The media has been providing hints that they see Israeli collusion in their Trump narrative.

Israeli collusion with the Trump campaign? It’s about as rational as anything else Robert Mueller is investigating! And George Papadapoulos’ wife claims he had to plead guilty to Mueller or else be prosecuted as an Israeli agent. Papadapoulos’ lawyer denied it, but that hasn’t prevented the Washington Post from making other connections.

Thus, the Tablet reports, “How Russiagate Became Israelgate.”

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However, an article in the Washington Post on Mangiante’s claim suggests that the 29-year-old former Trump adviser’s ostensible ties to Israel have become a subject of general interest, albeit thinly sourced. The Post reports that Papadapoulos wrote for Israeli publications, including Haaretz, and struck up an acquaintance with a Netanyahu aide, Eli Groner.

Writing for an Israeli newspaper and being friends with an Israeli in a government position is hardly evidence of collusion. But it might be enough for a desperate media.

He shows that this kind of accusation would fit Mueller’s history. Then he points to more media “hints.”

Hints of a Jewish conspiracy that was part of or behind the Trump-Russia collusion theory have long circulated among the conspiracy-mongers and in the press. In his November 14, 2017 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson said that the Jewish diaspora “appears to be a very interesting route for the Russians.” The Steele dossier, which was marketed by Simpson’s company, elaborates on that claim. The FSB, claims one of Steele’s ostensible sources, was approaching “U.S. citizens of Russian (Jewish) origin on business trips to Russia” as potential foreign agents.

In April 2017, Politico picked up on the theme with a story about the alleged ties between Trump, Putin, Jared Kushner, and a “happy-go-lucky Jewish group” called Chabad, “the most sprawling Jewish institution in the world.” Tablet reported that Fusion GPS was believed to be the source for the Politico story. The ostensible Trump-Putin-Chabad link appeared in the press again, including on the BBC, with the arrest of Michael Cohen, and was also quickly disproved.

That the collusion spotlight has now focused more intensely on Israel and the Jews in a story that’s ostensibly about Russia and Donald Trump makes a weird kind of sense. As a conspiracy theory becomes larger, incorporates more actors and institutions, points to more events, more connections, it shows more gaps in its logic. As the conspiracy theorists struggle to explain or reconcile contradictions in their accounts, the pull towards the deus ex machina of all conspiracy theories—the powerful, wealthy, rootless, cosmopolitan wanderers of the earth—only gets stronger.

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