Hogan Gidley, a former Trump White House official, tried to unload a wheelbarrow of BS propaganda on CNN’s Jake Tapper. The ever-smarmy Gidley suggested that federal Judge Aileen Cannon, sabotaging presiding over the Mar-a-Lago stolen classified documents case, is compensation for the supposedly biased New York Judge Juan Merchan. In the same swipe, Gidley accused Tapper of bias for not acknowledging the (fake) equivalence – and suggested the entire mainstream media is unfair to the poor, persecuted Trump.

“No offense, Jake, but you talked about Aileen Cannon earlier, and you called her a Trump appointee, which is absolutely correct," Gidley began. "But you didn't characterize Judge Juan Merchan as a Biden donor, for example. So, I expect the media to come out full guns-ablazing on Donald Trump, regardless of how this looks."

Tapper wasn’t having it. With an expression worth a thousand words, he interrupted Gidley to say, "I think he gave like $35 bucks to buy a T-shirt for his daughter or something like that."

As Media Matters has reported, Fox News and its MAGA guests have relentlessly assailed Merchan as biased, conflicted and compromised, even though New York state’s Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics found that his three extremely modest donations to Democratic causes in 2020, totaling $35 in all, “cannot reasonably create an impression of bias or favoritism in the case before the judge.”

Not surprisingly, though, Gidley pretended he had prevailed. “A donor,” he called Merchan.

“OK,” Tapper said, having already made his point.