RACHEL MADDOW (HOST): Well, when you look into the intelligence firm here, it appears that the managing partner from this intelligence firm is in fact that pro-Trump Twitter kid who has been saying this big scandal is about to break. The top image that is backlit on the Surefire Intelligence website is Matthew Cohen. That's his LinkedIn picture. The other pictures which match it exactly are this pro-Trump Twitter kid Jacob Wohl. It also appears that a number of people who supposedly work at this Surefire Intelligence agency are just fake headshots or stock photos or supermodels.

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My favorite part of the story, it turns out when you call Surefire Intelligence, those calls go to a voicemail message that links to another phone number, and that phone number belongs to Jacob Wohl's mom.

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MADDOW: This is super weird.

BEN COLLINS: It is.

MADDOW: The thing that we all first learned about this was that the special counsel's office had referred this for investigation to the FBI, and it was like whoa, first of all the special counsel's office speaks. Second of all, they've referred it to the FBI for investigation -- it must be a serious matter.

COLLINS: Yes, hypothetically.

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COLLINS: Well it was so transparently bad from the get-go, again, the fake celebrities and things like that. Jacob is known for this sort of thing. Last week he was pushing the migrant caravan conspiracy and you saw what that leads to this weekend. And Gateway Pundit has been down this path millions of times before. There have been trial balloons in the past about fake allegations that these people have picked up in the past too. So, look, thankfully, I think the media did its job here. We did what we needed to do from the outset to really get the actual reality of the information out there before he launched this whole thing. It was a ploy from him to see how far the believe-any-woman thing would happen, and it's transparent, and -- again, I cover crooked weird stuff all the time. This is like the most transparently bad thing I've seen in a very long time.