MSNBC host Chris Matthews was off and running on Tuesday’s Hardball, engaging in loony speculation that House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes’s claims about Trump surveillance could be fake, legitimate claims by Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash were false, and teed up Jennifer Palmieri’s sad excuses that Russia was why they lost the election.

In his first segment, Matthews floated a conspiracy that Nunes met someone on the White House grounds that could have been a former staffer to assist in concocting these claims about the Trump team being caught up in surveillance that, in Matthews’s book, just “looks like a masquerade.”

Matthews continued that, with these tale tales, he could simply request a meeting with President Trump to reveal “some hot stuff” that’d “help exonerate you or at least muddy the waters as he put it.”

Laughing like a hyena, Matthews added:

The whole thing is opera-buffer, whatever. It’s just a big parody. There's no way he had a conversation like that with the President. He can't say your people told me or I got a mole in here. I got a former staffer working here. It's an insane conversation, and you know what, Michael, it didn't happen. It didn't happen. Somebody put together this whole masquerade that they would have because all Trump works for is keeping the news a little better than it would be otherwise for a couple days and he gets through the night[.]

As for Schweizer, Matthews introduced Tuesday’s Trump tweets about the Intelligence Committees, the Clintons, and Russia to then use — of all places — to argue that Schweizer’s claims about the Clintons, speeches to Russian oligarches, and uranium were false:

Well, it should be noted that Politifact, which checks on facts, has deemed all those statements by the Breitbart people misleading. Anyway, the allegations come from a book Clinton Cash, written by Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute which is co-founded by his honor, Steve Bannon. Anyway, at 7:16 this morning, President Trump then promoted a segment on Fox about Podesta's alleged ties to Russia. At 7:17, Mr. Schweizer appeared on air to peddle an old allegation he raised in August with Bannon while they were writing for Breitbart.

It’s rich that Matthews chose Politifact seeing as how even The New York Times reported about Schweizer’s allegations that money flowed to the Clinton family and their allies amid a Russian atomic energy company’s takeover of “a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West.”

Despite a series of clarifications muddying the waters, the 4,300 word story stood for itself (as did subsequent stories here).

Palmieri arrived after Matthews’s Schweizer attack to suggest that, despite their insistence at the time that they were to not be trusted, they faced news coverage “dominated” “for three solid weeks...about the context of John Podesta's e-mails.”

“And it was just — every day blocked out the sun. Every day that is what we were dealing with. But, it is — but again, we're even now getting deflected by, like, the details what occurred on the campaign trail as opposed to what the Russians were trying to do,” she added.

Republican strategist John Brabender pumped the brakes on the hysteria about Russia and the election outcome, but Palmieri shouted him down:

PALMIERI: Ne — never — never — John, never in our history — never in the history of our republic have you had another country — a semi-hostile country like Russia — BRABENDER: — I don't think the Russians probably had a lot to do with that. PALMIERI: — tried to interfere to affect the outcome of an election because they didn't like Hillary Clinton and they wanted Donald Trump as president. BRABENDER: Okay then let me ask you this. Do you think you lost the race because of the Russians' involvement? MATTHEWS: Oh, here we go. PALMIERI: That doesn't — that doesn’t — that doesn’t — that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Russian government had — came in here with the intent of interfering in our elections, and they succeeded and people are still not taking it seriously.

Seeing as how he had earlier engaged in conspiracy theories, Matthews speculated: “Brabender, you know how the game is played and I think Trump may have been involved.”

Here’s the relevant portions of the transcript from MSNBC’s Hardball on March 28: