It’s long been an article of faith on the Left that Donald Trump was a Russian tool who colluded with our adversaries to swing the 2016 election and thereby deny Hillary Clinton her rightful place in history.

The truth, though, is that he wasn’t and he didn’t.

We’ve known all this to be a hoax and a dirty trick since early 2017, when then-House Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes alerted Trump that the Obama administration had been spying on him. And in recent months and weeks, and most acutely during the ongoing trial of Clinton crony Michael Sussmann, Special Counsel John Durham’s investigative ocean of facts has melted away what remains of that tiny Clintonian “collusion” ice floe. Leftists can loathe Trump all they want, but facts are stubborn things. As the New York Post reports:

On Sept. 21, 2016, two days after Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann gave then-FBI General Counsel James Baker info about a supposed digital back channel between the Trump Organization and Moscow-based Alfa Bank, agent Joe Pientka texted colleague Curtis Heide: “People on 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server.”

The “7th floor” refers to the most senior FBI agents and officials [including then-FBI Director James Comey], who have their offices on the seventh floor of bureau headquarters in Washington.

Think about that: The highest echelons of leadership within our nation’s premier law enforcement agency were “fired up” about getting Donald Trump based on information provided them by his opponent’s presidential campaign. This was the dirtiest of dirty tricks and a deep-state conspiracy.

Due to revelations during the Sussmann trial, we now also know that line-level agents at the bureau had been led to believe that Sussmann’s now-debunked claims of a secret back channel between Trump and a Russian bank had come from the Department of Justice — when in fact they came from Sussmann himself.

We also know that Sussmann lied to the bureau’s then-general counsel, James Baker, when he texted him to shop that falsehood to the bureau in order to have it open up a counterintelligence investigation on Trump and his campaign team. Sussmann told Baker he was acting on his own, as a concerned citizen, rather than as a stooge of the Clinton campaign. He’s being charged with making a false statement to the bureau, and his own words are the smoking gun. Here’s the verbatim language of that text message:

Jim — it’s Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. Do you have availability for a short meeting tomorrow? I’m coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company — want to help the Bureau. Thanks.

As for the FBI’s involvement, we also now know that it’s conducting an internal investigation of its handling of the FISA warrant process in the Trump-Russia case, also known as Crossfire Hurricane. The bureau’s documented abuse of the FISA process during the Obama administration was the means by which it secured the ability to spy on Donald Trump and his campaign team.

The FBI has 37,000 employees, and untold thousands of them do their jobs in accordance with the bureau’s motto: “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” But the same can’t be said for its leadership, which seemed to become corruptly partisan during the Barack Obama years, especially when it slow-walked the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s “private” email server and then launched the aforementioned “investigation” of Donald Trump. More recently, the bureau’s attempted entrapment in the “plot” to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and its still-secret involvement as agents provocateur during the January 6 Capitol riot have further tarnished its image.

Will anything come of its investigation? Doubtful. After all, this FBI fish is rotten at the head. But perhaps it’s a start.