In June 2026, social media users shared a video allegedly showing a masked man scaling a U.S. Justice Department building and tearing down a banner displaying President Donald Trump's image. Workers hung the banner on Feb. 19, displaying the Trump administration slogan, "Make America Safe Again."
For example, on June 16, X user @Suzierizzo1 posted (archived) the video with the caption, "A man dressed in all black scaled the Department of Justice building and tore down the Banner of Trump. How do you feel about this?" Other users shared the same clip on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Reddit (archived) and X (archived).
In short, the video was fake. As detailed below, the clip contained numerous signs that an unidentified user prompted an artificial intelligence tool to create the content.
Snopes messaged X user @Suzierizzo1 to ask if they created the video or reposted the content from another source, and will update this article if we receive further information.
Signs of AI in the video
Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo, as well as reverse image searches, found no credible news reports about a government-displayed Trump banner being vandalized at the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C.
Instead, the reverse image searches provided evidence confirming the video's inauthenticity.
To create the video, a user provided an AI tool with a Feb. 20, 2026, photograph by Ken Cedeno, which preserved the image's original angle, lighting and shadows. They then prompted the AI tool to bring the image to life and requested the addition of the ski mask-wearing vandal.
For example, The New York Times featured Cedeno's authentic picture in an article published in April.
Signs of AI in the fake video included the clip's short duration, illegible text and the fact that the man's arm passes through the banner as if it weren't there.
The man's movements also appear unrealistic. For example, at the four-second mark, he quickly snaps from having trouble scaling the building to rapidly moving behind the banner. A frame-by-frame analysis at the nine-second mark also showed equipment visible at the top of the building's right-hand column completely disappears from one frame to the next.
For further reading, we previously reported on rumors surrounding other banners displaying Trump's picture, including on the Agriculture Department and Labor Department buildings.