Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson sounded off on what he described as an “irrational” belief that Russia swayed the results of the 2016 presidential election to favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

One of the leading figures championing that theory is former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, who Carlson described as “delusional.”

Transcript as follows:

We’re coming to you this Thursday unfortunately from a very sick city, a place where many of the people in charge aren’t just wrong, but increasingly are irrational.

Washington is in the grip of unprecedented mass hysteria over Russia. Yes, Russia. Take three steps back. It’s a freezing, poor country on the other side of the globe where the average life expectancy is lower than that in Bangladesh.

Russia’s is a place whose economy is smaller than the economy of Texas. It’s a country that could barely produce a working escalator or non-poisonous vodka.

And yet, that country which is regarded by sober people as sad and increasingly irrelevant is, according to Democrats in Washington, in virtually complete control of the workings of the U.S. government.

They tell us that every day and they’re starting to seem like they believe it. That’s demented.

The most striking example comes from former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper. In an interview just yesterday, Clapper claimed that Russia flipped the results of the 2016 election, got Trump elected over Hillary.

As for evidence of that, Clapper admitted he didn’t have any because, of course, he doesn’t have any. Nobody else has any either. There is no evidence that any foreign country changed a single American vote in 2016.

And by the way, that was Clapper’s position just two years ago when it was the position of the Obama administration that vote tampering by a foreign power was completely irresponsible and impossible to contemplate.

Now that Trump is in office, of course, Clapper and other Democrats are warning that Russia will try to subvert this year’s midterms as well. They have no evidence of that either.

Now, keep in mind that Jim Clapper is not some fringe radio show host or backbencher in Congress. For years, he held one of the top intelligence posts in the country, yet he’s delusional. That’s terrifying.

And he’s not the only delusional one. The CIA operative spying on the Trump campaign also sounds like he’s unbalanced. Report today from The Daily Caller finds that that man once falsely accused a Russian academic at Cambridge University of being a Russian infiltrator and said an entire intelligence seminar was compromised by Russian agents, like Kim Philby were still alive.

This afternoon, congressional leaders received a classified briefing from DOJ and intel officials about actual spying that took place in 2016, not spying from spooky Russian agents sent from the Kremlin, but from the Obama FBI. And that might put some of this in perspective.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor