MSNBC host Rachel Maddow promised last night that she had an exclusive coming, and tonight she delivered. Maddow laid out a surreal new story centered around a supposed classified document that was leaked to her, and the upshot is this: someone out there is trying to sell forged documents that falsely discredit the reporters that are working to expose Donald Trump’s Russian collusion scandal.

Maddow was able to determine that the “classified” document anonymously sent to her was a fake, because it copycatted the unique identification that had initially appeared on a real document leaked by government contractor Reality Winner – and it couldn’t have come from her. There were also other clues that revealed it was not legitimate.

The fake document named a specific Donald Trump campaign adviser as having colluded with the Russians to rig the election. But because it was faked, that means someone out there is producing fake “classified” documents and sending them to the media to try to trick the media into reporting on the story – so the rug can then be pulled out from under those reporters.

Maddow’s conclusion is that the goal here is to make the (very real) Trump-Russia collusion scandal look fake. If bombshell proof gets out there into the mainstream media and then has to be retracted, it could cause the general public to conclude that the entire scandal is overblown. Based on what Maddow has presented, I think she’s absolutely correct in her conclusion.

This leads to the question of who is that desperate to protect Donald Trump from his Russia scandal. This scheme involves creating fake classified documents about Trump-Russia collusion out of thin air, forging a legitimate identifying code onto it, sending it to major reporters to trick them into reporting it, and then presumably revealing it to have been a fake once it’s been reported. Fortunately, Maddow never fell for it to begin with. Now hopefully her team can figure out who sent her the fake document to begin with – because that could lead the real culprits in the collusion scandal.