Election security

It looks like Putin conned the FBI into the ‘Russiagate’ probe

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Russia investigation launched and conducted by James Comey’s Federal Bureau of Investigation deserves to rank as one of the agency’s great blunders — at best.

President Trump famously calls the probe a hoax, a label he uses liberally, but in this instance, it may literally be true.

We’ve spent years obsessing about Russian meddling in our politics, and now it turns out that the original FBI investigation into the Trump campaign that morphed into the Mueller probe may have been instigated, in part, by Russian disinformation.

In other words, the Kremlin may have succeeded in getting us to turn even more viciously against ourselves and conduct our politics in an atmosphere characterized by screaming headlines, dark insinuations and endless investigations — all by feeding a few lies to a private eye hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump.

And the people who did the most to whip up this hysteria were the same ones who professed to be most alarmed at Russia meddling.