The story of President Donald Trump’s infamous tweets falsely accusing President Barack Obama of having his “wires tapped,” and the steps Trump and his enablers have taken since to legitimate that claim, is a perfect microcosm of everything contemptuous and transgressive about this administration.

The president’s impulsiveness, his indifference to facts, his unwillingness to admit error, his White House’s hostility to truth, and the broader Republican Party’s cynical permissiveness of his antics—all of these tendencies were well known before Trump reached for his Android phone one month ago and started typing. What was less obvious, given the allegation’s unique synthesis of gravity and absurdity, was how to treat it as a news event. Every contested assertion a president makes must be run to ground, but in this case, the universal debunking—and the White House’s subsequent refusal to retract the claim—raised questions nearly as serious as the false scandal Trump had alleged.

Most to the point: How should reporters, knowing that the initial wiretapping accusation is meritless, treat Trump’s ensuing efforts to muddy the waters?

The Trump administration’s first two attempts so were so plainly ridiculous, they were met with appropriate skepticism. Reporters, backed by intelligence community leaders, discredited White House suggestions that Trump and his aides were direct targets of U.S. intelligence surveillance intercepts, or of British spying conducted on Obama’s behalf.

But now the administration has concocted a third justification that is far more insidious because it migrates from the realm of fantastical conspiracy theories to something more complex, facially plausible, and contiguous with Trump’s stated purpose: to shift public scrutiny away from his campaign’s complicity in Russian election interference, and toward his unsubstantiated counterclaim that the Russia story is fake and driven by illegal, selective, and politically motivated leaking of classified intelligence.