In supremely unsurprising news, President Trump was keeping tabs on the House Intelligence Committee's hearing on the Russia investigation today that featured testimony from FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers. In similarly predictable fashion, the president tweeted out a counterfactual claim about their testimony which would have looked good for him if it were true, which it wasn't.

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In the video clip included in the tweet, Republican committee chairman Devin Nunes asked about whether the intelligence community has evidence "votes were changed" in any of the key states in the 2016 presidential election. Rogers said the NSA does not, but that is a highly specific claim. It is not the same as saying "Russia did not influence electoral process" as Trump—or Dan Scavino, who the account bio says runs the @POTUS account—claims in the tweet. In fact, both Rogers and Comey said the opposite: They reiterated the findings of the declassified intelligence community report from January, which said Russia did interfere in the electoral process.

Thanks to the glories of this modern age, the tweet was available to people in the hall, and it was read to Comey and Rogers verbatim. They reacted as most everyone else did, with the added wrinkle that it was their own statements mischaracterized by the president:

Elsewhere in comically bad White House responses, during his briefing today, Press Secretary Sean Spicer tried to disown a couple of former key advisers to the president who have quite the history with Russia. He described General Michael Flynn, who was fired as National Security Adviser after lying to the vice president about whether he discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia with the Russian ambassador, as a "volunteer of the campaign." Spicer said Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager last summer who resigned after allegations emerged that he took high-dollar off-the-books payments from Russian-aligned officials in Ukraine, "played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time."

This is, of course, delusional.

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Jack Holmes
Senior Staff Writer

Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.