What’s the difference between a suspension and being “benched”?

Whatever it is, Judge Andrew Napolitano is back on Fox News after reports that he was suspended temporarily because he openly promoted an internet hoax about the British intelligence community surveilling Donald Trump’s team, at the behest of former President Obama.

His poorly sourced story was used by the president as “proof,” but otherwise discounted by others at Fox, such as Shepard Smith, who said Fox News had seen nothing to back up Napolitano’s claims.

The British government disputed the claims, vehemently.

“Yes, I do and the sources stand by it,” Napolitano said when asked if he’s sticking by the story. “And the American public needs to know more about this rather than less because a lot of the government surveillance authority will expire in the fall and there will be a great debate about how much authority we want the government to have to surveil us, and the more the American public knows about this the more informed their and the Congress’ decision will be.”

He added that “a lot more is going to come” on the issue.

Then pull him to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, which is currently having hearings into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, as well as investigating President Trump’s March 4 Twitter claim that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower – a claim that no one, as yet, has seen any proof.

“He used GCHQ. What is that? It’s the initials for the British intelligence-finding agency,” Napolitano said on Fox. “So, simply by having two people saying to them president needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump’s conversations, involving President-elect Trump, he’s able to get it and there’s no American fingerprints on this.”

Napolitano, who has suggested that he’s on Trump’s short list for the Supreme Court, may be eager to curry favor with the president, or he may be fully convinced of the rightness of his claims.

Regardless of his reasoning, he’s standing on the very claims that got him sidelined, so let him back those claims up by testifying.