With the Mueller bombshell, the GOP's grand conspiracy theory falls apart

Trump couldn’t get his henchman to fire Mueller, and backed down. His defenders are left looking like idiots again

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
01.26.2018•8:18 AM

This week we finally saw the right's defenses of Donald Trump crystallize into an overarching "theory of everything,"as Salon's Matthew Sheffield wrote on Thursday: A Department of Justice and FBI cabal worked feverishly to help Hillary Clinton escape accountability for her crimes, and was only thwarted by the stable genius of Donald Trump. This "secret society" is now doing everything in its power to overthrow the president. We spent the week following three specific strands of this alleged scandal, all of which have disintegrated by Friday morning.

First we had the so-called secret society which was excitedly flogged by the entire Fox News apparatus and taken up, perhaps a bit gingerly, by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. That turned out to be a joke in a text message from one of the FBI lovers at the center of the Republican conspiracy theory. Literally. So that was that.

The second strand was the case of the "missing texts," in which some of the messages on the two lovers' cell phones were lost in the transfer to new devices. President Trump got into that one, claiming that 50,000 texts were gone and declaring it "one of the biggest stories in a long time." The Republicans basically just dusted off their old "Clinton emails" talking points and made it all sound suspicious for a couple of days. Then the Department of Justice informed them that thousands of phones had been affected in the switch -- and that all the missing text messages had been restored. So much for that.

Finally there was "The Memo," a document written by House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes, R-Calif., that purports to show a conspiracy to misuse the FISA court process to authorize an illegal surveillance of former Trump adviser Carter Page. Unfortunately, nobody but Nunes and other House members can see the memo because it's classified and releasing it, even to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee or officials at the Department of Justice, would be wrong.

None of which makes much sense. The Democrats who have seen the underlying classified intelligence say the memo is bunk, the DOJ has refuted its conclusions and it turns out that even Nunes hasn't seen it and instead depended upon the judgment of longtime Benghazi inquisitor Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.

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