For the second straight day, MSNBC’s Hardball dismissed any and all Republican questions on Wednesday about bias inside the FBI as modern-day McCarthyism that’s a smoke screen “destroying” and “hurting” America.

Host Chris Matthews predictably set the tone, referring to Republicans such as Senator Ron Johnson (Wisc.) as “toadies” being ordered by the White House to “go out there and kick up some dust, make up anything you can, do anything to deflect or distract or discredit from Bob Mueller because they think trouble is coming.”

Liberal journalist and Wall Street Journal correspondent Eli Stokols agreed, dubbing the text messages and secret society talk a “hysteria” that’s “straight out of the old sort of McCarthy playbook.”

Stokols dismissed the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page texts as only “joking about holding some sort of secret meeting” and containing “no actual evidence, at this point, that there is some secret society FBI agents meeting in the wings.”

Matthews also mocked the idea of any secret group, arguing that “[y]ou don't call something secret society,” “don’t talk about” it, or “reference” it. He admitted that Johnson seems “intelligent enough to be a senator,” but that drew skepticism from far-left Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart.

Capehart then uncorked a rant seeking to delegitimize any questioning of the FBI (or, by extension, Mueller):

Senator Johnson should know better. If indeed there is a secret society, then he, as a member of the Senate, should make that charge in a hearing....have them come and speak before the American people in a Senate hearing and talk about the secret society. What he's doing is undermining the legitimacy of the FBI, the Justice Department, and just people's faith in our institutions....They're trying to create fog and they're doing something that they think is going to help them with short-term game — gain, but in the long-term, they are destroying, they are hurting this country.

“They’re trying to muddy the waters to ensure whatever Bob Mueller comes up with that they will be able to say, we can't trust this because fill in the blank. But it is my hope that the American people will take a look at whatever Bob Mueller comes up with...and hopefully realize that the people who have been going on television and going on radio and spouting this nonsense have...been spouting nonsense,” Capehart added.

Liberal Republican and Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace also weighed in on the “fog” analogy, stating that there’s “something more sinister” at play that could be “political suicide” for “the entire Republican Party brand...to smear and assassinate the character of the entire FBI over text messages between two agents who were having affair who disparaged — the one of them disparaged everyone.”

Here’s the relevant transcript from MSNBC’s Hardball on January 24: