“I just go by the old rule," Devin Nunes told Sean Hannity Monday night, "whatever they accuse you of doing, they’re actually doing." This may actually be a many-times diluted paraphrase of a famous quote from Joseph Goebbels at the 1934 Nuremburg rally: "The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing." Versions of the Nazi propaganda minister's adage are continually floating through the Internet ether in memes and other detritus, and at least one seems to have reached the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Nunes probably didn't know the origin, but he incorporated the maxim in his argument on Fox News last night that actually, it was Democrats who colluded with Russia.

Nunes was of course responsible for the infamous Memo, which Republicans in Congress and on cable news hyped up as "worse than Watergate" until it was released with a dull thud. The big point from Nunes and crew before the document was declassified was that The Dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele—at the behest of the research firm Fusion GPS, which received funding from the Clinton campaign—was what triggered an FBI counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. Since The Dossier had funding ties to Trump's political opponent, Republicans said it was an improper basis for the Bureau to seek a surveillance warrant against some of Trump's associates.

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Except the fifth and final bullet point of Nunes' document completely undermined this theory, and thus the whole justification for releasing The Memo. Maybe Nunes was hoping no one would read that far. That section admitted that the FBI's counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign was triggered by information the agency had obtained about George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser to the campaign who has since pled guilty to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. This claim backs a December report from The New York Times that Papadopoulos was drunk at a London bar in May 2016 and told an Australian diplomat that the Russian government had dirt on Hillary Clinton. When leaked Democratic emails began appearing online two months later, the Aussies told American intelligence about Papadopoulos.

When the revelations about Papadopoulos first surfaced, the Trump team dismissed him as a "coffee boy." Nunes took a similar tact on Fox and Friends yesterday:

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NUNES downplays PAPADOPOULOS' role in Trump campaign, claims he shouldn't have been investigated for drunkenly bragging about Russia having dirt on Clinton.



"As far as we can tell, Papadopoulos never even knew who Trump wa-- never even met with the president." pic.twitter.com/NgMdzdXVPM — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 5, 2018

“If Papadopoulos was such a major figure, you had nothing on him, you know, the guy lied," Nunes said. "As far as we can tell, Papadopoulos never even knew who—never even had met with the president.” Except when the Papadopoulos news broke, everyone and their brother saw a photo of a campaign foreign policy meeting featuring, among others, Papadopoulos, Jeff Sessions, and one Donald Trump:

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This morning, Devin Nunes, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee just said that Donald Trump, "had never even MET George Papadopoulos." pic.twitter.com/zFV7cEAtbo — Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) February 5, 2018

In fact, Trump tweeted the photo himself:

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Nunes also strayed from the truth on Fox and Friends when he said Papadopoulos was "getting drunk in London and talking to diplomats, saying that you don’t like Hillary Clinton—I think it’s kind of scary that our intelligence agencies would take that and use it against [an] American citizen." It wasn't any expressed dislike for Hillary Clinton that got Papadopoulos on the radar, it was his advance knowledge of a foreign power's plan to use damaging information against a U.S. presidential candidate to influence the election.

Nunes' other big strategy as his Memo falls apart is to try to push on with hyping the supposed mistreatment of Carter Page, another Trump foreign policy adviser with delusions of grandeur who is continually popping up on cable news to flirt with self-incrimination. Perhaps Page thinks it wise to live a public life now that Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin might see him as something of a liability. The Memo makes the following claim regarding the surveillance of Page:

Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding [British agent Christopher] Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials.

Except, as Jonathan Chait detailed in New York magazine, the application did disclose that some of the information indicating Page may have been committing a crime came from a political source. It was in a footnote on the application, which Nunes was reminded of on Fox and Friends.

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“A footnote saying something may be political is a far cry from letting the American people know that the Democrats and the Hillary campaign paid for dirt that the FBI then used to get a warrant on an American citizen to spy on another campaign," Nunes exploded. Chait put paid to this:

Notice how “The FBI LIED about the Steele dossier” has been scaled back to, “The FBI did not highlight the truth about the Steele Dossier in the part of the application we bothered to read.” So now the main attack on the FBI is about font size.

And anyway, none of this does anything to prove Nunes' point that it was actually Democrats who colluded with Russia, a statement that makes no logical or factual sense. It's just another example of how conspiracy theorizing has leeched from the far-right fringes of InfoWars into the so-called Republican mainstream. Increasingly, there seems to be no line or distinction between those two information ecosystems.

Perhaps more to the point, this has the air of exactly what Nunes said to Hannity: with Trump's campaign accused of colluding with Russia, his allies are now saying Democrats did the same thing. Nunes, never one of Congress' distinguished brains, failed to grasp that this maneuver doesn't work if you are already accused of something and the evidence backing the claim has continually mounted. You're supposed to accuse them without evidence before they can call you out. This is more "I know you are, but what am I?" Unfortunately, it will probably be sufficient to convince the Republican base.

Part of that Goebbels speech at Nuremburg found its way into perhaps the most infamous Nazi propaganda film of all time: Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will. Perhaps we'll call Nunes' masterwork The Triumph of the Dull.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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