Scott Colom's campaign website is ScottColom.com.

On September 9, with Election Day two months away, Cindy Hyde-Smith's campaign launched a different one: ColomForSenate.com. It is built to look like his.

Her team then posted the link on her campaign's X and Facebook accounts, pointing her followers to it. Her spokespeople could not be reached for comment that day.

The claim the paper actually checked

The site calls Colom the "transgender defender," a label Hyde-Smith has used for him before. It says he "pushed radical sex change surgeries for children."

For that, it cites one document: a June 2021 letter from Fair and Just Prosecution that Colom signed.

That letter is public, and it is the only document linked anywhere on her website. It is a joint statement by elected prosecutors and law enforcement leaders "condemning the criminalization of transgender people and gender-affirming healthcare." It does not endorse surgery for anyone, because it never mentions surgery: the word does not appear once in its eight pages.

What it says about children is that certain "dangerous bills" would "criminalize parents who allow their trans children to receive medically recommended treatments." What it asks of prosecutors is that they not spend "scarce criminal justice and law enforcement resources on criminalization of doctors who offer medically necessary, safe gender-affirming care to trans youth, parents who safeguard their child's health and wellbeing by seeking out such treatments, or any individuals who use facilities aligned with their gender identity."

So the document says: do not prosecute the doctors or the parents. The website says: he pushed surgeries on kids.

For what it's worth, the American Medical Association says its support for gender-affirming care is unchanged and that surgical interventions in minors "should be generally deferred to adulthood" — which is the opposite of the position the site assigns him.

This is not spin about a vote. The site names its own source, and the source does not say what the site says it says.

The rest of the site links nothing at all

The other main attack is on Colom's record as a district attorney, an office he won in 2015 by unseating an incumbent of nearly thirty years. The site says he "turned the courtroom into a revolving door" while "elites hailed him as a 'model progressive prosecutor.'"

It cites no cases. The source line for the entire section reads, simply, "Colom's prosecutorial record." Two other sections name Mississippi Today and nothing else; one credits "campaign finance records" and one "campaign appearances." None of them links to anything.

Colom has run on close to the reverse. He calls himself a reformer who "closed a record number of cold cases" and "won 94% of his trials," and at the Neshoba County Fair in June he campaigned on a tough-on-crime record alongside stronger border security and expanding Second Amendment protections.

A section of the site is given over to Joe Biden, described as Colom's "friend," and it closes by dismissing him as "Biden's pick — not ours."

The part of that story her own side undercuts

Biden did nominate Colom, in November 2022, to fill a vacancy on the federal district court.

What the website leaves out is who supported him. The nomination drew bipartisan backing, including from Mississippi's other Republican senator, Roger Wicker. Hyde-Smith refused to back him anyway, and the nomination stalled until it was returned.

She did it by withholding a blue slip — a procedural courtesy a Mississippi segregationist established to keep civil rights judges off the bench. Two Republican governors had backed him too.

Her campaign manager, Jake Monssen, now presents that as the argument for doing it again: "Thankfully, just as she blocked Colom's nomination by Joe Biden to become a federal judge, Cindy Hyde-Smith will once again block this extremist from federal office in November."

The man she calls an extremist is the man her Republican colleague thought should be a federal judge.

The tone of it

Monssen's press release said the site would inform "voters of Scott Colom's true platform and record," and that "Mississippians deserve to know who Scott Colom really is and who is behind his run for U.S. Senate."

He also wrote that "Mississippians deserve to know Colom proudly shares the beliefs of these clowns" — the clowns being Senator Elizabeth Warren and James Talarico, a Democrat running for the U.S. Senate in Texas, whose appearances with Colom the site catalogs.

Hyde-Smith has not debated an opponent since 2018, and her campaign's answer to a "Where's Cindy" campaign last month was a line about George Soros's apartment. A website with her opponent's name in the domain is what she is doing instead of standing on a stage with him.

The bottom line

Cindy Hyde-Smith's campaign launched ColomForSenate.com on September 9, a site designed to resemble Scott Colom's real campaign website. The first accusation on it — that he "pushed radical sex change surgeries for children" — rests on a single June 2021 letter, the only document the site links, in which the word surgery never appears at all. Its attack on his record as district attorney cites no case at all. And the nomination it mocks as "Biden's pick" was backed by Mississippi's other Republican senator, Roger Wicker, before Hyde-Smith killed it by withholding a blue slip.

Source

US Sen Cindy Hyde-Smith criticizes Colom through fake MS campaign website — Bea Anhuci, Mississippi Clarion Ledger, September 10, 2026.