Trump rumor alleging he ordered ‘military raids on Vatican tunnels’ is unfounded

A rumor that circulated online in March 2025 claimed U.S. President Donald Trump ordered “military raids on Vatican tunnels.”

For example, one Facebook user’s post (archived) began, “BREAKING! Trump Orders Military Raids on Vatican Tunnels – CIA Adrenochrome Labs Shut Down, 1,500 Deep State FBI Agents Taken Out, 650 Planes of Gold Seized, QFS Activated, GITMO Expanded, EBS Armed for Global Disclosure!”

A Snopes reader asked for further research, emailing, “I am hoping to get some feedback on this post on Facebook.” Numerous users also repeated the claim on Facebook, Telegram, Truth Social and X.

However, we located no evidence to confirm this unfounded rumor. The White House website, under the control of Trump’s administration, displayed no news releases related to the matter. Trump’s own Truth Social feed showed no postings about Vatican tunnels either. Also, Trump appointed his loyalists Kash Patel as FBI director and Dan Bongino as the agency’s deputy director, as well as John Ratcliffe to lead the CIA, yet the news sections of FBI.gov and CIA.gov featured no articles about any raids on “Vatican tunnels,” “CIA adrenochrome labs” or “1,500 deep state FBI agents.”

Further, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo yielded no credible articles from news media outlets reporting on the claims other than fact-check articles from past years dismantling similar baseless rumors involving the Vatican, tunnels and gold bars.

The CIA, FBI, Vatican and White House did not yet respond to emailed requests for comment regarding this matter.

The rumor echoes a baseless QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that prominent elites run a cabal of child predators to traffic children, harvest adrenochrome from them and consume it to maintain youth and health. (Adrenochrome is a red-colored biomolecule derived from the oxidation of epinephrine, also known as adrenaline.) Promulgators of this conspiracy theory provide no verifiable data or credible sources to back it up.

Prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, another QAnon conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate made the rounds online, falsely claiming former Secretary of State and then-Democratic Party presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton and her former campaign chairman, John Podesta, ran a child sex ring in the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. In December 2016, a man with an assault rifle entered the pizzeria and fired several shots in an attempt to investigate the baseless rumors.

Gazetteller.com was first to post rumor

The independent publisher Gazetteller.com first reported that Trump supposedly ordered “military raids on Vatican tunnels” on March 27. The website’s “About Us” page promises readers a “commitment to free speech and independent journalism.”

Gazetteller.com did not yet respond to an emailed request for evidence that would make it possible to independently verify their claims.

The article’s author penned the headline, “BREAKING! Trump Orders Military Raids on Vatican Tunnels – CIA-Run Adrenochrome Labs Shut Down by U.S. Special Forces, 1,500 Deep State FBI Agents Taken Out, 650 Planes of Gold Seized, QFS Activated, GITMO Expanded for Incoming Arrests, EBS Locked and Loaded for Global Disclosure!”

The story read, in part:

A child trafficking network spanning 170+ nations was uncovered, protected by governments, and operated by intelligence agencies. These children were not just abused. They were ritually sacrificed, mutilated, harvested for adrenochrome, and implanted with experimental biotech. Entire generations were bred underground for torture and slaughter. The elites didn’t just cover it up—they participated in it.

CIA-run MK-Ultra programs harvested children from orphanages, CPS agencies, and war zones. The Vatican served as the central hub of spiritual blackmail—rituals conducted beneath St. Peter’s Basilica, masked as Catholic rites, were actually Luciferian initiation ceremonies involving global leaders, celebrities, and CEOs.

The author later added, without providing any verifiable evidence whatsoever, “This is not speculation. This is documented by military intelligence, retrieved from seized servers, hard drives, and DUMBs (Deep Underground Military Bases) that Trump’s alliance has been storming for the last 5 years.”

Aside from the claims, the story’s author name showed as “Ethan White.” The author page for “Ethan White” had a web address displaying a different name, “Ryan Dwyer,” as “gazetteller.com/author/ryan-dwyer/.” Further, the same page featured a fake picture of the author that someone generated with artificial-intelligence (AI) software, per scans with the AI image-detection websites Sightengine, WasItAI and Is It AI. Other author pages on Gazetteller.com featured similar inauthentic images. The pictures resembled those found on thispersondoesnotexist.com, a website featuring AI-generated photos of people who do not exist, all created with Nvidia’s StyleGAN2 image modeling software.

Sources