Red Herring Mole

The show's designers have set Bob up to be The Mole. It's incredibly obvious that Bob is The Mole. Heck, even the other characters on the show are starting to suspect that Bob is The Mole.

So here we come to The Reveal, where it turns out... Bob wasn't The Mole after all! Nope, Bob is a totally innocent character who just had a bunch of unfortunate coincidences surrounding him. There may not be a mole at all, but if there is, it will be an entirely different character, and probably the one that everyone suspected least.

Not to be confused with a Reverse Mole, though in at least one case a character plays both roles. A Ten Little Murder Victims plot involves most of the cast being these.

May involve Divided We Fall. Compare with the Bait and Switch Tyrant.

Comic Books

 * In the first volume of Runaways, the mole is subtly hinted at to be
 * In the '80s Crisis Crossover Millennium, the premise was that every book had a mole working for the alien robots known as the Manhunters. The writer of Suicide Squad promptly drafted Mark Shaw, a character who had previously worked with the Manhunters (before turning on them), into the book to be an obvious target of suspicion. Naturally the mole was someone else entirely.

Film

 * Inverted in No Way Out. The protagonist (Kevin Costner) must race to find evidence to exonerate himself amid a Pentagon Witch Hunt for a Soviet mole suspected of killing the Defense Secretary's mistress. The hunt, of course, is a Red Herring intended to divert attention from the real murderer. The twist comes after he has successfully cleared suspicion from himself, when it's revealed that.
 * The monster of The Thing mimics target animals, including humans. However, over the course of the movie, the various people which are hinted to be the monster (and suspected of being the monster by the others) are all proved to be human.
 * In The Faculty, Delilah is a mole, but she's just there to distract the others from the fact that  has infiltrated their group.

Literature

 * The first Harry Potter book has Snape, who Harry believes is attempting to steal the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone. Nope, it's . Snape is suspected of other events of which he is innocent in later books as well.
 * This got to the point where, in book 6, Rowling devoted an entire chapter to explain how in the previous 5 books. This chapter exists for the sole purpose of making it believable that he is very definitely the mole before  Of course,
 * In the middle of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, one of the characters mysteriously disappears. He/she could have been offed by the serial killer in their midst, but the other characters can't find his/her body or even any sign of him/her anywhere else on the island. Aha! He/she must be the killer, hiding somewhere that the others can't find! That assumption's shot down when
 * Harry Turtledove's The Two Georges: we think The Mole is a civil servant who stole the protagonist's wife from him, but it turns out to be.
 * The Big Over Easy has a subtler version with Jack Spratt's flashy rival Friedland Chymes, who appears to be obstructing the investigation, and the reader might suspect he's The Mole (but it's not directly hinted). He turns out simply to be arrogant and convinced he's already solved the case, while still being a legitimate detective.
 * In Dune, Dr. Wellington Yueh is set up as this as part of an elaborate I Know You Know I Know gambit between the Harkonnens and Atreides. As the person upon whom suspicion most obviously falls, he is at the same time Beneath Suspicion due to his mental conditioning, and therefore the Atreides are lured into looking elsewhere for the real mole. Turns out that, yep, Yueh is The Mole, and does betray them, making this a deliberate subversion.
 * Ollie Brown in the Joe Ledger Series, as a former CIA Assassin who was inexplicably kidnapped then not killed instantaneous he was suspect. When he ran off with The Big Bad it looked certain but he was innocent.

