Frustrated and demoralized by the fact that Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into President Donald Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia turned out to be fake news, Democrats have resorted to attacking the messenger — Attorney General William Barr. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even accused him of lying to Congress.

As we noted after Barr’s testimony last Wednesday, Dems are claiming he “hid” information from the report when he literally did the opposite by making public a report he didn’t have to disclose. Nevertheless, House Democrats will hold a vote this Wednesday to hold Barr in contempt for missing their arbitrary deadline to release the complete Mueller report.

The funny thing is, Barr did provide a complete report to select members of Congress, albeit with a few redactions for necessary reasons. According to Barr, “just 8% of the public report was redacted” and “less than 2% has been withheld in the minimally redacted version made available to congressional leaders.” How many Democrats have bothered to review it? Zero.

So why are Democrats attacking Barr? One reason is to distract from the revelation that the FBI did indeed spy on the Trump campaign. We say “revelation” only because that news finally showed up in a New York Times story.

In any case, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy sums it up:

Mueller received fawning press for two years on the expectation that he would slay Trump. Then, on March 24, Democrats and the media learned not only that there was no collusion case (which was no surprise) but that Mueller had been derelict, failing to render a judgment on the only question he was arguably needed to resolve: Was there enough evidence to charge obstruction? Journalists proceeded to turn on their erstwhile hero. This sent him reeling, and it brought to full boil the anger of Mueller staffers, who wanted to charge Trump with obstruction based on the creative (i.e., wayward) theory they had been pursuing — namely, that a president can be indicted for obstruction based on the exercise of his constitutional prerogatives if prosecutors (including prosecutors who are active supporters of the president’s political opposition) decide he had corrupt intent. The staffers put their pique in a letter that could be leaked, and Mueller was sufficiently irked by the bad press that he signed it. And now Democrats are using the letter as the launch-pad for The Big Lie that Barr lied, calculating that if they say it enough times, and their media collaborators uncritically broadcast these declarations, no one will notice that they never actually refer to the transcript of what they claim is the false testimony.

Democrats are unnerved. Attorney General Barr is pursuing an inquiry into the Obama administration’s decision to conduct a foreign counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. The time is now, they figure, to reprise the Ken Starr treatment: the ad hominem withering of an accomplished, highly capable official — in this instance, one who is daring to press questions that would have been answered two years ago if an incumbent Republican administration had spied on — er, monitored — a Democratic presidential campaign.

Trump is fortunate to have an attorney general with the intestinal fortitude to withstand this petty but focused Democrat assault. It’s as phony as their collusion charade.