Let’s be perfectly clear at the start: It makes no difference who the whistleblower is. That stopped even being a potential issue weeks ago once the intelligence inspector general validated the report about President Donald Trump’s call with the new president of Ukraine.

The only reason we’re still talking about this at all is because right-wing media are hoping to use the person’s identity as a silver bullet to kill the entire Trump-Ukraine scandal that has led to an official impeachment inquiry.

And it’s no surprise that at the forefront of this bogus campaign lies Fox News.

Conspiracy theories are nothing new to Fox News, but with a potential impeachment on the horizon, the president’s favorite network is going full speed ahead in efforts to defend its most important audience. In its latest attempt to discredit the impeachment investigation, Fox recently picked up a razor-thin piece from Real Clear Investigations (RCI) that claims to identify the whistleblower by name. Unfortunately for Fox, RCI’s reporting is just another desperate attempt by right-wing media to distract from Trump’s abuse of power.

The identity of the whistleblower is far beside the point of the impeachment investigation. They could be a longtime right-wing operative, a committed left-wing activist (probably not), or someone in between: It wouldn’t change the cornucopia of evidence confirming that the president abused the powers of his office. Not only has the intelligence community inspector general debunked the lies pushed by Trump and his right-wing media allies, but damning testimony from the ongoing House investigation and reports from multiple whistleblowers have revealed that the president engaged in quid pro quo with a foreign leader to gain political advantage over an opposition candidate.

The RCI piece supposedly naming the whistleblower was written by far-right reporter Paul Sperry, the former Washington bureau chief for fake news outlet WorldNetDaily (now known as WND). Sperry’s journalism career had largely consisted of spreading anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, including writing a book on the Muslim Mafia. He’s also been at the center of pushing the conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama is running a “shadow government” aimed at undermining the Trump administration.

RCI has already walked back the article’s headline multiple times to soften its claims. Additionally, the individual named in Sperry’s “report” has been the target of far-right conspiracy theorists for years and was reportedly driven out of his White House post after receiving death threats.

This hasn’t stopped both Fox’s “straight news” and opinion sides from leaning into Sperry’s reporting. On day two of this manufactured distraction, anchor Martha MacCallum hosted a panel in which boy genius Charlie Kirk called the whistleblower a “highly politically motivated individual.” The previous day Brit Hume and MacCallum discussed the story without repeating the name reported by RCI, including a chyron that read: “Brit Hume on Whistleblower Being Named.” MacCallum suggested that the whistleblower’s identity “might reveal motivations, might reveal relationships, might reveal bias” against the president, echoing a line of attack from the network’s opinion side. Hume added that the whistleblower’s identity “would be embarrassing to House Democrats who are trying to mount an impeachment inquiry if it turns out that they, in some respects, had helped to trigger the whole thing.”