“Almost as soon as gunshots were reported from the White House Correspondents’ dinner on Saturday night, social media was flooded with conspiracy theories and finger-pointing over the attack. In a now-common phenomenon after such incidents, prominent influencers fill the information vacuum with speculation in a bid for attention and followers,” the New York Times reports.

“The miasma of falsehoods, rumors and conjecture has clouded multiple breaking news moments in recent years, including two previous assassination attempts against President Trump and the capture of Nicolás Maduro, then Venezuela’s president.”

Aaron Blake: “Perhaps no modern politician has done more to mainstream conspiracy theories than President Donald Trump.”

“After effectively launching his career in Republican politics with false ‘birther’ claims about then-President Barack Obama, Trump has spent a decade lobbing all manner of wild theories about the “stolen” 2020 election, Haitian migrants eating people’s pets and the like. He’s also cultivated allies who helped him push those theories, often convincing many of his supporters.”

“But the monster Trump helped create could now be coming for him.”

The “disappearing scientists” story is, in its way, a remarkable achievement, writes Daniel Engber.

“To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the phrase pattern of events is imprecise, because there is no pattern here at all. Given all the people who could have been roped into this narrative but weren’t, any hope of finding meaning falls away. Barring any dramatic new disclosures, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being a sham in every way at once.”

President Trump said documents related to UFOs and unexplained aerial phenomena, aka UAPs, will be released “very soon,” NewsNation reports.

Vice President JD Vance told a podcaster he’ll “get to the bottom” of the government’s UFO files, adding that he’s “obsessed,” The Hill reports.

Said Vance: “Trust me, anybody who’s curious about this, I’m more curious than anybody, and I’ve got three years of the very tippy-top of the classification. I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”

New York Magazine: “QAnon is premised on the idea that a global cabal is engaged in the rampant sex-trafficking of minors, and one takeaway from the never-ending Epstein blowback is that we really are governed by an overclass of degenerate elites.”

“What’s more, the crude underlying logic of QAnon is being reinforced with every new screen-grab of a terse missive from jeevacation@gmail.com, making the universe of conspiracy thinking increasingly legible to the rest of us and creating a cycle of perpetual astonishment at the discovery of previously unsuspected webs of influence and intrigue.”

“In other words, the Epstein files are making us more like Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

“If you told him Martians came and stole votes, he’d be inclined to believe it.”

— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), quoted by the New York Times, in secret grand jury testimony on Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.

President Trump shared various conspiracy theories about fraud in Minnesota  — including a baseless one that Gov. Tim Walz orchestrated the assassination of state Rep. Melissa Hortman (D) to cover up fraud, the Washington Post reports.

“Conspiracy theories never go away, and each revelation feeds that. That’s pretty much it.”

— A longtime Republican operative, quoted by the Washington Post, on the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein fallout.

“Far-right influencers have been hinting in recent weeks that they have finally found a venue — Miami — and a federal prosecutor — Jason A. Reding Quiñones — to pursue long-promised charges of a ‘grand conspiracy’ against President Trump’s adversaries,” the New York Times reports.

“Their theory of the case, still unsupported by the evidence: A cabal of Democrats and ‘deep-state’ operatives, possibly led by former President Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a yearslong plot spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced after leaving office.”

“But that narrative, which has been promoted in general terms by Mr. Trump and taken root online, has emerged in a nascent but widening federal investigation.”

“The Trump administration has ordered FBI employees to immediately search their workstations and digital media for any records pertaining to the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa,” CNN reports.

“A Florida federal judge has empaneled a grand jury for January that a close Donald Trump ally recently suggested is related to a criminal investigation into allegations of a long-running Democratic conspiracy against the president,” Bloomberg reports.

“Mike Davis, who has advocated for a criminal investigation into Trump’s political opponents, made the comments in a video he posted on social media.”