Remember, for like five minutes, when the left insisted that questioning the legitimacy of an election was not only wrong but an attack on the very core of our republic? Yeah, that didn’t last very long.

We are right back where we started, which is with Democrats and the media desperately pushing ridiculous Russian collusion conspiracy theories. Apparently, this country is doomed to relitigate the 2016 election from here unto eternity, or at least until Democrats and “journalists” feel as if they’ve saved face after making absolute idiots of themselves during the Trump era.

Here’s CNN doing an entire segment parroting the Biden administration’s spin on the Trump-Russia hoax.

WATCH: CNN devotes an entire segment to discussing the discredited Steele Dossier, claim that they have evidence of Trump-Russia collusion pic.twitter.com/7bGNkP0Te1

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) April 19, 2021

A common tactic on the left is to take some irrelevant aspect of a broader situation and argue it as if it validates their entire premise. That’s what you are seeing here. I’m going to blow up the claims made in the above segment in a second, but let’s assume this was not misleading at all and that CNN’s report is just the straight facts. How would Russia finding out a single bit of polling data in the summer of 2016 (i.e. not even in the heat of the race) amount to collusion or stealing the election? It simply wouldn’t. This is like arguing that leaving your oven on made it hot outside.

Of course, what CNN says here is, in fact, misleading because skewing the news to meet a partisan narrative is what they do. What does the claim in question actually boil down to? Well, it’s not new and has been talked about many times in the past. Paul Manafort, who had a brief stint with the Trump campaign, had a decades-long relationship with a Russian business associate. Manafort shared some polling data with that friend. That friend then, at least according to the Biden administration, passed that to Russian intelligence.

Now, on no planet does that 1) amount to anything actionable for Russia or 2) show any collusion with Russia at all. Do you know where else you can get polling data on a major presidential election? By searching for it on Google. The idea that Russia received something that somehow allowed them to interfere in the 2016 election doesn’t even make sense on its face.

Further, Manafort, even if he had ill intent (and there’s no evidence of that), wasn’t with the campaign long enough for it to matter. He was brought on to wrangle delegates at the convention. By mid-August, he was gone. There hadn’t even been a debate yet, and most Americans don’t really get locked in until September and October. If Russia’s plan to interfere in the election was to get a single polling data point before the convention, their plan was pretty crappy. But that wasn’t their plan, and all these allegations of collusion and mysterious Kremlin influence are nonsense.

As I said at the beginning of this article, this is really just about saving face. Trump and the subsequent results of the investigation into him made the media hysteria surrounding supposed Russian collusion look foolish. They want to rewrite history and be able to claim that some part of their theory was true. It wasn’t, and this latest attempt to mix issues, mislead, and leave out key context won’t change that.