So the FBI opens a probe into Anthony Weiner and discovers a bunch of Hillary Clinton campaign emails on his laptop.

FBI Director James Comey, a Republican heading an agency stocked mostly with Republicans, is terrified that his own staff will think he’s playing politics (and therefore leak the story) if he doesn’t openly pursue these ‘new leads’.  So he announces a new Hillary probe, just a month from Election Day.

The Punch Line (AP/Patrick Semansky, File)

Meanwhile, the CIA and FBI have already been watching Trump aides Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort and Carter Page for several years, due to their long-standing Russia ties. When GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, gets tapes of conversations between them, other members of the Trump campaign and members of the Russian inner circle (let’s remember here that no one ever owns or controls anything sizeable, powerful or successful in Russia without Vladimir Putin’s active sponsorship), they bring this information to a White House briefing. That was the briefing where the Christopher Steele dossier was also discussed and where Joe Biden was quoted as saying, “If it’s true, it’s treason.”

But nobody says anything publicly about Trump being compromised except Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader at the time, who comes off like an alarmist partisan.

So, in total contrast to the whining from Trump’s White House, the FBI, CIA and Obama White House all acted in ways that benefited Trump’s campaign and harmed Hillary’s. Why on Earth would they do that?

Insert your favorite conspiracy theory here, if you wish. I think the answer is simple and damning:

They were all convinced Hillary would win.

And nobody wanted to give the blustering Trump–who was already complaining loudly that the election was rigged against him–any more reason to martyr himself. Nobody wanted to bolster the pseudo-Fox News everyone knew he was planning after the election. Nobody wanted to hobble Hillary’s administration by giving his claims credibility.

The other problem, I suspect, is that some of the most damning and reliable intelligence against Trump’s people came from intel sources in the Russian hierarchy, people we’ve worked very hard to cultivate and didn’t want to compromise or expose–particularly not to hurt a candidate who wasn’t going to win anyway.

It’s important to remember how things really happen in the world–in this case, America’s history turned on people making false assumptions and on the impossibility, until the moment it happened, to take Donald Trump seriously as President of the United States.

More proof, as though more was needed, that History has a sense of humor, but it’s a black one.