The man tapped to oversee the Defense Department’s operations in the Western Hemisphere appears to be linked to the promotion of fake news about national security in the Western Hemisphere.

Perhaps that’s the experience the Trump administration sought from Joseph Humire, now the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere affairs and a former executive director of a think tank called the Center for a Secure Free Society. The Trump administration’s own claims that the Tren De Aragua gang has been working at the direction of the Venezuelan government — which it used to justify its efforts to deport Venezuelan nationals to a high-security prison in El Salvador — have been debunked by U.S. intelligence agencies.

A recent report from media organization InSight Crime found several examples of the think tank under Humire promoting demonstrably fake stories about the Venezuelan gang operating in the U.S. Per the investigation:

While Humire was at the helm, the center began publishing a Tren de Aragua ‘activity monitor,’ which purports to track crimes and arrests related to the Venezuelan gang across the United States.

InSight crime identified five event entries in the tracker that appear to have been completely fabricated.

For example, a story attributed by the tracker to the San Antonio Express-News alleged that a Tren de Aragua member named Marcus Antonio Vargas-Lopez robbed a convenience store at gunpoint. That story, however, appears to have been entirely made up:

InSight Crime found no independent confirmation that this event actually occurred. The link to the article goes to an empty webpage, no other news outlets had matching coverage, and the San Antonio Police Department said it did not find anyone with that name in their records.

Not a good look. Unfortunately, there was more where that came from:

The three other false entries — all dated shortly before or shortly after Humire’s congressional testimony — follow the same pattern of being located in Texas and citing nonexistent newspaper articles as their source.

At least the think tank appears to have acknowledged the errors. Its executive director, Leonardo Coutinho, “told InSight Crime that the organization would work to fix the issue,” the outlet reported, but he “did not respond to questions about why and when the organization posted the false events.” The think tank removed only one of the flagged events from the tracker, according to InSight.

The Center for a Secure Free Society didn’t respond to MSNBC’s request for comment. Neither did the Defense Department when asked about Humire’s past role at the think tank. (InSight reported that Humire and the Pentagon also did not respond to its requests for comment.)

In lieu of a reasonable explanation, it looks like the Trump administration has tapped someone who oversaw a misinformation mill for a top role at the Pentagon.