As the indictments pile up in the Russia investigation, Donald Trump has begun pushing a radical new theory designed to discredit Robert Mueller’s yearlong probe into his campaign. As has now been widely reported, the F.B.I. in 2016 became so alarmed by evidence that Russian agents had infiltrated the Trump campaign that they used a secret informant to interview three Trump aides—Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis. (Papadopoulos has already pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about his contacts with Russian officials, and is cooperating with Mueller.) Among defenders of the Russia inquiry, this development has been greeted as confirmation that the F.B.I., far from seeking to undermine the Trump campaign, pursued the least invasive counterintelligence methods possible to investigate Russian interference. If anything, these people say, the F.B.I. under director James Comey went too far in keeping its fears hidden from public view on the eve of the election. Trump, however, has adopted a bizarre counter-narrative for the F.B.I. inquest. As my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported yesterday, the president has become convinced that anti-Trump forces inside the F.B.I. actually entrapped his advisers, and may have even planted evidence of Russian collusion as a sort of insurance policy if he won the election.

While Trump has not yet voiced the most explicit version of this conspiracy publicly, he has been slowly building the case that the Justice Department investigation is, in fact, a Deep State plot to delegitimize his presidency or even force him out of office. “If the FBI or DOJ was infiltrating a campaign for the benefit of another campaign, that is a really big deal,” he tweeted over the weekend, promoting a popular theory on the right (and, increasingly, on Fox News) that the use of an informant was politically motivated. As evidence, he laid out a series of alleged Democratic scandals that the Justice Department had declined to scrutinize with comparable fervor. “[T]hey aren’t looking at the corruption in the Hillary Clinton Campaign where she deleted 33,000 Emails, got $145,000,000 while Secretary of State, paid McCabes wife $700,000 (and got off the FBI hook along with Terry M) and so much more,” he wrote. “Don’t worry about Dems FISA Abuse, missing Emails or Fraudulent Dossier!” In another string of tweets, he questioned why the F.B.I. had never seized the Democratic National Committee server that was allegedly hacked by the Russians and asked why lobbyist Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chair, had never been “charged and arrested.” On Sunday, he demanded on Twitter that the D.O.J. launch an internal investigation into the origin of the Russia probe to determine if “the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes - and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

On Monday, Trump gave the first public indication that he believes former C.I.A. director John Brennan, a vociferous Trump critic, orchestrated the surveillance of his campaign. “John Brennan is panicking,” he tweeted, quoting a Fox News commentator. “This guy is the genesis of this whole Debacle. This was a Political hit job, this was not an Intelligence Investigation. Brennan has disgraced himself, he’s worried about staying out of Jail.” On Tuesday, he urged his followers to “Follow the money,” and claimed that the informant was a political operative working for Clinton.

It’s hard to square this particular element of the F.B.I. conspiracy theory with the reality of the 2016 election. If law enforcement agents were working with Obama and Clinton to prevent Trump from becoming president, how come no aspect of the investigation was made public until after the election? If this was a plot to secure the election, it was remarkably poorly-timed. On the contrary, it appears the F.B.I. went out of its way to alert Trump to Russian efforts to recruit Trump associates, warning him in mid 2016 about the Kremlin’s interest in his campaign. (Trump, of course, likely already knew this, given the series of high-level contacts between Russian officials and senior members of the Trump campaign throughout the summer before the election.) As former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Tuesday on ABC’s The View, when asked whether Trump should have been happy that the bureau worked to ensure the integrity of the election, “he should be.” Trump quickly shot back on Twitter, “No, James Clapper, I am not happy. Spying on a campaign would be illegal, and a scandal to boot!”