Environmental activists have been struggling to keep the #ExxonKnew campaign alive, as a steady stream of disclosures over the past several months has undermined their efforts to convince more government officials to launch climate-related investigations. Now, with the nomination hearing of former Exxon President and CEO Rex Tillerson scheduled for Wednesday, they’re going right back to one of their staples: generating fake news.

Case in point: the story that appeared this week in USA Today declaring that ExxonMobil previously did all sorts of business in Iran. The piece was pitched to USA Today (only after literally every other reporter in New York and Washington passed on it) by a group called American Bridge, which is aligned with anti-energy activists.

But if your only source of information on the issue was what you read in the paper you picked up outside your hotel-room door, you wouldn’t know (for instance) that the company has no operations in Iran, or that once Exxon actually explained in detail all of this to the SEC when the agency asked about it back in the mid-2000s, the matter was essentially closed, with the SEC taking no further action (you can read the correspondence between Exxon and the SEC yourself online, here, here, here and here). Just another example of activists pushing #fakenews.

That’s just the beginning, though. The USA Today story comes after InsideClimate News (ICN), the Rockefeller-funded organization that produced the original #fakenews about Exxon, wrote a story last week under the headline: “Federal Climate Investigation of Exxon Likely to Fizzle Under Trump,” which was about President-elect Trump’s nominee to be the next U.S. Attorney General.

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