When the Durham report was finally released Monday it confirmed a number of things we’ve known for years – in addition to confirming that neither Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, the report concluded that “top federal law enforcement officials took unverified intelligence fed to them by the Hillary Clinton campaign and turned that into a years-long, unjustified witch hunt against Donald Trump” and those associated with him.

While the American people should be furious that federal law enforcement officers essentially attempted a coup, a great deal of anger should also be focused on so-called journalists at places like the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and more – you know, the usual suspects. Without their active assistance in both pushing the desired narrative and ignoring overwhelming evidence of FBI/DOJ malfeasance, they never would have gotten away with it. It was a win/win/win for them: the FBI was free to use its power to persecute and terrorize political enemies for years, and the mockingbird journalists won Pulitzer after Pulitzer.

All they had to do was abdicate their journalistic duties and mindlessly parrot the information propaganda their trusted “sources” gave them.

One would think that with the report’s release and shocking revelations the so-called journalists would, at a minimum, pause and have a moment of reflection about what the findings meant. That they might wonder about their role in this unprecedented and completely unfounded targeting of a sitting president by federal law enforcement. That they might feel a twinge of upsetness that they were played by their sources. That they might think, “Hey, maybe I should apologize to my audience and explain how this unverified information made its way into my work and how I’m going to prevent that in the future.” That they might worry that they would lose credibility with their readers by engaging in a failure of such epic proportions.

Meh. For the most part, it seems they believe self-reflection is for chumps, and that there is no such thing as integrity or pride in one’s work. The Associated Press tried to spin away the report’s findings before it was even released, and shortly after its release it was clear that the new narrative was, “The report didn’t reveal any new information.”

Then Andrew McCabe, who was the subject of a criminal referral after the Inspector General report found he’d “made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor – including under oath – on multiple occasions” went on Anderson Cooper 360 to repeat that and to add a new element to the narrative: that Durham’s investigation was never legitimate and that Durham started the investigation with a predetermined outcome. If anyone would know about starting an investigation with a predetermined outcome it would be Andrew McCabe, but just because he’s done that doesn’t mean that others do.

(McCabe also said that Durham’s report “betrays a deep misunderstanding of not only what we knew at the time, but how we make these decisions,” and added that he thinks “it’s incredibly important for people to understand what we were seeing then,” yet he refused to meet with Durham.)

By Tuesday morning Nicole Wallace over at MSNBC was taking McCabe’s illegitimacy trope and expanding upon it, deeming the “whole thing…a rabbit hole conspiracy theory.”

.@NicolleDWallace: "Durham's whole thing is a rabbit hole conspiracy theory" pic.twitter.com/DBkYF52VWj

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 15, 2023

Well, Nicole, one thing we’ve learned over the last few years is that when you or your colleagues in so-called journalism term something a “conspiracy theory” that’s a signal that something you find inconvenient or messy or unhelpful is actually true.

And former conservative Jonah Goldberg, who fully bought into the hoax, was irritated by “a whole bunch of tiresome pests” calling him out on a 2017 clip in which he said he’d take Comey’s word over Trump’s 10 times out of 10″ and similarly was incapable of any self-reflection, tweeting:

A whole bunch of tiresome pests are going nuts over a clip of me in — 2017! — saying I’ll take Comey’s word over Trump’s 10 time out of 10. I agree that Comey looks much worse now then back then. But I think I was justified in saying it then, given what was known, and given that the issue was Trump’s credibility versus Comey’s.

And, frankly, Trump is still more dishonest than Comey — even if you consider Comey a deeply dishonest person, which I pretty much do.

I’m just putting this here because I think all of the dunking is stupid, in bad faith, not worth individual responses — and works on the mulish assumption that if you can prove Comey was a bad guy that makes Trump a good guy. He’s not. There is still no definition of good character he can clear the hurdle on.

Trump invited virtually all of his legal, political and financial problems on himself, including to a large part the FBI collusion probe — which, by the way, resulted in a lot more criminal convictions than Durham’s probe did.

Conservative author Michael Walsh, who once worked at Time Magazine, agrees that confirmation bias was partly responsible for the legacy media’s actions, but makes the point that in addition to the awards they won for the Russiagate stories, the so-called journalists simply wanted to feel important and like they were in on something big.

Only partly true. Many media outlets (such as @nytimes) were in on it from the start. You'll never see them handing back Pultizers even though they "reported" on a complete fiction.

— Michael Walsh (@TheAmanuensis) May 16, 2023

The Durham report, three years late and many million$ short, proves on thing: that corrupt rackets like @nytimes were confidently predicting 90+% chances that Hillary would win practically right to the last minute bc they were in on the fix.

— Michael Walsh (@TheAmanuensis) May 16, 2023

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