The VSG goes off the rails on Fox & Friends

I didn't watch it live - I rarely watch TV in the daytime - but there was lots of remarking upon it on Twitter, including lots of passing around of the looks of extreme discomfort on the faces of Doocy, Earhart and Kilmeade, like they were listening to the rantings of the proverbial crazy uncle at Thanksgiving.

The biggie was the VSG's stepping into the Crowdstrike conspiracy theory once again:

Call it President Trump's insanity defense — and that's a joke, but hear me out. 

Based on his freewheeling interview with Fox & Friends, Trump genuinely believed that Russia had not worked with WikiLeaks to continue a decadeslong effort to sow dissent in free democracies by hacking the poorly protected Democratic National Committee server in 2016. Instead, Trump thought that Ukraine had framed Russia for the 2016 meddling and that in addition there is a CrowdStrike server sitting in some Ukrainian basement that could prove it all. 

"The FBI went in and said, ‘We’re not giving it to you.’ They gave the server to CrowdStrike, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian," Trump told Fox News. "And I still want to see that server. You know the FBI has still never gotten that server. That is a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?" 

When host Steve Doocy pushed back on the claim, Trump doubled down on the assertion, claiming that this was why he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate corruption in the July 25 phone call. 

There are just a few problems. For starters, CrowdStrike isn't some Ukrainian corporation owned by "a very wealthy Ukrainian" as Trump asserted on television. It's a publicly traded security firm ($CRWD) based in California and co-founded by an American born in — wait for it — Russia. A New York private equity firm where Trump's ambassador to India used to work is CrowdStrike's largest outside stakeholder. And although the DNC did hire the company to transmit its data to the FBI for investigation, there's no single "server" at all.

It's worth noting that the National Republican Congressional Committee enlisted CrowdStrike's services to the tune of $40,000 as recently as this past June.

Then there's this bit of wounded vanity:

Josh Marshall‏Verified account @joshtpm

Trump on Yovanovitch: "She wouldn't hang my picture in the embassy. She is in charge of the embassy. She wouldn't hang it. It look a year-and-a-half, two years to get the picture up. She said bad things about me ... This was not an angel this woman, okay?"

As if she had nothing more pressing on her agenda than hanging pictures. As if no other presidential pictures in the history of US embassies had taken that long.

This guy can't ever go without adult supervision.