The Nunes memo flopped after several weeks of "It's worse than Watergate!" hype. The FBI texts "BOMBSHELL" bombed within a single day after it bore no resemblance to reality. But faithfully uninformed and undaunted, Donald Trump is moving on! His new target is Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Source? Fox News, natch! As the Maddow blog's Steve Benen notes: "The president—who ostensibly has access to a vast, multi-billion-dollar intelligence apparatus, providing him with almost limitless amounts of vetted information—was apparently relying on something he saw on Fox News."
HuffPost describes the latest Fox fabricated "scandal":
Fox’s “exclusive” Thursday report said Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, had “extensive contact last year” with lobbyist Adam Waldman to set up a meeting with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote a dossier on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Waldman runs the Endeavor Group, a Washington lobbying firm that worked with a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska in 2009 and 2010.
Waldman offered last March to connect Warner with Steele to discuss the infamous dossier. The article states that “secrecy seemed very important to Warner” and that the senator “seemed particularly intent on connecting directly with Steele without anyone else on the Senate Intelligence Committee being in the loop ― at least initially.”
But even Fox couldn't bring itself to float a new smear campaign without at least acknowledging that the texts appear to be part of Warner's work on the Intelligence Committee. Not only did GOP Intelligence chair Richard Burr know about the texts, he and Warner disclosed them to the full panel last year and even issued a joint statement to Fox about them.
In fact, the report is such a misdirection that Sen. Marco Rubio is calling foul, tweeting Thursday: "Sen. Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago. Has had zero impact on our work."
Trump ran with it anyway. One has to wonder—just how stupid are his dead enders? He floats a new phantom theory every week, only to come up with something equally as delusional and useless the next. None of them pan out or deliver on their promise, and yet Trump’s followers just continue feasting away on a steady diet of Trump’s zero-substance intel.