It was the greatest and most consequential act of election interference in American history, and now, even as the last of its defenders have folded their cards, its co-conspirators remain almost entirely unrepentant.

Color us shocked.

It’s not quite accurate to dismiss these guys as clowns, though, is it? Former Obama CIA Director John Brennan, former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Bush CIA Director Mike Hayden, and former Obama CIA Director Leon Panetta constitute the senior leadership of that Gang of 51 intelligence officials who colluded to interfere with the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden and against Donald Trump. But their behavior was anything but clownish. It was election interference.

Mostly, there’s silence among the Leftmedia — which is odd because these people will prattle on about any subject under the sun, except the size of the crowd at the latest Trump rally. We can take this collective silence as a sign of shame, as an acknowledgment that they were dead wrong — or worse — about a story that changed history.

Remember: These people, these 51 signatories of the “Russian disinformation” letter published by the useful idiots at Politico, conspired to control the flow of preelection information so as to deny the voting public a complete and accurate picture of the candidates and the issues. As we’ve noted numerous times, the collusion between the FBI and Big Tech to censor the New York Post’s bombshell story about that deeply incriminating MacBook in the crucial days just prior to the election was a decisive piece of election-rigging interference.

And never forget: It was decisive. A Tipp Insights poll found that 79% of Americans believe Donald Trump would have won reelection if voters had known the truth about the laptop. And 47% of respondents said that knowing about the contents of the laptop and the evidence of influence peddling therein would’ve changed their voting decision. Heck, 71% of Democrats said it would’ve changed their decision. No doubt plenty of them were lying to avoid appearing as if they condone such corruption, but not all of them were lying. Biden promised to bring “normalcy” and “decency” back to the White House, after all. He lied.

I said there’s mostly silence among the Leftmedia, but The Washington Post’s Philip Bump is a notable exception. Bump was a true believer, a dead-ender, a guy who stuck to the “Russian disinformation” story even as the mainstream media began to fall like dominoes in admitting that the laptop was real.

Bump’s latest column, titled “The right takes a Biden-laptop victory lap around an empty arena,” shows a remarkable lack of repentance. In it, he weirdly and convolutedly blames Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

Think about it: The federal government finally copped to the laptop’s legitimacy by using it as evidence to convict Hunter of three felony gun charges. And when you’ve lost the federal government, there’s really no one left to lose beyond immediate family members. And Philip Bump.

As our Nate Jackson quipped about Bump’s increasingly irrelevant employer, “Democracy dies in darkness because they’ve killed it.”

As for consequences, what of it? What should happen to these hoaxers? “I think, one, their clearances need to be revoked,” said Florida Congresswoman Kat Cammack, who added, “We know that the intel community never operates in absolutes, and the fact that we had 51 come forward and try to put forward a narrative that this was disinformation, misinformation when everyone knew full well that it wasn’t, that it was very real.”

Indeed, when was the last time so many members of the intel community came out so publicly and so wrongly on any matter of intelligence? Answer: Never. That should tell us something about the willfulness of the deception.

Lost amid all this hand-wringing is the fact that one of the architects of this hoax is today one of the highest-ranking members of the current administration. As we wrote more than a year ago, then-Biden campaign senior adviser and current Secretary of State Antony Blinken was “the impetus” of the infamous Letter of 51. Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell admitted as much under oath.

Also lost is the fact that Hunter Biden isn’t out of the woods legally, not by a long shot. As Just the News’s Steven Richards reports, “The contents of the hard drive, obtained and authenticated by the FBI as early as December 2019 will show the first son’s tax delinquency and unsuccessful efforts to settle his massive debts with the IRS while continuing to spend beyond his means, according to emails obtained from the laptop by Just the News.”

That’s right: The FBI knew the laptop was legit back in 2019. But still they worked to perpetuate the lie.

As it turned out, the Letter of 51 was more damaging to our democracy (it’s a republic, but whatever) than anything the Russians could’ve hoped to do. Just think: Your intelligence services are corrupt at their highest levels. They’ll lie to your face in order to achieve a political outcome.

That grim reality should be deeply disturbing to all Americans.