Lou Dobbs is what's wrong with Trump's Republican Party

Lou Dobbs is, theoretically, a journalist.

He hosts a show on Fox Business Network. And on Thursday morning, he shared to Twitter the apparent home phone number of Jessica Leeds, the woman who has accused Donald Trump of groping her on an airplane over 30 years ago.

Doxxing Leeds is gross enough. But I also want to note that Dobbs did so in the service of spreading an obviously false claim about her.

Dobbs shared a tweet purporting to show that Leeds' phone number from a web search matches a Clinton Foundation phone number from WikiLeaks releases.

Suspicious, right? Except the phone numbers are not the same, as Dobbs would have realized if he spent 30 seconds examining the conspiracy-nut blog post the tweet linked to.

Only five of the 10 digits Leeds' and the Foundation's phone numbers match.

Three of the five matching digits are "212."

Congratulations, Lou Dobbs. You figured out that Jessica Leeds lives in Manhattan, and the Clinton Foundation is also located in Manhattan. Very suspicious.

Dobbs is symptomatic of the broad problems in the Republican Party that led to Donald Trump: These people will believe any lie, no matter how obvious, if it flatters their political preconceptions.

Fox Business, theoretically, has a standards and practices department. Will they discipline Dobbs for sharing a false accusation about a sexual assault accuser, and for sharing her personal contact information in the process? The network didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider earlier Thursday.

This is an editorial. The opinions and conclusions expressed above are those of the author.