Martin O’Malley on June 11 Iowa City. Scott Olson/Getty

On Thurdsay struggling Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley’s campaign issued a bombastic “open letter” to “Wall Street Megabanks” and a policy paper outlining financial reform proposals. O’Malley’s team probably hoped this kind of bold, somewhat ridiculous move (“TO: Wall Street Megabanks“? Come on) would earn a bump of press attention for the campaign. The good news: It did. The bad news: It’s because the first footnote of the policy paper cited an off-brand, non-Onion fake news article which said that former attorney general Eric Holder had been hired by JP Morgan Chase at an annual salary of $77 million. (In point of fact, former attorney general Eric Holder has not been hired by JP Morgan at an annual salary of $77 million.)

Here’s the sentence that’s footnoted:

O’Malley campaign

Here’s the original footnote, first caught by Phil Mattingly of Bloomberg (you can read the fake article it cited here), and the quickly fixed version:

Martin O'Malley's Wall Street white paper has been stealthily updated to remove satirical website citing (see below) pic.twitter.com/wFrN1kAQ8M — Andrew Kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) July 9, 2015

Welp! (The non-fake Times story about Holder’s actual new corporate-law gig is here.)

