On February 28, 2026, the United States started bombing Iran. That same day, John Rutherford's office posted an official statement to his House website.
The headline read: "Rutherford Statement on Operation Epic Furry."
The first line read: "U.S. Congressman John H. Rutherford (FL-05) released the following statement on Operation Epic Furry, the U.S. military operation in Iran."
And then, inside the quote he actually put his name to:
"The Iranian regime has set the table for Operation Epic Furry through their forty-seven years of state sponsored terrorism and murder of American citizens."
Three times. Headline, intro, and in his own quoted words. The operation is called Epic Fury.
We're not guessing at any of this. The page is preserved in the Internet Archive at the URL his office originally used — rutherford.house.gov/media/press-releases/rutherford-statement-operation-epic-furry — captured four separate times between the evening of February 28 and the early hours of March 1.
The quiet fix
Late on February 28, Boing Boing noticed and the internet did what the internet does.
Here's the timeline the Internet Archive's own records lay out. The "epic-furry" page was captured as late as 04:09 UTC on March 1. By 05:16 UTC — about an hour later — a new page existed at rutherford.house.gov/media/press-releases/rutherford-statement-operation-epic-fury.
Same date on it. February 28, 2026. Same statement. New spelling. No note saying anything had been changed.
Somebody in that office was awake in the middle of the night to fix a typo. Nobody was awake to reconsider the sentence the typo was sitting in.
What the statement actually says
Strip out the joke and read what a sitting member of Congress published about a war on the day it began:
"It's clear: this evil regime seeks to kill and must be obliterated."
"For the freedom of the Iranian people, and the safety and security of the entire world, I stand behind President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and our U.S. military servicemen and women."
"Our world is safer with President Trump as Commander in Chief."
That's a member of the House Appropriations Committee — a man whose subcommittees write the budgets for Homeland Security and for military construction — announcing his support for a war of regime change that no one in Congress had voted on.
Not "the president should come to Congress." Not "here is the authorization we'll be debating Monday." Just: obliterate them, and I stand behind Trump and Netanyahu.
Congress still never voted
Five months later, that was still the situation. In July 2026 the House finally voted 214–208 to order U.S. forces out of the fighting — and 207 Republicans voted to keep us in, Rutherford among them. Only four House Republicans voted yes.
By then the bill had numbers attached. The Pentagon's own casualty database showed at least 624 American service members wounded in a war Congress never authorized — a figure that appeared with no announcement, no briefing, and no press conference. The department then moved four dead soldiers off the Epic Fury casualty page and onto a brand-new category invented after they died.
Rutherford's district is home to Naval Air Station Jacksonville and Naval Station Mayport. The people who get sent to a war like this one live in the district he represents. He did not ask for a vote before it started, and he voted against ending it once it had.
Who's paying for the enthusiasm
Rutherford is one of the more heavily funded members of the Florida delegation when it comes to foreign policy money. Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given him $64,283. Just 1% of his campaign money comes from small grassroots donors; 94% comes from PACs, super PACs and large donors.
And he does not take questions about it in person. In March 2025 he told Jacksonville Today he wouldn't hold a town hall because constituents "scream and holler, and act like fools." He has not held one since.
So the record on the biggest thing his office has said in years reads like this: a statement endorsing a regime-change war, published with the operation's name wrong three times, corrected in the dark hours of the same night, and never explained to anyone in Jacksonville — because there's no meeting where you could ask him.
The spelling was the part they fixed.
Sources
- Rutherford Statement on Operation Epic Furry — Office of Rep. John Rutherford, February 28, 2026 (Internet Archive capture of the original page)
- GOP congressman John Rutherford praises Operation "Epic Furry" — Rob Beschizza, Boing Boing, February 28, 2026
