On Election Day, somebody finally read the list.
The New York Times had run it back on September 17 under the headline "Jewish Leaders in Michigan Urge Support for El-Sayed's Senate Bid." Reporter Bayliss Wagner wrote up an open letter from a group calling itself Michigan Jews for Democracy. More than 500 people signed it, and it declared Democrat Dr. Abdul El-Sayed "clearly the better choice for Jews" over Republican Mike Rogers.
Seven weeks later, the X user AG, who posts as AGHamilton29, actually scrolled through the signatures. Somewhere in the middle, representing East Lansing, Michigan, was a man named Jack Mehoff.
Say it out loud if you need to. Nobody at the Times did.
East Lansing is home to Michigan State University, so maybe Jack was a student. Michigan State says it has no record of him.
Jack had company. More than 200 names on the list used just an initial for a first or last name, the kind of signature anybody with a keyboard can make up in four seconds. AG also said he happened to know that at least one of these "leaders" is dead.
The whole letter lived on a Google Sheet. Anybody could add a name, and it sure looks like anybody did.
George Mason law professor David Bernstein went looking for the actual leaders. "In this list of 'Jewish leaders' there are five rabbis," he wrote.
That's five, out of more than 500.
The headliners among the clergy were Rabbi Chava Bahle, who in 2014 became the first rabbi to lead a Unitarian Universalist church, and Rabbi Alana Alpert, who leads a Reconstructionist congregation. Those were the big names the Times put in front of Michigan's Jewish community.
The timing tells you why El-Sayed needed this letter. Just eight days before the Times story ran, Jewish faith leaders in Michigan launched a coalition to raise concerns about him. His campaign needed a counterweight, and it got one with the paper of record's name on it.
When NewsBusters executive editor Tim Graham and others started asking questions, Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said the paper "found this letter newsworthy because of a number of the notable individuals who signed on." He added that the Times confirmed the people specifically named in the story had signed.
So the Times checked the handful of names it printed and waved the other 500 through. Jack Mehoff rode along with everyone else, and a Google Sheet ended up in a headline as "Jewish Leaders."
Washington Free Beacon reporter Jon Levine described the paper's approach this way: publish a "Jews for Abdul" list with "Jack Mehoff" on it, then "just power through it."
The real names on the list weren't much more reassuring. El-Sayed's campaign promoted the letter as a show of strength with Jewish voters, and by late September it had passed 800 signatures. Some of the signers have accused Israel of genocide. Others belong to Jewish Voice for Peace or helped organize anti-Israel campus encampments.
One signer, Michigan Democratic Party officer Liano Sharon, called fellow Democrat Rep. Haley Stevens a "neo-Nazi" and suggested a Nuremberg-style trial for her.
This is the same newspaper that spends half its opinion section warning Americans about misinformation. It wants Facebook posts flagged and unsourced claims buried by the algorithm. Then it ran an unvetted spreadsheet as proof of a candidate's support in a U.S. Senate race.
Any intern at a campus paper would have searched that name before printing it. It was a 15-minute drive from the Michigan State student newspaper's newsroom.
As of Election Day, Jack Mehoff of East Lansing was still on the list.
