Earning TruthRevolt’s Young Fascist of the Week title for this week is CNN writer Andrew Kaczynski, who is behind the blackmailing of a private citizen for posting a silly GIF of Donald Trump wrestling CNN which the president retweeted. After the tweet went viral, CNN tracked down the identity of the anonymous Reddit user and threatened to dox him if he pulled another stunt like this one.

Prior to his employment as a senior editor for CNN’s investigative team known as KFILE, Kaczynski, 27, worked for BuzzFeed. He was picked up there while still in college because of his skills as an Internet sleuth. Kaczynski was making a name for himself on YouTube as someone who could quickly scour the web and find material from politicians’ pasts they’d hoped had long been forgotten. Many prominent members of the media began following his videos. This attracted BuzzFeed, which put him on staff.

Kaczynski, who interned for Republicans in college and once considered himself a “moderate Republican,” previously told C-SPAN about the purpose of his work: “I think people like to see whether Mitt Romney 1994 was campaigning for welfare reform, against welfare reform, for abortion. They want to see where he was doing it during his 2002 campaign, 2007. I think people really like to see how these politicians have evolved and there’s sort of an element to it that’s almost a gotcha element, but there’s also an element that people are like this is incredibly interesting.”

However, Kaczynski has proven he’s not only interested in digging up dirt and potentially harming politicians but private citizens as well. While at Buzzfeed, Kaczynski helped spread a tweet by a public relations director who joked on Twitter before a flight, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” With Kaczynski’s retweet and his fellow BuzzFeeders dragging this working-class woman’s name through the mud, she ended up losing her job.

And that wasn’t the only time Kaczynski’s zeal helped destroy someone’s life. Shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Kaczynski tweeted the name of a Brown University student who was reported missing. He claimed he heard the name from a Reddit user board, which got it from journalist Kevin Galliford, who got it from a man named Greg Hughes who tweeted something he claimed to have heard on a Boston Police scanner identifying two suspects in the bombing: Mike Mulugeta and Sunil Tripathi. 

Kaczynski hastily tweeted, “Wow Reddit was right about the missing Brown student per the police scanner. Suspect identified as Sunil Tripathi.”

The Atlantic and other sources disputed the police scanner claim and stated that Tripathi’s name was never mentioned over police radio. It appeared as though Kaczynski used only Reddit as his “source” which amounted to users showing a side-by-side photograph of Tripathi and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the actual bomber, and concluded they basically looked the same. With Kaczynski relying on this flimsy conjecture, the Tripathi family was bombarded with calls from journalists ready to interrogate.

As it turned out, Tripathi had already been reported missing for a month and was suffering from depression. His body was found in the Providence River a week after the bombing. The misidentified “terrorist” had committed suicide.

Milo Yiannopoulos reports:

According to The New York Times, Kaczynski subsequently “deleted his incriminating tweets” and carried on like normal, writing a post-mortem of the incident for BuzzFeed that contained no mention of his involvement in spreading the falsehood about Tripathi.

As Mike Cernovich puts it, “Kaczynski did not merely spread minor fake news. He ruined a young man’s life by falsely accusing him of a horrific act of terrorism.”

Kaczynski now works for CNN, where he continues to be paid to harass private citizens. As we reported this week, Kaczynski hunted down the identity of Reddit user HanAssholeSolo, who posted the video of Trump wrestling a CNN logo. The network was proud of its accomplishment and bragged that the man behind it apologized and promised to never post something like that again. However, Kaczynski threatened that “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.” 

Kaczynski has spent considerable time on Twitter defending himself against accusations of blackmail over the last few days. And in doing so, he’s already changing the timeline of events to cover his tracks. Check out this tweet on July 4 in which Kaczynski states the “apology came after CNN identified and reached out to HanAssholeSolo:”

Less than an hour later, after a million accusations of blackmail, Kaczynski said the apology came before CNN contacted him:

CNN is spiraling out of control. It sees no problem with hiring someone like Kaczynski despite his dangerous style of "journalism." But as it goes in the business of fake news, integrity and the truth aren't a priority.