Live Action TV
"Giles: Wait... you think I'm evil if I go on a camping trip with young girls and don't touch them?"
 * Nathan in the Lost episode "The Other 48 Days." His name reminds the audience of Ethan, who infiltrated the fuselage survivors, and he even says he's from Canada, just as Ethan claimed to be (a Running Gag on the show is that anytime someone mentions Canada, he's lying.) Of course, Nathan's not an infiltrator;
 * The Marquis de Carabas in Neverwhere. In both book and TV show, he's set up to look like the bad guys' employer.
 * The actual Pilot Episode of Firefly does this.
 * Of course, since there are ten people on the ship and nine of them are in the opening credits, it's fairly obvious which one isn't above board.
 * In the Reality Show named The Mole, the object is to identify The Mole among the contestants. Since failed guesses at the Mole's identity get players eliminated from the game, players will often pretend to be the Mole to trick their competitors into guessing wrong.
 * The tricky bit here is that the Mole wants missions to fail so the pot of prize money remains low, while everyone else wants to win missions and raise the pot. That means the regular players try their best to succeed, while trying to make it look like they're attempting to fail.
 * And, because the Mole would not be obvious about his task, players don't want to make it obvious they are failing on purpose. They want to make it seem like they are doing subtle sabotage badly. Anyone who is clearly failing on purpose is clearly a Red Herring Mole and not the real Mole. (That is, unless the real Mole thought you would think that, and is making himself so obvious you will overlook him. Yeah, it's that kind of show.)
 * Season six of NCIS begins with a mole-hunt within the department, which apparently ends when tries to kill recurring character, who shoots him in self-defense. The audience is almost immediately tipped off that  is the mole, but the rest of the cast don't find out for another eight episodes.
 * Part of the seventh season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer dropped hints that Giles might have been murdered and impersonated by the First Evil. He wasn't. It was purest coincidence that he completely conspicuously failed to come into physical contact with anything or anyone for five straight episodes.

"George: "Have you seen any German spies?" Schmidt: "Nein, nein!" George: "NINE!? I haven't even seen one!""
 * Blackadder Goes Forth has Johann Schmidt, in a hospital where there's believed to be a spy. He speaks with a HEAVY German Drawl. Also leads to this.


 * Blackadder, of course, dismisses him out of hand, lampshading the absurdity of the Germans depositing a spy with a heavy German accent into a British camp. Except it turns out he is a spy.
 * Bones: They set up Lance Sweets to look like he might be the Gormogon's apprentice, before the reveal that it was Zack.

Video Games

 * In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the player is given every reason to think Jolene is responsible for the mysterious disappearances around the Glitz Pit.
 * Gorath in Betrayal at Krondor, a dark elf who joins the humans for the good of his own race, is suspected of being a double agent for much of the game, with several unfortunate (and no doubt orchestrated by his enemies) incidents painting him in a highly suspicious light. When the party arrives in Romney to find the Krondorian Lancers brutally murdered, one of the witnesses reports of someone sharing Gorath's name and description supposedly being seen there earlier, much to James' fury. Later, when Gorath and Owyn are captured by Delekhan, the former is treated somewhat like a spy who has failed in his tasks. Owyn is unsettled by the idea but concludes that he still needs Gorath's help to get out of there alive, whatever his real loyalties might be.
 * In the 2009 Ghostbusters video game Walter Peck spends almost the entire game actively hindering the team, to the point where they suspect he is secretly a Gozer cultist.
 * is this in Ace Attorney, so sweet and innocent that the player is driven to think they must be guilty of something.
 * In fact, it's more unnerving that's he's always nice and helps you to the best of his ability.
 * In Fire Emblem Path of Radiance, while you're at sea, you see a cutscene with Ashnard which basically sums up to that while Ike and co. have escaped with Princess Elincia, they have a spy in their group reporting on their every move. The very next scene, you find a stowaway, the young thief Sothe, on your ship and have to choose whether to recruit him or not. It doesn't help that Sothe won't tell you what he's doing there for quite a few more chapters.
 * Baitos Kaitos: Eternal Wings And the Long Lost Ocean has two -Savyna and Lyude. Both have ties to The Empire you're fighting against, with Lyude being an Imperial Officer and Savyna an assassin they employed. Both of them are discussed by other characters as being likely candidates for The Mole. Of course, they're both innocent. The real spy is
 * Inazuma Eleven GO has who says he's a SEED from Fifth Sector to screw with Kirino.

Web Comics

 * RPG World has Eikre, who, despite an amazing number of coincidences and several characters' suspicions, is not Galgarion in disguise.

Western Animation

 * In a particularly nasty example for a kid's show, Transformers Animated has

Real Life

 * The mole hunt that eventually nabbed notorious FBI spy Robert Hanssen was focused for some time on the wrong person, a CIA agent who turned out to be innocent. The Bureau questioned the CIA officer and his family at length, until they acquired a recording of the mole and realized they'd been looking at the wrong man. Hanssen's arrest followed a few months later.
 * This trope is why it's extremely difficult to convict someone in criminal court using circumstantial evidence only.
 * One rather creepy variation is the discard where a less valuable mole is set up by his own team to be caught as a distraction to protect a more important one.