Someone seems very intent on making sure voters don’t forget about the Epstein files.
Republicans eager to find out more about the party’s first-of-its-kind midterm convention in Dallas next week got a surprise this week: a website that initially purported to be the Republican National Committee’s official convention page but then redirected to the Justice Department’s library of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender.
It wasn’t a hack. The real convention site, at gopconvention.com, remains operational, prominently featuring an outline of Texas and this bold claim: “The Golden Age of America Has Just Begun.”
Some users searching for the site on Google, however, were directed to an impostor website — at gopdallas2026.com — that earned a spot much higher in search results than the real site.
Google’s preview of the fake page promises “details about the 2026 RNC Midterm Convention at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas, Sept. 9-10 including registration, VIP experiences.”
It does not deliver anything of the sort. Instead, a click on the site takes the user to “justice.gov/epstein,” something of a headache for Republicans and President Trump, whose ties to Mr. Epstein have angered the MAGA base and served as an ongoing irritant in an election year expected to be a referendum on his presidency.
It was not immediately clear who was behind the fake site. An internet registration database, ICANN, showed that the name, address and contact information of the person or group behind the deception had been redacted. An effort to contact the owner through the site’s domain host, GoDaddy, was not successful.
The R.N.C. said it believed a creative agency with Democratic ties was behind the fake site, pointing to a Daily Mail article published Friday that cited a Republican opposition research firm’s digital forensic analysis.
The New York Times could not independently verify that claim.
“Democrats are too broke to have their own midterm convention, so they settled for a sad, fake little website,” Zach Parkinson, a spokesman for the R.N.C., said in a statement.
The ICANN data showed that the domain was registered on July 7 and updated on Sept. 3. An archived version of the fake site shows that it appeared for weeks as a more straight-ahead impostor of the actual Republican convention site, leading with fireworks, a photo of Mr. Trump and the title “The Great American Comeback Midterm Convention.” It even included a list of potential speakers, such as Mr. Trump and various cabinet secretaries.
The Daily Mail article said that when a reporter reached out to the founder of the Democratic agency on Thursday, the fake site switched to the Epstein files redirect.
The spoof tricked people for weeks, with news outlets initially citing information it presented and some reporters filing for credentials on the fake website.
“If you were a reporter who submitted a request for credentials through this website and are now left stranded, you now know who screwed you over,” Mr. Parkinson said.
The fake site did include a disclaimer: “This website is an independent informational resource and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Republican National Committee (RNC), the 2026 RNC Midterm Convention, the American Airlines Center, or any official convention entity.”
As recently as Aug. 27, gopdallas2026.com still showed the duplicate site and was not linking to the Epstein files. Nearly 140 other websites linked to it, including The Dallas Morning News, the conservative Daily Wire news site and the New Jersey Federation of Republican Women.
At some point after that date, the site began redirecting to the Epstein files.
Kate Conger contributed reporting.
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