There are certain myths that the Republican Party embraces as fact, reality be damned. Many GOP officials just know, for example, that Donald Trump secretly won the 2020 election (he didn’t). They just know that the economy reached record highs during Trump’s first term (it didn’t). They just know that Trump’s Russia scandal has been discredited (it hasn’t).

And they just know that during Joe Biden’s presidency, the Democrat sicced federal law enforcement on his political opponents, despite the inconvenient fact that this never actually happened.

On Tuesday, during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s annual oversight hearing with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri summarized his party’s thinking on this widely embraced fiction. From the transcript:

I’ve heard [the committee’s Democratic members] say that Joe Biden never targeted his political enemies. Joe Biden never directed his attorney general to target his political opponents. Huh. That’s interesting, because I could have sworn that yesterday we learned that the FBI tapped my phone.

We did not learn that the FBI tapped the senator’s phone. Hawley might’ve seen political value in peddling the lie, but repeating a lie doesn’t make it true.

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The Missouri Republican, however, didn’t stop there. On the contrary, the senator apparently prepared what he considered a detailed case against the former Democratic president, highlighting specific examples:

• The FBI used an informant as part of an investigation into an anti-abortion extremist.
• Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo in 2021 related to threats against education personnel.
• A Pennsylvania man was prosecuted after allegedly assaulting a reproductive health care clinic escort. (He was later acquitted.)

In other words, Hawley — a Yale Law School graduate, a former Supreme Court clerk, a former law school professor and a former state attorney general — took his time to compile evidence of Biden using his office to target his political opponents. And when given the spotlight and relying on prepared notes, the senator presented a grand total of zero examples of Biden using his office to target his political opponents.

Hawley seemed quite pleased with himself after his presentation, as if he’d obviously painted a devastating picture against the former Democratic president. Whether the GOP senator realized it or not, he didn’t just fail, he failed in ways that proved the opposite of his intended point.