Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) Tuesday announcement that his House Judiciary Committee is investigating the right-wing media conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden is secretly overseeing Donald Trump’s New York state prosecution came just days after Trump ally Steve Bannon promised to “force” Jordan to launch such a probe.

Trump is currently on trial in New York, where he faces charges of falsifying business records in order to conceal payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case alleges that these payments were intended to keep Daniels’ claims that she had an affair with Trump from becoming public during the 2016 presidential election.

Right-wing propagandists have furiously denounced Bragg’s prosecution as politically motivated and relentlessly distorted the case against Trump. As part of that effort, Trump allies launched a smear campaign targeting Matthew Colangelo, a top prosecutor on the case, in April 2023. 

Pro-Trump media figures alleged that Colangelo is a “partisan hatchet man” and claimed that his past service in the Justice Department — he was appointed acting associate attorney general when Biden took office and subsequently served as the deputy to the permanent appointee in that role — proves that Trump’s indictment was a “political hit by Biden to take out Trump.” In reality, Colangelo had unique experience for Bragg because he led the New York attorney general’s civil inquiry into Trump before joining the Justice Department, and it is not unusual for lawyers to leave DOJ for senior roles in the Manhattan DA’s office.

Mike Davis, a right-wing activist who regularly threatens political prosecutions of MAGA enemies if he is appointed in a future Trump administration, launched the anti-Colangelo campaign on social media, and Bannon, an influential Trump adviser and host of the War Room podcast, amplified them in an April 3, 2023, interview with Davis. Bannon called on his audience to “make this guy infamous,” and he and Davis both called for congressional investigations that Bannon said would “get all his emails.” Davis subsequently pushed his conspiracy theory in appearances on Fox News, Newsmax, and CNN.

MAGA media revived the attacks after Colangelo delivered the opening arguments for the prosecution in Trump’s trial on April 22. Fox’s Jesse Watters called him “Biden’s prosecutor” and said he was putting on a “show trial,” while Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt said that Colangelo had been “shipped to New York to imprison Donald Trump and keep Joe Biden and Merrick Garland perpetually in power.” 

But no one was more fixated on the issue than Bannon, who offered an extended April 24 rant about his plan to “force” Jordan to launch an investigation into the Biden administration’s purported influence on the New York case.

"We're already working behind the scenes and we're going to force Jordan to do that because all Jordan's given, and you can talk to the Trump team, all he's done is happy talk,” Bannon said, later adding: “You're head of Judiciary, you've got stories today that Comer and him don't know where they're going, you haven't done the weaponization of government, you've done a terrible job on the impeachment, you haven't held the DOJ to account for anything, it's been absolutely an air ball, an air ball, for a year and a half for you as head of Judiciary.”

“You must take action,” Bannon said. “I shouldn't have to take valuable airtime here, that we have so many other things to get to to hound you. To hound you. To hound you. Because if you don't have a bayonet to the back of these guys, they're going to backslide on everything, you know why? Because they're gutless.”

“It's called controlled opposition,” Bannon concluded. “He'll go on Hannity and talk about some stuff, right? But nothing happens and this has got to happen.”

Apparently Bannon’s hounding was successful. On Tuesday, in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland that Fox received as an exclusive, Jordan demanded “information and documents related to Mr. Colangelo’s employment” in light of “the perception that the Justice Department is assisting in Bragg’s politicized prosecution.”

On War Room, Bannon swiftly praised Jordan’s action as a “start” that had him “feeling better today.” He then brought on Davis, who commended Jordan before offering an ominous prediction that the probe would ultimately allow the Trump DOJ to launch the politically motivated prosecutions that he has demanded.

“This is going to lead to evidence, which is critically important because it's going to lead to, or should lead to a criminal probe on January 20, 2025, when President Trump is back in office and his acting attorney general orders a criminal probe under 18 U.S.C. 241 conspiracy against rights, a very serious civil rights crime,” Davis said.

The right initially wanted to counterprogram the damaging spectacle of Trump’s trials with a dubious impeachment of Biden. Their effort failed because the House Republican case relied on right-wing media conspiracy theories that withered outside of that ecosystem. But rather than learn a lesson about the quality of their propagandists’ overheated allegations, Jordan has simply moved on to using his power to investigate a different right-wing conspiracy theory. 

The ongoing farce demonstrates once again how the GOP relies on its extremist wing to gin up these pseudoscandals — and how its politicians spend their time tilting at windmills to placate the party’s looniest elements.