A mystery even more gripping than the saga of the hamburger that was purchased in one state, misplaced in another, and somehow inspired five days of national news coverage as a result.

Only two possibilities. One is that Turning Point has an imbecile on its design team who went looking for an authentic presidential seal, somehow missed the endless images available online of the real thing, and landed on a parody seal without recognizing it as such. Or, two, Charlie Kirk is a Never Trumper under deep, deep cover who pulled off a prank for the ages.

Charlie, if you’re reading this: No worries. I’ll never tell.

Here’s a clearer look at the fake seal. You can’t make out the slogan in the vid but you can here: “45 ES UN TITERE.” Translation: “Trump is a puppet.”

here’s the image pic.twitter.com/6DhQrm9uUF

— Dusty Giebel (@DustinGiebel) July 25, 2019

Turning Point is telling the media today that theory one is the correct answer. Which makes sense: What sort of anti-Trumper would join TPUSA’s design team and work diligently for them for months or years in the idle hope hat he might one day end up with control of the backdrop during a presidential appearance?

The individual responsible, a member of TPUSA’s AV team, was let go in the wake of the incident. According to a source familiar with the event, the incident was just a terrible Google search mistake. TPUSA had event branding on the screens, but during a run through ahead of Trump’s remarks a few hours before the event, the team was told they had to change the branding to a presidential seal, prompting a search for a high quality image.

“One of our video team members did a Google Image search for a high-res png (file) presidential seal,” a source familiar with the incident said, adding that the individual “did the search and with the pressure of the event, didn’t notice that it is a doctored seal.”

Turns out the fake seal is linked to anti-Trump merchandise marketed on Facebook and Twitter by a Web retailer calling himself, ahem, “OneTermDonnie.”

I’m surprised the White House insisted on the presidential seal as a backdrop instead of letting TPUSA use Trump’s speech to promote its brand. If you’ve ever seen him pushing his friends’ books on Twitter you know he’s always up for using his office to help enrich a pal. Two things I can’t figure out, though. First, why didn’t TPUSA get an image of the seal from the White House’s advance team? Where was the advance team in helping prepare for this event? And also, why didn’t TPUSA just duplicate the seal they were already using as part of the production? You can see it center stage on the screen behind Trump as he walks out in the clip above. That’s the correct seal, not the two-headed Russian one.

Here’s Trump at the same event informing a roomful of impressionable teenagers that Article II of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.” Considering how the DOJ believes that a sitting president is unindictable, he’s … sort of right, isn’t he?