In the previous three installments of this series, I chronicled the attempts made by an old friend to convince me of an outlandish conspiracy theory being promoted by the group of rabid online Trump supporters known as “QAnon.” According to my friend, initiates of the Illuminati had teamed up with subterranean demons to torture, rape and eat kidnapped children in underground military bases ruled by the mortal enemies of Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump did something incredibly dangerous.

President Trump addressed the baseless, far-right QAnon conspiracy theory directly for the first time on Wednesday, saying he didn't know much about the online community and its followers other than "they like me very much."

"I heard that these are people who love our country," Trump added in response to a question about the conspiracy community during a press briefing at the White House.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he doesn’t know much about QAnon, a community that follows a person or group that is said to have high-level access inside the U.S. government and disseminates conspiracy theories.

“Well I don’t know much about the movement, other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” the president told reporters in Washington when asked about QAnon.

The Republican Party let out a collective sigh of relief when Steve King—a soon-to-be-former Iowa congressman known for his racist and nativist rhetoric—lost his re-election primary in early June. But Republicans are still in a bind. In a partisan political climate that has sown the seeds for fringe candidates to win elections, the GOP is struggling to distance itself from conspiracy-mongering nominees without surrendering key districts to Democratic opponents.

The links to the viral video “Plandemic” started showing up in my Facebook feed Wednesday. “Very interesting,” one of my friends wrote about it. I saw several subsequent posts about it, and then my brother texted me, “Got a sec?”

Donald Trump Jr. implied former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had something to do with the death of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump Jr. lashed out at his father's 2016 rival on Saturday, a day after she mocked the president for his offhand question asking Dr. Deborah Birx if injecting disinfectant could be a protective measure against the coronavirus.

"Please don’t poison yourself because Donald Trump thinks it could be a good idea," Clinton tweeted.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top expert on infectious disease, on Friday, rejected a conspiracy theory that the novel coronavirus was created in and escaped a Chinese lab.

At the daily White House press briefing, a reporter asked: "Mr. President, I wanted to ask Dr. Fauci: Could you address these suggestions or concerns that this virus was somehow manmade, possibly came out of a laboratory in China?"

Two correctional officers who were assigned to guard Jeffrey Epstein on the night he was found dead in his cell of an apparent suicide have been indicted on criminal charges, federal prosecutors in New York announced Tuesday.

Authorities have charged Michael Thomas and Tova Noel with making false records and conspiracy. The two worked as jail guards at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal jail in Manhattan that's mostly used for defendants awaiting trial.

Two federal workers who were on duty the night Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in a Manhattan jail were charged on Tuesday with failing to check on him every half-hour as they were supposed to and then lying about it on prison documents.

The two federal Bureau of Prisons employees, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were expected to appear in United States District Court in Manhattan to face charges including conspiracy and making false records.