Fake Trump-Comey tapes with KKK return addresses were just a terrible publicity stunt

The Domestics — a Portland-based rock band that's clearly been following politics — recently came under fire for shipping mysterious tapes titled "Trump/Comey Recordings" to people in the music industry.

According to a Facebook post from Stephen Judge, whose friend received one of the cassettes, the tapes had return addresses listed as the KKK and Westboro Baptist Church.

"In addition, each of the people who he knows who have received this cassette, all have one thing in common," he wrote. "They are all jewish."

Judge shared a photograph of one of the cassette cases, along with text from his friend's Facebook post, which read: "So, uh this just showed up in the mail. It contains snippets of Trump speaking, backwards audio, and a Russian-language choir ... It contains a link to a weird website with a Russian flag (and audio,) a picture of an eye staring at you, and a weird-looking email address."

While the tapes were clearly meant to reference the believed-to-be-nonexistent recordings of a conversation between Trump and former FBI Director James Comey, they clearly missed the mark.

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In a statement to Paste, the band's label, Tender Loving Empire, said that the publicity stunt gone horribly wrong was done with the intention that those who received the tape would follow a link and receive a free download of The Domestics' album.

"As a viral marketing project, 63 tapes were mailed out. The tapes were labeled 'Trump / Comey Recordings' and contain some poorly found audio of 45 and Comey discussing Russia," the label wrote in the statement. "On the tape there is a web address that leads to a website with an email address. Our goal was to get people to email us at that address, at which point we’d send them the band’s upcoming album Little Darkness in advance of the 9/1 release date."

Though the band's intention was reportedly to "troll the right wing media into briefly thinking they were getting the actual Trump/Comey tapes," instead, as Judge's Facebook post communicates, it instilled fear and a feeling of anti-Semitism in those who received them.

In a statement to Paste, the band reiterated their intentions, explaining several people had considered getting the FBI involved.

"There was talks of reports being made to the FBI about these actually being the real tapes, which was hilarious and exciting for me to witness," the statement read. "I also got two emails that suggested somehow Jewish individuals in the music industry were specifically targeted in the distribution of this tape which is totally not the case."

In the future, it sounds like The Domestics should probably stick to good old-fashioned CD demos to get their music out in the world.