The rise and fall of a Fox News fraud

from BoingBoing:

Fox News invited bullshitting fraudster Wayne Simmons to appear on its "news" programs over 100 times posing as a CIA operative. Based on his hawkish proclamations, the Pentagon hired Simmons as a shill analyst to propagandize for them. Now that Simmons has been exposed, arrested, and charged with with multiple counts of fraud, he will never appear on Fox News again, but the lies he told on the network will forever be regarded as gospel truth by fear-addicted Fox TV viewers.

From Rolling Stone:

Simmons claimed to have spent 27 years with the CIA, but Paul Nathanson, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, said in a court filing that Simmons "never had any association whatsoever with the CIA." (The CIA declined to comment – as a rule, it never confirms or denies agents – but said it is "working closely with the Justice Department on this matter.") Instead, prosecutors say Simmons spent those 27 years doing just about everything else: He ran a limousine service, a gambling operation and an AIDS-testing clinic; worked for a hot-tub business, a carpeting company and a nightclub; and briefly played defensive back for the New Orleans Saints. Along the way, he accrued criminal convictions, including multiple DUIs, plus charges for weapons possession and assault, and an arrest for attacking a cabdriver in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2007. "Fuck you, you can't do shit to me – do you know who I am?" Simmons told a cop, according to a police report, before insisting that he was CIA, and that the cabbie, who was Pakistani, had a bomb. A police dog found no explosives, and a CIA representative told the cops to take whatever actions they deemed necessary.