Back in May, Donald Trump’s exquisitely delicate ego motivated him to establish the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was tasked with examining the impacts of “improper voting, fraudulent voter registrations, and fraudulent voting.” In other words, it was designed to prove beyond a doubt that the only reason Trump had failed to win the popular vote was due to millions of instances of voter fraud—an entirely baseless claim often repeated by the president and his allies. Yet, after months of work, the commission was unable to substantiate Trump’s claims, leading to the announcement on Wednesday that the White House would disband it. But if you ask the president, its dismantling has nothing to do with a lack of voter fraud and everything to do with a vast conspiracy against him.

“Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” Trump said in a statement. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action.” Also adopting an alternative view of the situation was the panel’s vice chairman, Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas and, notably, one of the few who supported Trump’s fraud claims. Kobach told The New York Times that there had been “a determined effort by the left” to kneecap the investigation through various lawsuits. “It got to the point where the staff of the commission was spending more time responding to litigation than doing an investigation,” Kobach said.

The majority of said litigation was filed by those who feared that the entire point of the commission was to make it more difficult for minorities, the poor, and the young to cast votes at all. The panel was even sued by one of its own members, Democrat Matthew Dunlap, who claimed that its “operations have not been open and transparent, not even to the commissioners themselves, who have been deprived access to documents prepared by and viewed by other commissioners.” Those fears escalated when the commission sent out a letter in June requesting that states release sensitive voter information, such as full names, addresses, dates of birth, political parties, last-four digits of Social Security numbers, and voting history from 2006 on. “That they would be able to build out this nationwide database [on such a timeline] with any level of accuracy defies the imagination,” Vanita Gupta, who ran the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration, told my colleague Kia Makarechi at the time, adding that the letter “lays the groundwork for mass voter purging.” In an interview with the Times on Wednesday, Gupta noted that the “abrupt abandonment of the commission makes clear that it had become a thoroughly discredited body that could not find evidence of mass voter fraud.”

Shockingly, the president did not agree: