I think everyone can agree, regardless of political ideology, the Trump-Russia issue turned into a big mess.

The news media detest not knowing. In place of good, solid information on just what may have transpired between the Trump campaign and Russia, or just what may not have transpired, they chose to fill in the blanks with rampant negative speculation. By the time the Mueller report was turned in, they had convinced themselves—and half of America—that Donald Trump was a Russian agent. It all turned out to be nothing.

But don’t just blame the news media. Their fires were stoked by the likes of John Brennan, former CIA director and rabid Trump hater. During his mea culpa with Morning Joe on MSNBC he said, “I don’t know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was.” You think? Then he pretended to be “relieved” that his president was not a Russian agent. Disappointed is more like it.

Morning Joe himself echoed Brennan’s faux sentiment. “It is good news that the president of the United States did not conspire with Russia to influence the 2016 election.” Not to Joe and rest of the get-Trump media. This is almost worse than Election Night 2016. To the rest of us it’s confirmation of something we already knew.

So how do the media redeem themselves? Short answer? They don’t. And they won’t even try. Their hatred for Trump is so deep that they’ll never admit that they made up the story of Russian collusion and plugged in willing stooges like Brennan to give the lie weight. Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, a big lib and no fan of Trump, was beside himself on Tucker Carlson’s show. He tore into CNN and MSNBC in particular for banning voices like his because he wouldn’t toe the line on the Trump-Russia collusion story. He called it a “fraud that they perpetrated on their audience” and accused both networks of being “state TV” or “CIA TV” for giving people like Brennan so much air time.

What happens now? What should happen is Republicans in the Senate, the only place they have any investigative power, should be holding hearings to determine how such a colossal fraud could have been perpetrated on the American people. They can start with the coup attempt by former FBI agent Peter Strzok and his boss, Andrew McCabe, among others. The irony is Mueller was looking at Trump’s firing of James Comey as a possible obstruction of justice. As it turns out, this whole debacle of an investigation based on a bogus dossier was going on right under Comey’s nose. Either he was part of the coup attempt or he was too inept to see it. Either way he should’ve been fired the day Trump took office.

From my vantage point here’s what appears to have happened: there were certain persons inside the FBI and Obama’s Justice Department who were so determined to keep Trump from becoming president that they ignored real crimes committed by Hillary Clinton, and instead fabricated fake crimes by Trump. They used a dossier they knew was fake to petition a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to allow them to spy on the Trump campaign.

Nixon was run out of office and several of his men went to prison for a petty break-in looking for dirt. This appears to be a widespread conspiracy to fix an election that may include a former FBI director and a former president. That’s been the real scandal all along. Now maybe we can focus on that instead.