Mistakes were made.

When Ron Ziegler, Richard Nixon’s press secretary, repeatedly used this passive-voice construction during Watergate-era press briefings to acknowledge fault without articulating specific wrongdoing, he was roundly criticized by the media. And rightly so. Former New York Times columnist and congenital wordsmith William Safire dubbed it the “passive-evasive” voice, while political analyst Bill Schneider cleverly called it the “past exonerative tense.”

In recent months, though, we’ve seen this device being deployed repeatedly by those on the Left — specifically those who actively interfered in our most recent presidential election by suppressing the New York Post’s pre-2020 election Hunter Biden laptop bombshell about Joe Biden’s corruption.

The Left’s most recent mea culpa comes from the former head of — get this —trust and safety at Twitter, who recently admitted that its decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 was “a mistake.” As Fox News reports:

During a sit down with journalist Kara Swisher, ex-Twitter safety chief Yoel Roth said that despite concerns about the authenticity of the laptop story, it still did not reach a point where he wanted to remove the content — which was later censored anyway. Initial reporting suggested that Roth blocked user access from the October 2020 story, but the former Twitter division lead said the decision was not up to him.

“But — so it was a mistake?” interviewer Kara Swisher asked.

“In my opinion, yes,” Roth responded.

And there you have it. But once again, notice how he preemptively absolved himself of guilt: He said “the decision was not up to him.”

Mistakes were made, they keep saying. Better two years late than never, we suppose, but no one ever seems to be held accountable. Not former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, not Facebook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, not the corrupt forces within the FBI, not even The Shifty Fifty — those despicably deceptive “intelligence” “professionals” who signed their names and their reputations to a letter claiming that the laptop everyone now admits is authentic was actually Russian disinformation.

And remember: This wasn’t about all the salacious stuff on that laptop — the naked, drug-addled selfies of the president’s son, the “smartest guy” Joe Biden knows. No, this was about the sales receipts and the connective tissue that monetarily linked a former sitting vice president and presidential candidate to the Communist Chinese and other corrupt regimes. This was about the sort of influence-peddling scandal that flips an election.

And, as we now know, it did flip an election. According to a survey of 1,750 Biden voters in seven swing states taken just days after the 2020 election, nearly 10% of them said they wouldn’t have voted for him had they known about the incriminating evidence on that laptop.

You want evidence of a rigged election? There you have it.

“The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself,” tweeted Elon Musk on Monday. “The public deserves to know what really happened.”

Musk was responding to a Twitter user who earlier in November had tweeted, “Raise your hand if you think Elon Musk should make public all internal discussions about the decision to censor the NY Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 Election in the interest of Transparency.”

“This is necessary to restore public trust,” Musk replied.

Yesterday, he made yet another promise to his platform’s users: “The obvious reality, as long-time users know, is that Twitter has failed in trust and safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections. Twitter 2.0 will be far more effective, transparent and even-handed.”

No wonder the Democrats and their Leftmedia brethren want to silence Musk by any means necessary. Indeed, it’s hard to believe, but Musk, merely for his commitment to transparency and free speech, may have supplanted Donald Trump as the Left’s Public Enemy Number One. Let’s hope he enjoys that exalted status.

There’s an old-school journalistic adage that goes, “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” Translation: Don’t take anyone’s word for anything.

Going forward, we might remember that admonition whenever someone on the Left — whether a journalist, an editor, a publisher, or some other no-good agenda-driven hack — tries to dismiss a deeply damaging revelation as “disinformation.”

Because when the Left lets loose with those “disinformation” salvos, you can be certain you’re over the target.