When NBC went on the air on Thursday for their special coverage of former President Donald Trump’s conviction in New York, legal analyst Laura Jarrett touched on the reaction the verdict received from his supporters. The only problem for NBC was that the footage they showed alongside Jarrett of a hysterical Trump supporter who could be heard yelling and screaming throughout her report was of a Jimmy Kimmel-employed liberal actor.
The man’s name is Tony Barbieri, who does a bit for ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! where he calls himself Jake Byrd and travels across the country acting like a caricatured conservative, and NBC is hardly the first media outlet to treat him as an actual conservative. In 2022, CNN actually interviewed him pretending to be a Herschel Walker supporter.