What’s been lost in the fog of conspiracy theorizing around the Mueller probe is the fact that virtually all of the FBI’s most senior managers supported Comey’s decision to announce the reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails 11 days before the election — an announcement that arguably helped Donald Trump pull off his victory.

Even as that investigation received blanket coverage, the public knew nothing at all about the FBI investigation into Trump’s top campaign officials for colluding to interfere with the presidential election to help Trump.

“Look, if there was some conspiracy by Jim Comey, Andy McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, the FBI, the deep state, whatever you want to imagine,” a senior federal law enforcement official told me, “the plain fact is that if someone at FBI wanted to tip the election, they would have leaked the existence of that investigation to the New York Times. But nobody said a word, and nobody did because that is the way things really work.”