One of Donald Trump's top contenders for a Cabinet post, former United Nations ambassador John Bolton, went on TV over the weekend and suggested that he thought it was possible that the alleged Russian hacking of Democratic emails before the election was actually a "false flag" — a ruse — perpetrated by the Obama administration.

When pressed, Bolton he told a Fox News anchor, “We just don’t know. But I believe that intelligence has been politicized in the Obama administration to a very significant degree.” On Monday Bolton walked this back, saying he didn't mean to suggest that it was necessarily the Obama administration but merely some entity other than the Russians. OK.

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This wasn't Bolton's first foray into conspiracy theories. He has a long history of having them. Indeed, many of Donald Trump's advisers do. Trump's chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, ran one of the top conspiracy sites on the internet, Breitbart News, so there's no doubt about his embrace of fake news and dark fantasy.

Dr. Ben Carson, Trump's choice for housing secretary, is a self-described reader of "conspiracy books," who is drawn to fables suggesting that the biblical figure Joseph built the Egyptian pyramids to store grain and that the LGBT movement is a communist plot. Trump transition team member Kris Kobach, an anti-immigration zealot who is also the Kansas secretary of state, has mused that Latinos might conduct ethnic cleansing if allowed to become a majority.

These are all domestic advisers, and while that's not a good thing by any means, it's slightly less unnerving than the fact that Trump's foreign policy staff are full blown tinfoil hatters, too. We have learned a fair bit about the lurid imagination of incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn, who has eagerly passed on rumors that Hillary Clinton was involved with occult practices and pedophilia and has retweeted white supremacist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic propaganda. His son, Michael Flynn Jr., had to leave the transition team after it became clear that he was spreading fake news stories about the fictitious #Pizzagate scandal and was involved with some very unsavory white nationalist groups online. His father's unstable personality has been the subject of many profiles over the past few months, which make clear that he has extremist views across the board. He doesn't seem to be in any danger of losing his job.

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