The Guardian adds to our knowledge of how the Obama administration and its allies overseas tried to discredit Donald Trump. (For purposes of this post, I assume that everything the Guardian says is true, even though it is based on anonymous sources who are pursuing their personal and political interests.)

Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told. GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added. Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said. The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said. Another source suggested the Dutch and the French spy agency, the General Directorate for External Security or DGSE, were contributors.

So just about every Western intelligence service was collaborating with the Obama administration in trying to elect Hillary Clinton. Yet, amazingly enough, they failed.

The blindingly obvious point that the Guardian tries to obscure is that the combined assets of all of these agencies failed to find any evidence of collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russia. We know this, because the Democrats have pulled out all the stops. Both before the election, and especially after the election, they have leaked furiously to try to discredit President Trump. If there were any evidence of collusion between Trump (or even obscure, minor “advisers” like Carter Page) and Russia, there would have been nothing else in the Washington Post or the New York Times for the past five months. But they have nothing.

What was really going on seems clear. Everyone involved in this story thought that Hillary Clinton was sure to win the election. Why? Because they read the Washington Post and the New York Times. Plus Real Clear Politics and 538. The suggestion that the Russian government tried to swing the election to Donald Trump is ridiculous. The Russians thought that Hillary was the certain winner, and if–a big if–they carried out a primitive phishing expedition into Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s email account, and subsequently sent the DNC emails to Wikileaks, it was to cause trouble for Clinton after she became president.

Likewise, British intelligence and the other agencies mentioned by the Guardian thought there was no doubt but that Hillary would win. How could they curry favor with the new administration, expected to be Obama’s third term? By feeding negative information about the opponent who was sure to lose, even though there was no real significance to the intelligence provided.

That’s what happened. The fact that liberals still try to push the “Russia” story, even when it is obvious that they are out of ammo, is pathetic.