As the faux Russia-collusion conspiracy has turned belly up, smoke of a real conspiracy — what some are calling Spygate — has begun to billow. Spygate is the descriptor for the willful attempts by members of Barack Obama’s deep state to subvert and then oust a duly elected President Donald Trump by knowingly pushing bogus allegations of Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia. Now, like rats fleeing a sinking ship, these deep-state players appear to be turning on each other.

At the heart of Spygate is that infamous and unverified Christopher Steele anti-Trump dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC and used by the FBI and Justice Department to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on members of the Trump campaign. Who knew what and when? A no-nonsense Attorney General William Barr is determined to get to the bottom of these troubling questions, and that has people scurrying for cover.

Two big names — former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey — are currently pointing the finger at each other, claiming that it was the other guy who pushed the dossier as legitimate. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy notes, “A dispute between the camps of Comey and … Brennan broke out into the open — a dispute over which of them tried to force the dossier findings into the aforementioned intelligence-community assessment (ICA). This is a remarkable rift given that the dossier allegations in fact were not included in the ICA.”

Meanwhile, former FBI Counsel James Baker claims the reason the FBI alerted Trump to the unverified dossier in the first place was that it was already out in the media (because Comey leaked it). The FBI was supposedly “quite worried” that Comey might appear to be pulling a J. Edgar Hoover, using the dossier to blackmail Trump if he didn’t address it with the president and note that it had not been verified. However, Comey also chose to lie to Trump by telling him at the time that he was not the subject of an FBI investigation.

But Baker’s biggest admission was that the FBI took the dossier “seriously” but not “literally.” If that were indeed the case, would that not demand the dossier be carefully investigated and verified before it was used as legitimate source material for obtaining a FISA warrant? FBI agents certainly presented it to the court as such.

Finally, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has also come out swinging against Comey after the disgraced former FBI director suggested that Rosenstein did not have the “inner strength” to “resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump.” Rosenstein blasted, “The former director seems to be acting as a partisan pundit, selling books and earning speaking fees while speculating about the strength of my character and the fate of my immortal soul. That is disappointing. Speculating about souls is not a job for police and prosecutors. Generally, we base our opinions on eyewitness testimony.” Not when you are indeed a partisan pundit selling books, as Comey most certainly is.