If you’re having a bad day, take solace in the fact that at least you haven’t been publicly humiliated like Ohio Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, whose attempts to pass off a series of very dumb, already-debunked, paranoid FBI conspiracy theories as fact fell apart in real time on CNN this morning.
During an interview with Chris Cuomo, Jordan—who has spent the past several months methodically attempting to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election—insisted that members of the FBI, in conjunction with President Obama, were actively working to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. They did this, Jordan claimed, by surveilling former low-level Trump adviser Carter Page during the final weeks of the campaign without providing proper justification to a federal court. This is also known as the premise of the extremely stupid, thoroughly discredited “Nunes Memo.”
“What kind of caper is this, that this is what they came up with to hurt President Trump?” Cuomo asked. “[They] put a surveillance on Carter Page, a guy who had almost no real connection to Trump to his own understanding, and they do it just a few weeks before the election, and they think it’s gonna affect the outcome of the race? It’s preposterous!”
Undeterred, Jordan pushed another debunked theory: that a series of extremely innocuous text messages between FBI agents was indicative of a broader deep state conspiracy. In visual form, his argument looked something like this:
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It made about as much sense! Cuomo eventually just laughed at him.