In a guest appearance on Sean Hannity's radio show on Thursday, Geraldo Rivera—a man with only limited access to proper shirting and, it would appear, history books—took perhaps the boldest stance yet among the legions of his fellow Fox News-affiliated Trump sycophants. "Nixon," Rivera opined to his host, referring to a president who resigned in disgrace in order to avoid impeachment, "never would have been forced to resign if you [had] existed in your current state." The exchange begins around the 45-second mark of the clip below, via MMFA, after Hannity impressively manages to shout a full bingo of right-wing buzzwords in that narrow window. (Surveillance, unmasking, minimization, uranium, email server!)

Hannity chuckled, noting that he wasn't yet a teenager at the time of Nixon's resignation, which prompted Rivera to utter these words, apparently without a trace of irony:

It’s too bad for Nixon, because nobody like you existed then. I say that because I believe that our prime responsibility now is to unshackle the 45th President of the United States.

There is an obvious conclusion to be drawn from Rivera's assertions that (1) Sean Hannity could have protected a criminal president from investigations into his conduct and (2) his goal right now is to protect the current president from investigations into his conduct, and I do not think it's one that he intended. From there, Rivera perpetuated what has recently become the Republican Party's theory of the case, which is that because the FBI may have used some information from so-called "Steele dossier" in a FISA warrant application, and because the Steele dossier was partially financed by the Clinton campaign, nothing Donald Trump did may be investigated any further. If conflating the dossier's funding source with the veracity of its information strikes you as logically problematic, don't worry: Rivera knows laws.