What happened is they lost. along the way they were totally pantsed by the rooooshins, or someone, who lifted the veil of legitimacy of their little charade by publishing their own words, outing the party and campaign as utter scumballs, thereby leaving them without their usual veil of righteous indignation to hide behind.
now they're concocting whatever nonsense they can to rebuild their wall of bullshit to hide behind.
at the same time they are trying to delegitimize the candidate that won so that they can retain some shreds of power and try to destabilize the incoming administration as much as possible in an attempt to limit damage to their overall agendas to the greatest extent possible.
In other words it's business as usual for the dirty-dickin DNC, trying to propagandize their way through the smashing to bits of the agenda they thought was already carved in stone.
At this point, they have no other choice.
Brainwashing works well for Democrats. They've been using if for years. They've convinced the sheep that Socialism/ Communism is the future of this country. The Republicans are dying old white men; people that cling to their guns and Bibles; nothing but a bunch of leftover rubes in flyover country; they will be gone soon enough, just you wait!
However throughout the last eight years of DumBama, they lost the Congress, they lost the Senate, they lost governorships across the country along with hundreds of other local seats, and now they lost the White House.
If they don't make up some kind of story, their sheep will begin to lose faith. They will start to understand that it's not the Republicans that are the dying breed, it's progressivism. It matters not if there is an ounce of truth behind this Russia thing, what does matter is that their blind followers never give up hope, because once they give up hope, they won't be standing in line to vote any longer.