After gestating for several weeks in the fever swamps of the far right, the notion that the F.B.I. embedded a spy inside the Trump campaign has finally birthed the inevitable presidential tweet, with Donald Trump declaring Sunday that the Justice Department must launch an investigation into itself. “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes,” he wrote, “and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

The existence of the aforementioned spy is not quite fake news, though Trump’s understanding of the situation appears to have been twisted by his dual convictions that nobody on his campaign has committed any wrongdoing and that government agents loyal to Barack Obama are trying to run him out of office. Trump has fretted about being surveilled before: in March 2017, he accused the Obama administration of having “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory”—a claim he continued to make, with increasing fervor, despite a total lack of evidence that Obama had ordered anything of the sort. Instead, what appears to have happened is both more conventional and more extraordinary.

The F.B.I., as The Washington Post reported Friday, did ask a source to make contacts with various people in Trump’s orbit to ascertain whether they had been communicating with Russian agents. But there is no evidence that the source was “implanted” as Trump tweeted, or that he had investigated the campaign for “political purposes.” On the contrary, it appears that the bureau responded to suspicions of a foreign-intelligence threat entirely by the book. The fact that the F.B.I. was investigating contacts between Trump-campaign officials and Russians was never disclosed to the public, and was only leaked months after the election. If it was a politically motivated conspiracy to tank Trump’s electoral chances and boost Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Justice Department sure botched the operation.

What happens next is up in the air. The Justice Department swiftly defused the situation over the weekend, responding to Trump’s tweet by announcing plans to fold the president’s questions into an ongoing internal inquiry into the department’s investigation of the Trump campaign, rather than by opening a new case. “If anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know about it and take appropriate action,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, said in a statement. That may mollify Trump for now, giving the president assurance that the matter is being looked into, while not acquiescing so forcefully as to call the Justice Department’s independence into question. Still, Trump’s allies in Congress are already calling for more. On Monday, Congressman Matt Gaetz told Fox News that it should be improper for the Department to investigate itself, and suggested the matter would be better handled by a second special counsel to investigate the investigators. If Trump jumps on that bandwagon, it may be that Rosenstein’s dilemma has only been diverted.

The president has long threatened to involve himself more deeply in Mueller’s investigation, either by firing Rosenstein, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or by ordering the firing of Mueller himself. “At some point, I will have no choice but to use the powers granted to the presidency and get involved,” he said earlier this month. Critics worry that Trump could follow in the footsteps of Richard Nixon, who forced a series of Justice Department officials to resign when they refused to carry out his orders to fire the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. Yet as the most recent developments in the Russia case suggest, Trump has other means at his disposal to muddy the waters. Already, much of Fox News and the Republican establishment have adopted Trump’s defensive posture and accusatory tone toward Sessions, Rosenstein, and Mueller (all Republicans, themselves), suggesting that they are part of a broader conspiracy, dating back to Obama’s final months in office. “The prior government did it, but the present government, for some reason I can’t figure out, is covering it up,” the president’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, told the Post. An informant in the Trump campaign, he added, would make Mueller’s investigation “completely illegitimate.”