Workers on Friday installing signs outside of the American Airlines Center ahead of Republican midterm convention.
An unofficial website about the Republican midterm convention in Dallas redirected visitors Friday to theJustice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein records.
Search results showed pages on gopdallas2026.com titled “The Dallas 2026 Host Committee,” “Plan Your Visit,” “Vendor Guide” and “Get Your Credential.” The pages looked like the event site but carried a disclaimer that the site was independent and not affiliated with theRepublican National Committee.
The convention's official website isgopconvention.com. It was working Friday and identifies itself as paid for by the Republican National Committee, which is organizing the event Wednesday and Thursday at American Airlines Center.
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The redirect was on a separately registered domain,www.gopdallas2026.com.During repeated checks Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, gopdallas2026.com sent visitors to the Justice Department’s “Epstein Library,” a collection of records related to the convicted sex trafficker.
It is not known who created the look-alike site, who added the redirect, or whether the same person or group controlled the domain the whole time.
Related:Don’t call it a ‘mini’ convention: Trump says midterm GOP gathering in Dallas will be ‘big stuff’
The RNC accused a creative agency with Democratic ties of creating the bogus site, referring to aDaily Mailreport based on digital forensic analysis.
“Democrats are too broke to have their own midterm convention, so they settled for a sad, fake little website,” RNC spokesman Zach Parkinson said.
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On Sept. 1, OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics, linked to gopdallas2026.com in a report on convention financing. Those links show the address had circulated as a source of information. They do not make the site official.
Public records show the domain was registered through GoDaddy on July 7, a week after President Donald Trump announced the Dallas dates. The owner’s name is hidden behind Domains By Proxy, a common service used to keep a website buyer’s name and contact information out of public registration records. The official gopconvention.com domain dates to August 1998.
