Sen. Scott Brown claimed he'd seen the bloody face of a dead Osama bin Laden, but he was actually tricked by a Internet fakery. "Listen, I've seen the picture," Brown told a Boston Fox affiliate. "He's definitely dead. And if there's any conspiracy theories out there, you should put them to rest." Brown is on the Senate armed services committee, so it was not implausible that he’d seen the images President Obama decided were too inflammatory to release today. But as The Altantic’s Jared Keller reported, Brown's fellow committeemen had not seen the pictures. Anyone skeptical of Brown's claim was proven right Wednesday afternoon.

Fox 25, as well as another Boston station, NECN, posted statements on their websites clarifying the senator's remarks. Brown told the Fox station "the photo that I saw and that a lot of other people saw is not authentic." Brown put his foot in his mouth elsewhere in his Fox interview. He exasperatedly told the news anchor that he had to talk about his possible training in Afghanistan because "the fact that somebody dropped a dime and it's out--you know, obviously I have to talk about it now." Who dropped that dime? The senator himself. About an hour and a half before Brown put out a statement announcing his overseas training, Brown told the Boston Globe's Glen Johnson, "I'm going to be going over at some point to do some missions."

Video of Brown's comments:

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Elspeth Reeve