There"s a direct line between John Solomon"s shaky allegations and the president"s brain

HBOOn Friday night, Bill Maher granted a very large platform to Ben Domenech, the co-founder of far-right publication The Federalist ... For the blissfully uninitiated, The Federalist is a strange, hyper-conservative website that’s privately funded and refuses to disclose who financially backs it, and has published a number of conspiracy theories, a gross op-ed defending Roy Moore preying on teenagers, and had a tag for articles called “Black Crime,” among other offenses

Two senators over the past five days have blown a major hole in one of President Donald Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories about Ukraine ... Trump’s belief in this conspiracy theory is seemingly part of what got him into this mess: He noted it in conversation with current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in their now infamous July 25 call where Trump pressured his counterpart to investigate Biden’s conduct

First Read is your briefing from "Meet the Press" and the NBC Political Unit on the day"s most important political stories and why they matter

Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast/GettyFor decades the American far right has depended on conspiracy theories to explain why the nation keeps adopting progressive policies of which they disapprove ... McCarthy did not go as far as branding Marshall a traitor, but he did charge that Marshall—a great war hero who helped lead the planning of D-Day and had been Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1943—led “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man

Analysis: The president"s long history of investigation demands and false conspiracy theories raises concerns for any prospective 2020 opponent

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden accused President Trump of "pushing flat-out lies, debunked conspiracy theories and smears against me and my family" in a Washington Post op-ed published late Saturday

If Donald Trump and his supporters weren’t so fond of conspiracy theories, the Ukraine scandal would never have unfolded as it did ... ”And over the past week, Trump’s defenders have spread one conspiracy theory after another about the intelligence-community insider who exposed the call

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/ReutersJoe Biden’s presidential campaign made an extraordinary request to executives of top news channels on Sunday, asking them to no longer book Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on their programs ... In a letter addressed to the heads of the major news and cable networks, as well as top news anchors, two top Biden campaign advisers make the case that by peddling routine falsehoods about the work of Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine, Giuliani’s presence on the airwaves is editorially untenable

Trump has publicly played down Russia"s role in the 2016 election ... But even privately, Trump trusts conspiracy theories more than US intelligence agencies