RACHEL MADDOW (HOST): Whole squads of the Fox News channel were built on this story, on that 80 second tape. For a while you could not avoid that tape on the Fox News channel. In 2010, the liberal watch dog Media Matters, they counted 95 different Fox News channel segments in the span of just over two weeks, all based on that 60-second, 80-second video. So that video became a study in how Fox News works. But it's also a study in the roots of the Donald Trump campaign because Fox News got that video from a guy named Mike Roman who runs a right-wing website called Election Journal, where he describes himself as a veteran political consultant and private investigator. And he shopped that video to Fox News, whereupon Fox News ran 90 segments on it over a two-week period and beat that dead horse for years. 

Mike Roman went on to be a regular contributor to right-wing fever swamp Breitbart.com, he wrote lots of articles about how the New Black Panther Party was undermining American elections, those two guys. And all the ways the Justice Department was turning a blind eye because, well, you know why. We tend to think of the New Black Panther thing as a ridiculous Fox News story and rightly so, but if you were looking for the root of this, how people in Alaska were telling me that Barack Obama and Eric Holder were part of a big black conspiracy to steal elections all over the country and the New Black Panthers are operating in every city in the country, how a crisis of confidence and the integrity of the America democracy gets its start with accusations of scary black nationalists engaged in voter intimidation. If you are looking for the root of all that, you are looking at this guy, Mike Roman. This merchant of doubt, this guy Mike Roman who started that whole thing. And Mike Roman is who the Donald Trump campaign has just hired to run its nationwide election protection operation for the presidential election this year three weeks from today.

Previously:

REPORT: Fox News has hyped phony New Black Panthers scandal at least 95 times

Fox News Raises Specter Of New Black Panthers To Stoke Fears Racial Violence In Missouri

Fox Poised To Manufacture Another Bogus New Black Panther Controversy