GOP congressional candidate: The federal government and BP colluded to spill oil in the Gulf.

By Amanda Terkel Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, disgraced FEMA director Michael Brown went on Fox News and

claimed that the Obama administration wanted the devastating oil spill as an excuse to backtrack on its offshore drilling plan. Around the same time, Rush Limbaugh unleashed a conspiracy theory suggesting that someone intentionally blew up the rig in order to “head off more oil drilling.” After widespread mockery and criticism, these types of oil spill truthers have largely gone quiet. Now, however, Bill Randall, who’s competing to be the GOP nominee in a congressional race in North Carolina and identifies with the Tea Party movement, is going even further by saying that the federal government and BP worked together to spill oil:

“Now, I’m not necessarily a conspiracy person, but I don’t think enough investigation has been done on this,” Randall said at a media conference on Tuesday. “Someone needs to be digging into that situation. Personally, and this is purely speculative on my part and not based on any fact, but personally I feel there is a possibility that there was some sort of collusion. I don’t know how or why, but in that situation, if you have someone from a company violating a safety process and the government signing off on it, excuse me, maybe they wanted it to leak.

“But then it got beyond what was anticipated, and we had an explosion and loss of life. And, oh man, then we have panic. Is there a cover up going on? I’m not saying there necessarily is. But I think there’s enough facts on the table for people that (they) really need to do some investigative research and find out what went on with that and get a subpoena of records and everything else.”

The spokesman for Randall’s GOP primary opponent mocked his trutherism, saying, “Does Bill Randall also think we didn’t land on the moon?”