This could have been just another component of Trump’s   well-documented dishonesty , a particularly durable example of his saying something untrue repeatedly. But the idea that the Russia investigation was a “hoax” has endured — and has become a sort of ground zero for claims that federal law enforcement is out to get Trump.

In the week since Trump’s estate at Mar-a-Lago was searched by the FBI as part of a probe into his retention of government documents, this assertion that the Russia investigation was a hoax has emerged repeatedly, including from Trump. Because so many of his supporters believe, incorrectly, that the investigation into Trump’s campaign and Russia’s efforts was somehow thoroughly debunked, they are ready to believe that the new probe is similarly artificial.

So it’s worth pointing out that, in fact, the Russia probe was neither a hoax nor debunked — and allow people to draw their own conclusions about the new investigation as a result.

We’ll consider several components of the Russia investigation to show that popular right-wing presentations about it are incorrect. There’s what was known publicly even before Russia’s efforts to intervene were reported in the wake of the election. There’s what was happening behind the scenes that raised alarms with the Justice Department. And there’s the breathless effort to discredit everything that cast a derogatory light on Trump — an effort that has objectively failed......

.....It’s not worth exploring all of the claims that were made to suggest that the Russia probe was suspect. There were so many — and so many that were obviously ludicrous — that it’s nearly impossible anyway. This, too, was both part of the strategy and a preview of Trump’s long-term strategy. Claim to see enough smoke, and eventually people will just assume there’s a fire.

The theories that have been the most commonly cited and longest-lasting are as follows.

The Clinton campaign got the FBI to investigate Trump.   Shortly before Trump took office, BuzzFeed News published Steele’s dossier of reports. The claims it made were   broadly unsupported and often dubious , but an audience of Trump opponents eager to believe the worst devoured its components. Major news outlets generally avoided treating its claims as matters of fact.

But because so much of the public conversation focused on the dossier — at the time, the most robust set of allegations made against Trump publicly — so did the backlash from Trump’s team. So, when The Post reported in October 2017 that the dossier was indirectly   paid for   by Clinton’s campaign and the DNC, this was seen as proof that the effort to undercut Trump was simply politics.

That belief was particularly fortified once Trump’s allies in Congress released   a memo   claiming that the FISA warrant targeting Page was based largely on the contents of the dossier. (It also claimed that the judge asked to approve the warrant wasn’t told that it was paid for by Clinton’s team, which is misleading.) At that point, a narrative began to gel: The Russia probe was all based on Clinton’s dirty tricks.

It wasn’t true.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), now a host on Fox News, made clear at the time that the dossier was incidental to the probe itself: “There is a Russia investigation without a dossier,” he said on CBS News. “... The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos’s meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn’t have anything to do with obstruction of justice. So there’s going to be a Russia probe, even without a dossier.”

There were other allegations about the FISA warrant, too. Critics of the Russia investigation often suggested that, by targeting Page, the government really hoped to target others in Trump’s campaign — that they could use rules allowing multiple “hops” of connections to see what others were saying. This ignored: that the warrant was obtained after Page left the campaign; that people such as Manafort would be viable, stronger targets for information than an informal adviser; and that Page had a demonstrated record of ties to Russia that suggested a warrant might be useful.

There was an indictment obtained related to the warrant: An FBI agent   pleaded guilty   to altering an email with what he claimed was information he believed to be accurate as part of the application process.

This, it turns out, was the most significant accomplishment of an effort to undermine the Russia investigation launched by Attorney General William P. Barr. In May 2019, soon after taking office, Barr   appointed   U.S. Attorney John H. Durham to look into the origins of the Russia probe. Barr and Durham invested a great deal of time and money in doing so, without much luck.

The other big push from Durham, though, loops back to the idea that Clinton was somehow responsible for the Russia investigation. Last year, Durham’s investigation   obtained an indictment   against an attorney who worked for the firm that hired the investigatory firm that produced the Steele dossier. It centered on that weird blip of a news story about the Russian bank — Alfa Bank — being connected to Trump’s private business.

Earlier this year, Durham’s investigators revealed their theory: The evidence of a link was contrived by Clinton allies to impugn Trump and then dishonestly shopped to the FBI. Durham’s legal filings even suggested that there had been data collected from the White House as part of the effort.

There was a flurry of agitation about how the Trump White House was spied on — but Durham’s team later   admitted   the data was collected during the Obama administration. The claims that the data were artificial was never validated. Most importantly, though, the investigation into Trump’s campaign team preceded the Alfa Bank claim by a wide margin. The FBI appears   not to have bit   on the idea and, as noted above, it was never taken very seriously by the media, either.

One can understand the appeal to Trump’s allies of tying this back to Clinton. But none of this addresses the reality that the trigger for the probe was, instead, Papadopoulos’s conversation with that Australian diplomat — contact that came to the FBI’s attention in the midst of a number of other warning signs.

The investigation was started by FBI agents who hated Trump and wanted to hurt him.   Before the Clinton-did-it theory, the favored theory was that the Russia probe was a function of biased FBI agents.

In fact, two FBI officials — Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — shared text messages in 2016 disparaging Trump (and other candidates). Strzok played a role in the launch of Crossfire Hurricane; both were assigned to Mueller’s team (though Page only briefly).

By the time Trump left office, Page and Strzok had been investigated nearly as thoroughly as Trump himself. Two reports from the Justice Department inspector general   evaluated   their text messages and an incident in which some of their messages were   briefly lost . The IG also considered the idea that the probe had been a function of bias.

In short,   it wasn’t . The inspector found no evidence that anything except the information from the Australian diplomat triggered the probe and that that information was sufficient for an investigation to begin. It criticized the exchanges between Strzok and Page but didn’t find that the investigations were   tainted by bias .

The release of the text messages resulted in a QAnon-like effort to pick out seemingly suspicious passages, most of which aren’t worth mentioning. One, though, proved useful in answering one of the key rebuttals to the idea that Strzok and Page were hoping to damage Trump: If so, why didn’t news of the probe leak before the election?

So Trump and his allies settled on a mention of an “insurance policy” in one message. Their argument was that this showed that the intent was to have leverage over Trump if he won. Instead, Strzok explained ( credibly ), the message advocated investigating Trump’s links to Russia as an insurance policy in the unlikely event he won the presidency — but had been compromised by Russia.

The Mueller report didn’t show collusion.   The most common argument that the Russia investigation was a “hoax” derives from the conclusions of the report itself. One of Barr’s most effective actions as attorney general was releasing   a summary   of the Mueller team’s   final report   on its probe before the report became public — allowing him to frame its findings in a way that reflected positively on Trump.

“[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Barr’s summary reads. But that’s not what the report says — at least, not entirely.

“Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome,” the quoted passage reads in full, “and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Later, the report added: “A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.”

What the report showed was a robust web of ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian actors, from a meeting at Trump Tower to Manafort’s sharing of internal polling data with someone believed to be linked to Russian intelligence. A report   released   in August 2020 by a bipartisan Senate committee clarified and extended those links.

This is not to say that anyone proved that Trump or even Trump’s senior team colluded directly with Russia as it tried to aid his campaign. It is, instead, to say that none of this was a hoax, that there was good reason for the FBI to be suspicious and that there was good reason to open an investigation that’s unaffected by the claims Trump later raised. It is to say that treating the Justice Department’s Russia probe as riddled with anti-Trump bias depends on elevating nonessential questions as essential and isolated problems as systemic. It depends, primarily, on coming into the question with the presumption that Trump was wronged.

Which — particularly now — is precisely the presumption that Trump hopes you’ll adopt.