We all have at least one friend like that: the hate-filled lefty who couldn’t come to grips with the fact that Donald Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016, and who then desperately latched onto the Trump-Russia-collusion hoax as a coping mechanism.

You know: the Trump-hater who took to Twitter and Facebook to obsessively post the latest garbage from the Pulitzer Prize winners at The New York Times and The Washington Post, or the latest breathless utterance about Konstantin Kilimnik from The Female Alex Jones at MSNBC, or the never-ending Schiff Show at CNN.

If you’re still friends with that person, now might be a good time to check in with him. (Hey, that’s what friends are for.) Perhaps you could start by informing him that it was all a filthy rotten hoax — a dirty trick to make Watergate look like child’s play — and that the mainstream media played him for an utter sap. But that you still forgive him.

The New York Post editorial board sums things up nicely:

Russiagate has fallen apart, with special counsel John Durham exposing the notorious Steele Dossier as a collection of lies and made-up stories. But you wouldn’t know it by reading most of the media, which have mostly ignored the story.

More importantly, they haven’t faced up to their own part in pushing this witch hunt. Relying on one anonymous source — ex-British spy Christopher Steele — they spun a supposed conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia. But they never revealed the fact that Steele was being paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign for opposition research, and they never examined Steele’s sources, who were unreliable or nonexistent.

One of the most dedicated hoax-peddlers of the Trump presidency has been the aforementioned Adam Schiff, the pathologically dishonest California Democrat who chairs the House Intelligence Committee. He’s peddling a book now, and he thought he’d have an easy go of it on ABC’s “The View” yesterday. He didn’t. Former Trump State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus did the honors:

Ortagus so flustered Schiff that he said “erection” when he meant “insurrection.” Toward the end, he tried to insist that none of Trump’s “serious misconduct is in any way diminished by the fact that people lied to [dirty dossier author] Christopher Steele.” Ortagus, though, was ready:

“No,” she said. “Just your credibility.”

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley has also been paying attention to John Durham’s work, and he weighed in on where he thinks the investigation is going: “These pieces are falling together and they’re forming a rather disturbing picture. Keep in mind, on July 28 … President [Barack] Obama was briefed by American intelligence, who told him there is evidence that Hillary Clinton is going to advance a Russian collusion narrative to take away attention from her email scandal. This was a formal briefing in the White House. Three days later, the Russian investigation was launched.”

What did Obama know, and when did he know it?

It was Biden’s current National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, who released a public statement that there was a covert server tying Trump to Moscow. It was a lie, but the media lapped it up. Perhaps Sullivan will be next up for indictment. He still has a job in the Biden administration, but why? And for how much longer?

Over at The Wall Street Journal’s Letters page, an otherwise anonymous citizen from Charleston, South Carolina, posed a great question:

What was more threatening to U.S. democracy: years of distraction, disruption and dysfunction in Washington based on phony charges of collusion with Russia or the Jan. 6 riot? Were pro-Trump revolutionaries on the verge of overthrowing the U.S. government on Jan. 6? The riot was disturbing, but it was over in a matter of hours. By contrast, a stealth insurrection against a sitting U.S. president based on knowingly false charges of collusion with a foreign enemy did lasting damage to faith and confidence in government.

Think about it. Special Counsel John Durham is out there somewhere, doggedly piecing together this dirtiest of dirty tricks. And meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats are desperately trying to draw your attention away from it. They’ll stretch out these J6 hearings until next year’s midterm elections, hoping to convince you that the non-insurrection of January 6 was the real story, the real existential threat to our republic.

Don’t let them do it. Find that friend of yours. And make sure he knows what the real story is.

(Updated)