The New York Times has inadvertently exposed the reality that former FBI leaders opposed Donald Trump from the moment he won the Republican nomination. The Times’s intention with its “bombshell” report was to offer more “evidence” supporting Robert Mueller’s investigation, but instead it showed just how biased and vindictive previous FBI leadership was against Trump. As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway observes, “Admitting there is no actual evidence for their probe into whether Trump ‘worked for the Russians,’ FBI officials instead cited their foreign policy differences with him, his lawful firing of bungling FBI Director James Comey, and alarm that he accurately revealed to the American public that he was told he wasn’t under investigation by the FBI, when they preferred to hide that fact.”

What the Times story makes even clearer was the degree of anti-Trump bias of FBI leaders at the time, which motivated them to essentially conspire with Hillary Clinton’s campaign by leveraging the bogus Christopher Steele dossier as evidence to justify surveilling members of Trump’s campaign under the guise of investigating allegations of Russian election meddling. Through timely leaks to the press, FBI officials helped foment the Trump-Russia collusion narrative all the while denying that the president was implicated — as former FBI Director James Comey did when he lied to Trump’s face, saying the president was not an FBI target. Then, the day after Trump fired Comey, an incensed FBI leadership secretly launched a retaliatory investigation against the president that was used to fuel demand for creating the Mueller probe.

“This is yet more evidence that FBI leaders actually had no real evidence against the Trump team,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) declared. “Instead, they were simply trying to undermine a president they didn’t like and avenge Comey’s firing. By relying on the Steele dossier — a fraudulent document funded by Democrats and based on Russia sources — FBI leaders were either complicit or too oblivious to notice they were being used in a disinformation operation by the Democratic Party and Russian operatives.”

Trump expressed his disgust at the Times report, stating that it showed “the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin’ James Comey, a total sleaze!”

The Democrat charge that Trump is Vladimir Putin’s “best buddy” is made with absolutely no supporting evidence — and in the face of actions by the president that demonstrate just the opposite. Trump is no more beholden to Putin than the Democrat Party is beholden to Trump.

Yet Democrats and their cohorts in the Leftmedia keep parroting the Russian collusion conspiracy sans any evidence in their ongoing efforts to delegitimize his election, while attempting to convince the American public that Democrats are justified in their outsized resistance to his presidency.