Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

On Thursday night, undercover reporter and activist Lauren Windsor of The UnderCurrent.tv released news that Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, famous for his alleged complicity in the sexual assaults of young men at Ohio State University where he was an assistant wrestling coach, had told folks that Donald Trump's 2024 campaign announcement is imminent. Windsor tweeted: "BREAKING: Jim Jordan told me tonight in Iowa that Trump will announce he's running 'any day now.' A big GOP operative in the state later announced to the crowd that Trump 'will travel here imminently.'"

This was followed by Politico reporter Olivia Beavers reporting that a spokesman for Jordan told her that the above statement was "Not true. Mr. Jordan did not say this." Well … Windsor has been releasing videos of GOP operatives saying all kinds of things the past few weeks, and on Friday she backed up her Jordan report with receipts. Spoiler alert: Jordan's "spokesman" lied.

In the video, which shows two different angles, Jordan is speaking with Windsor and another man, both of whom are pretending to be big Jordan supporters. Jordan says, "President Trump, he's gonna run again." When asked, "You think so?" Jordan goes all in:

REP. JIM JORDAN: I know so. Yeah, I talked to him yesterday. He's about ready to announce after all of this craziness in Afghanistan.
MAN: Thank God! And Biden should fucking resign! Pardon my French, congressman—
REP. JORDAN:—No, he should. He's really bad, really bad.

Windsor has been doing the kind of undercover recording work that right-wing operatives like Project Veritas have to manufacture. She has actually recorded elected Republican officials, like Sen. Ron Johnson, making a compelling case for how badly Donald Trump lost Wisconsin to Biden, and Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy telling an audience that the GOP agenda during Biden's administration is to create "chaos and the inability to get stuff done."

Jordan's name-dropping Donald Trump and then quickly pretending he didn't is news because it shows the cowardice and craven political groveling the Republican Party's leadership is doing these days. It also shows the cynical and existential nothingness of their political positions. Whether Jordan actually spoke with Trump recently and whether Trump said he was thinking of announcing because of all this "craziness" is unimportant. The fact of the matter is even if that exact conversation happened between these two self-absorbed dirtbags, it means nothing as both men are pathological in their lying. You can believe Trump said that just as much as you can believe Jordan made the whole conversation up just because he thought name-dropping Trump would make him seem more important to these two prospective fans.

Did Jordan tell his spokesperson he didn't say this? Did the spokesperson just tell a reporter he knew that Jordan didn't say anything about Trump? Who knows? Who cares? The amount of lying Jordan has been doing every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year of every decade probably makes it virtually impossible to remember a) which lie he told to whom and when, and b) what the truth of anything is anymore.

There are two angles of the exact same interaction with Jordan.