A New Right-Wing Disinformation Campaign: Biden Was Part of a Deep State Plot Against Trump

That didn’t take long. Joe Biden had barely joined the 2020 presidential race when the right-wing disinformation machine began cranking out the newest iteration of its Deep State conspiracy theory, with this version claiming the former vice president was part of a government cabal that cooked up a supposedly phony Trump-Russia scandal to keep the reality television celebrity from gaining the White House. This certainly is an easy charge to debunk—that is, if you care about facts—but it’s still likely that this unfounded notion will take hold in the fever swamp of Trump-encouraged and Fox-fueled conservative paranoia.

Days after Biden declared his presidential bid in late April, Restoration PAC, a conservative political action committee generously funded by a Republican billionaire, posted on Facebook a video titled “Joe Biden’s Involvement in the Fusion GPS/Steele Dossier.” For right-wingers, any Biden connection to this document would mean that the Democratic 2020 frontrunner was in the middle of the plot against Donald Trump, for the theory pushed by Fox Newsers and others holds that the memos written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the 2016 campaign—which alleged Trump was directly in cahoots with Moscow—triggered the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe that morphed into special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in 2017. The basic foundation of this conspiracy theory, though, is wrong: The FBI’s inquiry began in late July 2016 not because of the Steele memos but due to the US government receiving information from another government (the Australians) that a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, had been privately told that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton—a trove of emails—that could be used against the Democratic candidate. (Want a source for this? See the last page of the infamous Nunes memo.)