On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the commencement of an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s “shakedown” of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky during a July phone conversation between the two leaders during which Trump asked Zelensky to find dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, the current frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Following fast on the heels of the speaker’s annoucement, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton took to YouTube to condemn the inquiry, which is based on a whistleblower complaint filed by an intelligence officer who was privy to details of the discussion between Trump and Zelensky.

An account of the call released by the White House suggests that Trump was apparently seeking fodder for a narrative long percolating in right-wing fever swamps that Biden’s advocacy, during his tenure in the Obama administration, for the firing of a reportedly corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor general was an attempt to shield a company from prosecution on whose board Biden’s son, Hunter, sat. (A number of European allies of the U.S., as well as such international bodies as the International Monetary Fund, were also advocating for the removal of the same prosecutor because of his refusal to move on key corruption cases.)

But in the up-is-down world of right-wing communicators, it is Trump who is being targeted for his own purported crusade against corruption.

“He’s the whistleblower-in-chief,” Fitton said of Trump, adding that Trump was blowing a whistle “about the corruption of the last administration, the corruption of the deep state, and he’s pointing a finger at the operations of the Democratic Party that were part of the spy operation against him.”

Judicial Watch, the right-wing messaging shop posing as a legal watchdog, has functioned as an off-campus communications operation for the Trump administration practically from the moment that Trump assumed office. In the early days of the administration, Fitton took up the cause of Michael Flynn, whose tenure as Trump’s national security adviser was short-lived, due to Flynn’s apparent interference in U.S.-Russia relations before the Trump administration took office. Fitton and his colleagues are also avid pushers of the twisted narrative that the Obama administration and “deep state” actors had spied on the Trump campaign when, during routine monitoring of the phone calls of the Russian ambassador, the intelligence establishment discovered Flynn’s discussions with Sergey Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the United States, on behalf of the Trump campaign. Flynn, it turned out, had urged the Russians not to retaliate for sanctions imposed on Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election, implying that all would be made right for Russia once Trump took office.

In his special “breaking news” Judicial Watch YouTube segment on Tuesday, Fitton also demonstrated a classic mind-control technique, urging viewers to think of a different word when they hear the name of the constitutional process for removing a sitting president. “I want people to realize [that] every time they hear the word ‘impeachment,’ they should just substitute the word ‘coup,'” Fitton said.

On Thursday, Judicial Watch announced that it had filed Freedom of Information Act requests for all documents related to Biden’s advocacy for the removal of Ukrainian prosecutor general.

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