For years after President Nixon resigned in scandal, journalists in the nation’s capital would receive anonymous phone calls from conspiracy buffs who fashioned themselves as another Deep Throat. It was always a version of the same story: They had the goods on a scandal bigger than Watergate.

As a well-known White House correspondent at The Washington Post, the newspaper that uncovered many of the abuses that drove Nixon from office, my father, Lou Cannon, received his share of such calls. In response to these crackpots, Dad espoused a simple rule: “If they say, ‘I’ve got a story that will make Watergate look like a picnic,’ I hang up on ’em.”

Far be it from me to suggest that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership have gone off their collective rocker. But using the Russians as foils to deflect attention from the embarrassing content of hacked Democrats’ emails was bad enough even before Pelosi played the Watergate card. But the 2016 presidential campaign has now officially entered the silly season.

“The Russians broke in,” Pelosi told reporters who inquired about a report in The New York Times on the cyberattack of the Democratic National Committee. “Who did they give the information to? I don’t know. Who dumped it? I don’t know.”

“I do know that this is a Watergate-like electronic break-in,” added the highest ranking House Democrat in Congress. “And anyone who would exploit, for the purpose of embarrassment or something like that, is an accomplice to that.”

Although she could have been referring to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, it’s clear that Pelosi was alluding to Donald Trump. How did The Donald get in the middle of this mess, you ask? That’s an interesting tale, one that tidily illustrates both the Democrats’ cynicism and the Republicans’ corresponding haplessness—the two traits that best epitomize the 2016 election cycle.

On July 22, three days before the opening of the Democrats’ nominating convention in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton had a problem, and it wasn’t necessarily one of her own making. Wikileaks, the international whistle-blowers, made a document dump of 19,000 internal Democratic National Committee emails. Those messages bolstered the longstanding suspicions of Bernie Sanders and his supporters that the DNC had been sabotaging Sanders to aid Clinton.

DNC officials tried to tar Sanders, who is Jewish, as an “atheist”; the DNC had installed moles loyal to Clinton in the Sanders campaign; it had secretly paid Clinton supporters to troll Sanders on social media. The Clinton campaign responded by seeking to divert attention from substance of the emails and onto the motives and identity of the hackers.

“It’s troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said in an artfully worded smear to ABC’s “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos. To the viewer at home this seemed a stretch. Russians? How did they get in this little passion play? What’s that go to do with Trump, anyway?

The answer would unfold in short order. The line about Russian hackers, presumably in league with Russian authorities (meaning President Vladimir Putin), was soon being floated by Democrats ranging from President Obama to mainstream media sites that reported it as fact, sometimes without bothering to cite anonymous FBI “sources.”

Did the Russians really do this? I have no first-hand knowledge that it’s true, and I doubt Nancy Pelosi does, either. But the Democrats went with that line from Day One. As for the Trump angle, this was planted that first day, too.

“I think that what’s troubling is how [Trump] praised Vladimir Putin,” Mook told Stephanopoulos.

Trump’s man-crush on Putin is troubling, and not only to Democrats, but let’s be fair—it unfolded in a context having nothing to do with hacking. What was actually disturbing about the DNC emails, and not only to Republicans, was that they suggested that the DNC had manipulated its own nominating process. Bringing Putin into the conversation was misdirection, pure and simple, and the Clinton campaign did it by using the classic McCarthyite tactic of guilt by association. It should have been an easy thing for Trump to bat away. Republican Party chief Reince Priebus showed him how.

“I don’t know if we can definitively say who has them and who’s taken them,” Priebus told Hugh Hewitt in an interview. “But the point is, the Russians didn’t write the emails. And neither did the Wikileaks people. … The DNC wrote those emails so they have to answer for what those emails say.”

But this is not how the story played out. For one thing, much of the media latched onto the Democrats’ dubious tactic of blaming Russia. Then Trump stepped into the trap. Instead of channeling Reince Priebus, Trump was distracted by gleeful speculation on right-wing social media that maybe Wikileaks had the 33,000 missing emails that Hillary Clinton and her lawyers had deep-sixed—you know, the ones the FBI couldn’t find and didn’t view as sinister or troubling.

“China, Russia, one of our many, many ‘friends’ came in and hacked the hell out of us,” Trump told a raucous crowd at a rally in Roanoke, Va. on the first day of the Democrats’ convention. “I guarantee we'll find the 33,000 e-mails.”

Trump later backtracked, claiming he was being “sarcastic,” and perhaps this was true. But he also said at a press conference: “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

This must be the Democrats’ fear, too, which is where Nancy Pelosi re-entered the stage. Her goal is to inoculate Clinton against damaging revelations in the release of future hacked material. She did so by tainting the source. Yes, the Watergate analogy is a stretch: Although the 1972 burglary did target Democratic National Committee headquarters, it wasn’t done by a foreign power, it was carried out on the orders of President Nixon’s re-election committee. It would be as if Trump or Priebus ordered the DNC hacking. Then again, MSNBC floated this very idea when the scandal first broke.

“Why weren’t you guys hacked?” one MSNBC anchor asked Priebus, as though that was evidence of Republican collusion with the Ruskies.

The moral of the episode is that Team Clinton is clever, the media compliant, and Trump clueless. But what kind of conspiracy theory is that? I think I’ll call my dad with an anonymous tip. I’ve got a story that will make Deep Throat look like a piker: Trump is a Clinton mole.