Days before the 2016 election, James Comey announced he was reopening the F.B.I. probe into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information after a trove of her e-mails was discovered on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The e-mail probe had hung like a storm cloud over her campaign until that July, when the F.B.I. director concluded she’d been “careless” but not criminal in her use of a private e-mail address and server. But now, months later, it was back. “He dumped that on me on October 28,” Clinton would later recall of Comey, “and I immediately start falling.”

While it’s hard to say for sure if Comey’s infamous letter ultimately handed Donald Trump the White House, it does make one thing clear: that the president’s claims about being the subject of a treasonous “witch hunt” and attempted “coup” by federal law enforcement is complete and utter bunk. Trump has regularly accused Comey and other “deep state” officials of “treason” for launching a baseless probe—allegations that high-profile Republicans have backed up. But, as Comey wrote in a Washington Post op-ed Tuesday, there’s a huge hole in the president’s victimhood narrative: if U.S. officials were really conspiring to sink Trump’s campaign, why not use the politically-damaging Russia probe to, well, damage the then-candidate in 2016? “If we were ‘deep state’ Clinton loyalists bent on stopping him, why would we keep it secret?” Comey wrote. “Why wouldn’t the much-maligned F.B.I. supervisor Peter Strzok—the alleged kingpin of the ‘treasonous’ plot to stop Trump—tell anyone?”

The obvious answer, of course, is that there was no anti-Trump conspiracy. Comey goes on:

And there’s still more to the dumbness of the conspiracy allegation. At the center of the alleged F.B.I. “corruption” we hear so much about was the conclusion that Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied to internal investigators about a disclosure to the press in late October 2016. McCabe was fired over it. And what was that disclosure? Some stop-Trump election-eve screed? No. McCabe authorized a disclosure that revealed the FBI was actively investigating the Clinton Foundation, a disclosure that was harmful to Clinton.

Of course, none of that matters to the president, who has pushed the Justice Department to investigate the Russia probe’s origins. “They have unsuccessfully tried to take down the wrong person,” Trump said in a bizarre presser this month. “That’s treason.” In recent days, his allies have piled on. Investigators’ actions “could well be treason,” Rep. Liz Cheney said on ABC News’ This Week. And the cajoling has delivered: Attorney General William Barr, who agrees that there may have been “spying” on Trump’s campaign, was last week granted “full and complete authority” to declassify materials related to the origins of the Russia probe, in essence allowing the guy who exonerated Trump by misrepresenting Robert Mueller’s report to selectively disclose details that back up the president’s narrative.

Of course, there’s almost no chance Barr will conclude that every official involved in the probe behaved impeccably. Any minor misstep he uncovers will undoubtedly fuel the president’s conspiracy-mongering, giving his allies ammunition to support his claims. Still, no amount of new detail would be enough to overcome the basic fallacy Comey highlights: that the same F.B.I. officials who saw fit to disclose a politically-troublesome probe into Clinton opted not to do so in Trump’s case. “There was no treason. There was no attempted coup. Those are lies, and dumb lies at that,” he wrote. “There were just good people trying to figure out what was true, under unprecedented circumstances.”

More Great Stories from Vanity Fair

— Visit our brand-new, searchable digital archive now!

— How Beto O’Rourke lost his narrative

— Wall Street’s dangerous new addiction

— Can Kamala Harris catch fire?

— Is Uber’s the biggest I.P.O. flop in history?

— From the archives: Sixteen words that changed the world

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.