equipment from a company named “Strat Defense.” Crockett alleges Barrett had an association with “Strat Defense.” Barrett later resigns from her seat on the high court.
None of these events ever occurred, nor did we locate any records about a real military operation with the name “Hollow River,” a high-profile death of a “Private Elijah Watkins” or a company named “Strat Defense.”
Two days later, a user managing the DP Insights YouTube channel uploaded a video (archived) with the similar title, “Judge Amy Coney Barrett Tries to Jail Jasmine Crockett – She Makes Her Instantly Regret It!” The video received 183,000 views.
Both videos featured voice narration generated with artificial-intelligence tools, with only the DP Insights channel’s clip displaying an “altered or synthetic content” notice about such AI usage. The videos also included nearly identical disclaimers only visible in their text descriptions. However, those disclaimers only showed to users who clicked to expand “more” of the descriptions. One disclaimer read:
The stories presented on this channel are purely fictional and are created for entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to real events, individuals, or situations is purely coincidental and unintentional. These stories are not intended to depict, reference, or represent any real events, people, or entities.
With the disclaimers buried in a place some YouTube users might not notice, users shared the rumor on Facebook, Threads and X, as well as in other YouTube videos. One Facebook user captioned (archived) the video spreading the false rumor, “The power of truth.” A TikTok user also reposted the video from the Morgan’s Stories YouTube channel in three parts, receiving a total of around 500,000 views.
A user managing the Morgan’s Stories YouTube channel did not yet respond to an email asking about the purpose of creating their fictional videos, whether solely for advertising revenue or for other reasons. The DP Insights channel did not list any contact information.
For further reading, a previous fact-check article examined a rumor claiming Crockett collected her dead grandmother’s Social Security checks for 13 years.
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