Over the course of 48 hours, most of Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories get hammered

The reason for that is fairly simple. Trump’s presentation of his own suffering and of his opponent’s malfeasance were always detached from reality. They were useful for filling hours of airtime on Fox News, but, outside of the conservative media greenhouse where Trump himself gets heated up, there simply wasn’t evidence that Trump’s charges were accurate.

Eventually he ran out of time. There would be no October surprise reshaping the presidential contest. But there was a late surprise, as it turned out, one that unfolded independently in a few places over the past few days.

And we have an array of new evidence showing just how hollow Trump’s claims were.

Trump’s defining complaint since taking office has been that the investigation into Russian interference in the election four years ago and questions about possible overlap with his campaign was dirty, prejudiced and unwarranted. Attorney General William P. Barr, whose tenure has been defined by acquiescing to Trump’s whims, assigned a U.S. attorney named John Durham to dig into the origins of the Russia probe and suss out any suspect behavior or motivations.

It’s clear that the president and his allies hoped that there would be a line drawn back to Biden himself. Trump has publicly insinuated that there was one. Yet, as the months passed, there was not only no line drawn to Biden but very few hints of what the investigation was actually uncovering.

On Monday, New York magazine reported on the likely reason: There wasn’t anything nefarious afoot.

“According to two sources familiar with the probe, there has been no evidence found, after 18 months of investigation, to support Barr’s claims that Trump was targeted by politically biased Obama officials to prevent his election,” the magazine’s Murray Wass writes. “In fact, the sources said, the Durham investigation has so far uncovered no evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden or Barack Obama, or that they were even involved with the Russia investigation.”

This wasn’t the first probe into the investigation’s origins. When two FBI officials were found to have exchanged text messages disparaging Trump in 2016 (leading to both leaving the investigatory team cobbled together by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III), the Justice Department’s inspector general looked into the possibility of bias as an underpinning of the Russia probe. None was found.

Part of Trump’s rationale for arguing that he was the victim of bias was his insistence that the Russia investigation found nothing wrong. Thanks to Barr’s early framing of the final report produced by Mueller’s team as exonerating, Trump was able to pivot from “see, I did nothing wrong” to “this whole probe was an effort to take me down” more easily.

Mueller’s report, though, made clear that there were multiple nexuses at which members of Trump’s team had unusual or suspicious links to Russian actors. There was the odd meeting at Trump Tower, of course. Less well known was that Trump’s campaign chairman for much of 2016, Paul Manafort, passed internal campaign polling material to a man named Konstantin Kilimnik — a person who a bipartisan Senate committee determined had ties to Russian intelligence.

Newly released documents obtained by BuzzFeed News offer additional information about another such connection: the murky path from WikiLeaks, which was in possession of material stolen by Russian hackers, to Trump adviser Roger Stone.

We’ve known since 2016 that Stone claimed to have a connection to WikiLeaks. Over the course of the Mueller investigation and thanks to public testimony from Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, we understand that Stone allegedly informed Trump about what WikiLeaks was planning before it launched two dumps of stolen material in July and October of that year.

What we didn’t know was how much evidence there was that Stone was doing more than just making educated guesses about what was coming.

“In July 2016, political consultant Roger Stone told Trump as well as several campaign advisers that he had spoken with [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange and that WikiLeaks would be publishing the documents in a matter of days,” the BuzzFeed report indicates. “Stone told the then-candidate via speakerphone that he ‘did not know what the content of the materials was,’ according to the newly unveiled portions of the report, and Trump responded ‘oh good, all right’ upon hearing the news.”

“The newly unredacted portions of the Mueller report also show that after the initial email dump by WikiLeaks, Trump personally asked Manafort to keep in touch with Stone, who in turn told the then-campaign chair to keep him ‘apprised of any developments with WikiLeaks,’ ” BuzzFeed’s report later adds. “Investigators were also told by Gates that Trump had multiple phone conversations with Stone during the campaign and that, following one call held en route to LaGuardia airport, ‘Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.’ “

None of this is particularly earth-shattering, though it does offer new insight into the Mueller team’s internal debates over what charges might be filed. (Stone was eventually charged with obstruction and lying to prosecutors. After Stone was found guilty, Trump commuted his sentence.) It does, however, amplify questions about Trump’s claim to Mueller’s team that he didn’t recall whether he was aware in advance of what WikiLeaks was doing.

Then there are Trump’s Biden accusations. Since last year, when he leveraged his office to pressure Ukraine, the president has focused on the former vice president and his son Hunter Biden as potential sources of scandal that could reshape the presidential race. That effort seemed to get a boost in October when oddly sourced documents obtained by Giuliani were used to argue that Joe Biden was somehow involved in his son’s business. Trump and Giuliani leveled a series of dramatic allegations, the most significant of which was that Biden himself had profited handsomely (and illicitly) from his son’s work.

Apparently with good reason. The conservative website Daily Caller pored over what it said were text messages sent between Joe and Hunter Biden, finding that on multiple occasions in late 2018 and early 2019, the former vice president offered financial assistance to his son — undercutting the idea that Hunter was a secret source of dough. Those text messages have not been confirmed by The Washington Post.

“An incomplete review of the alleged Hunter Biden hard drive has uncovered no direct evidence that Joe Biden benefited financially from his son’s business dealings,” the Daily Caller’s Andrew Kerr and Chuck Ross report. “Text messages on the laptop indicate that Joe Biden offered to help his son financially on numerous occasions between November 2018 and March 2019. … Emails on the computer suggest that Hunter Biden was under significant financial duress when he asked his father for financial assistance.”

This isn’t by itself exculpatory, but given the burden of proof Trump and his allies face in proving their unsubstantiated claims about Biden’s relationship with his son, it’s the equivalent of dumping buckets of water on a campfire that stopped smoldering a week ago.

None of this matters for the election, of course. It’s too late for that. But it is important as context for claims Trump has made dozens of times about his own innocence and the culpability of his political opponents. It was never likely, given what we knew, that there would be a smoking gun found in Joe Biden’s hand. The revelations of the past 48 hours, though, suggest that it was Trump, not Biden, whom investigators believed might have been close to a crime scene.