A few years ago, Greg Kelly’s face was a common sight around New York City. As co-host of the local Fox station’s popular morning show, he appeared next to co-host Rosanna Scotto on advertisements that adorned the backs of buses and the sides of bus stops. The son of the city’s well-known former police commissioner Raymond Kelly, Greg served in the Marines before embarking on a career in journalism. He left the New York station in 2017, mostly vanishing from public view.

Then, in late 2019, Kelly reemerged. He hosted coverage of a Democratic presidential primary town hall event for the far-right network Newsmax. In January 2020, he became host of a prime time show on that network, “Greg Kelly Reports.” And, in perhaps his boldest attention-grabbing move, he began tweeting. A lot.

Here, for example, is a tweet from Kelly on Thursday morning.

Jrjfktkkrodiskem’ah

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) May 27, 2021

That was preceded by a blurry photo of … something and followed by this.

THEYRE TAKING MY PHONE

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) May 27, 2021

Who was the “they”? Apparently the staff at “Rancho Relaxo” a “FAT CAMP” to which Kelly was headed, though their insistence that he also undergo a “Digital Detox” was not well received. So, Kelly reported to his followers, he was instead going to stay at the Hard Rock, postponing his diet until next year.

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To a certain segment of the public into which I fall, Kelly’s completely bizarre tweets have become a subject of fascination. He’s made an occasional splash on his show itself, as when he disparaged President Biden’s dog. But on Twitter, Kelly has really let his Greg flag fly.

There was this entry from March, for example.

SMOKING WEED (aka GRASS) is NOT a good idea. I’ve tried it (back in the day) and it was WORSE than anything that happened to HUNTER BIDEN. I “toked up” with some buddies in Kentucky and woke up 4 days later in Nairobi, Kenya. With no idea what happened. DON’T DO DRUGS.

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) March 31, 2021

Or this one, more recently.

Everyone busting my CRACKERS over the “pants”—(partially my fault because I called attention to them with the Bugle Boy comment). The truth is, they’re BALMAIN (the most prestigious brand in PANTS)—my shoes are by Ferragamo. Basically, I’m a Sharp Dressed Man. Thank you ! pic.twitter.com/sDgtoGy9Ol

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) May 6, 2021

It’s a combination of frankness and bizarreness that harks back to the glory days of joke Twitter accounts like Horse Ebooks. But it wasn’t actually clear if it was a joke.

This question has been nagging at me for weeks. Each new bizarre tweet has prompted me to wonder the same thing. Is this actually Kelly, given that the account isn’t verified? And, if so, what’s going on, exactly?

I reached out to Kelly through the website of his podcast without a response. On Thursday I also called Newsmax directly, giving up after being transferred to the subscriber assistance line for its magazine (which I didn’t know it had). With those two strikes, I decided instead to do some digital investigating.

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We can start with this photo, posted to Instagram.

What’s useful about this is that it shows Kelly at a very specific time and clearly in a photo that he himself took (barring some impressive Photoshop work, which seems unlikely). The metadata for the Instagram post shows that it was posted at 6:17 p.m. Eastern time on Feb. 19, making it very likely that the photo was posted by Kelly or an aide to Kelly to Kelly’s own account.

That’s useful because Kelly’s Instagram account also has this image, a crop of a TMZ story about his weird marijuana tweet.

If this account is Greg Kelly’s and Greg Kelly is owning the marijuana tweet, that pretty strongly suggests that the marijuana tweet came from Kelly himself.

There’s other evidence, too. For example, on Jan. 11 he hosted a man named Will Chamberlain on his podcast. They discussed former president Donald Trump’s ouster from social media after the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol, and Kelly opined about his own experiences on Twitter.

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“I have — the other day I had 300,000 followers on Twitter. Just about. Now I have 250,000. So I lost fifty,” he said. “What they did to the president on Friday, I felt like I didn’t want to support Twitter. I shouldn’t be on Twitter. And I basically announced, look, I’m stepping away and I’m going to look at Parler. I haven’t tweeted since.”

Here is Kelly’s tweet about joining Parler.

PS: Twitter went Way Way TOO FAR. Probably time for me to Drop this platform. Trying to set up Parler but a few “roadblocks” —REEVALUATING! details on GKR on @newsmax

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) January 9, 2021

And here is an archive of Kelly’s Twitter account about 10 days later: He had about 270,000 followers.

Then, of course, there are the tweets from his employer. When Newsmax itself shares updates about Kelly, it uses the @gregkellyusa Twitter handle. Here’s just one example:

All of which makes clear that @gregkellyusa is, in fact, associated with Greg Kelly.

Then the question shifts a bit: Are these tweets from Kelly or simply from some staffer working for Kelly? The best evidence that it’s the former comes from the metadata of his tweets.

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Normally (though not always) if an employee is tweeting on behalf of a public official, they will use one of the tools created to facilitate sharing of Twitter accounts or scheduling tweets, something like the app TweetDeck or a social-media management platform like Buffer. Every time you tweet, Twitter stamps that tweet with information about how it was created, a sort of digital fingerprint.

Since Jan. 1, Kelly has tweeted 2,148 times. About a third of those tweets were sent from an iPad. About two-thirds were sent from an iPhone. And that’s it.

Again, it’s possible that some earnest, clever assistant is ginning up attention for Kelly by posting tweets from an iPhone of her own. But even if that’s the case (which there’s no real evidence it is) Kelly clearly has no problem with it. The marijuana/woke-up-in-Kenya story is both bizarre and not particularly flattering — and Kelly endorsed it on Instagram.

One of the best hints we have about how Kelly uses Twitter came a bit later in that podcast interview with Chamberlain.

“Twitter actually, quite frankly, sometimes brings out the worst in me,” Kelly said. “And that’s another — that’s another conversation.”

It is indeed.

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