We all make mistakes, and this was one of mine. I quickly produced a story about Claude Taylor, who was tweeting live updates about an FBI raid of a Republican consulting firm. His tweets came about thirty minutes before a local investigative reporter released the same set of information, and the article was simply placing them side by side and wondering if Taylor had connections in the know.

A few days after this story went up, Taylor and Louise Mensch—another crackpot conspiracy theorist—published a “report” stating that “Separate sources with links to the intelligence and justice communities have stated that a sealed indictment has been granted against Donald Trump.”

This is preposterous, as is their reasoning behind why it is sealed.

While it is understood that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution means that, until Mr. Trump is impeached, he cannot be prosecuted, sources say that the indictment is intended by the FBI and prosecutors in the Justice Department to form the basis of Mr. Trump’s impeachment. The indictment is, perhaps uniquely, not intended or expected to be used for prosecution, sources say, because of the constitutional position of the President.

At that moment, I knew this column was a gigantic mistake, but given that I had only been writing professionally full-time for less than a year, I was uncertain of what to do. I wanted to fire this column into the sun and purge it from the internet, but that would be unethical, and I don’t want to set that kind of tone for my career. So instead, I have deleted the entire column as it is based on Taylor’s credibility (of which he has none), changed the title, and put this mea culpa in place. I will leave you with this expose of Claude Taylor’s fraudulence that I wish I had done at the time I first wrote this piece.

Let’s do some facts about @TrueFactsStated:



1) “Vet of 3 presidential campaigns:” FEC records show Claude never worked for a single federal campaign. Ever.

2) Never was on the Clinton White House staff per Clinton presidential library records

3) Claude Taylor is a liar and fraud pic.twitter.com/nss5xoCUdE — Evan Siegfried (@evansiegfried) March 20, 2018

And now @TrueFactsStated has entered the “but I'm a real boy” stage of rebuttal to the fact the FEC says he's never worked a federal campaign and the Clinton library doesn't list him as a former staffer pic.twitter.com/OyrT73IVHw — Evan Siegfried (@evansiegfried) March 20, 2018

Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.