Although America still waits with bated breath to hear the conclusions of Robert Mueller and his investigative team, it appears clear that those conclusions, once finally shared with the world, will prove to be very interesting. And as the special counsel prepares to meet with Donald Trump himself sometime in the next few weeks, the president's Republican allies have begun pushing out the battiest conspiracy theories they can concoct in an effort to discredit Mueller before then.

For a few days, the most promising of these tales was the Mystery of the Missing Texts. In December, Mueller removed FBI agent Peter Strozk from the Russia probe after learning that before the 2016 election, he had traded messages with a DOJ attorney, Lisa Page, that were critical of Trump. To you, a rational person not driven by a sense of blind loyalty to your party's flailing leader, Strozk's conduct might seem, at worst, ill-advised. To Trump, though, it was proof of a vast, shadowy conspiracy designed to take down his administration from the inside. And when they learned that some of those texts might be missing, all Republicans had to do was replace "Benghazi" with "the Deep State" and fire off the same press releases they've been issuing for the last five years. Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson couldn't pen a huffy letter to FBI director Christopher Wray fast enough.

As it turns out, this mystery has the most boring of resolutions: A technical glitch wiped out all the FBI's texts over a five-month period, and that big, scary, five-digit, Benghazi-esque figure the president referenced is the total number of lost Bureau messages. None of these facts, however, were enough to deter Johnson from hopping on cable news this week and, citing to texts he had reviewed, alluding to the existence of an FBI "secret society" scheming to dethrone President Trump.

Again, to you, this probably sounds like delusional nonsense, but Johnson was unconvinced. "We have an informant that's talking about a group that was holding secret meetings off-site," he told Fox News host Brett Baier excitedly. "We have to dig into it."

This morning, an ABC News report revealed that the answer to this burning question is, against all odds, even more uninteresting than the last one: The "secret society" quip was a joke.