Conspiracy theorist and conservative pundit Jerome Corsi, who is a target in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into the Trump campaign and Russian election tampering, told MSNBC tonight that he deleted emails caught in the investigation because he “had a 17-inch laptop that was dying and it needed new space.”

News broke that Corsi had asked his stepson about a computer “scrub,” which led the FBI to question the 30-year-old about the comment, after the fringe political figure admitted the details during his longshot lawsuit against the Justice Department and Mueller.

“Why were you talking about a scrub? Were you trying to remove evidence relating to this case?” MSNBC host Ari Melber asked Corsi.

“It was not — the FBI showed up at my stepson’s home, 40 years old, and knocked on the door,” he replied. “They had a text message in which I’d asked him to scrub a computer. It was an old computer that had been sitting on my desk. The memory was full. My wife wanted a computer for her business. I said why don’t you take this old one and recycle it.”

When pressed on if he deleted emails from the relevant time period in Mueller’s investigation, Corsi said “no” and alleged “it was an old computer that had not been being used.”

“In Mueller’s draft indictment, which you shared with the world, interestingly, it says between January and March 2017, you deleted all your e-mails from before October 2016. Why?” Melber questioned.

Corsi responded by stumbling through an explanation of how he deleted the files to save space on his favorite computer:

“I had a 17-inch laptop that was dying and it needed new space. I also turned over the time machine application with the hard drive backup that had all e-mails, whether I’d erased them or not, and I knew they were all there. I was trying to keep an old computer running because I liked that 17-inch. To do so, I had to erase e-mails. It was not a plan to erase evidence.”

Watch above, via MSNBC.

[image via screengrab]

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