The so-called “mainstream media” was abuzz over the weekend following a report by ABC News’ Brian Ross that President Donald J. Trump, as a candidate last year, instructed national security advisor Michael Flynn to contact Russian government officials.

Upon hearing or reading that news, the Washington legacy media immediately began touting it as the “smoking gun” evidence of “Trump-Russia collusion” they’d all been searching for more than a year to uncover.

Only, Ross’ report turned out to be just more fake news about the Trump administration. By the end of the business day on Friday, Ross was appearing on his network’s “World News Tonight” broadcast to issue this correction: Actually, his anonymous source noted later, Trump asked Flynn to contact Russian officials after he became president-elect — to discuss how best to deal with ISIS.

Such high-level foreign contact for an incoming administration is completely normal and even expected so that the newly elected president can hit the ground running on Inauguration Day.

The story then died right away, and little more has been reported or said about it since (Ross, by the way, was suspended for a month without pay by ABC). It was replaced by talk over the weekend that Trump may have “obstructed justice” in the lead-up to his firing of former FBI Director James Comey. Now that speculation has fueled further discussion that special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Team Trump is no longer focused on the “collusion” angle but rather its goal is to get Trump impeached. (Related: So now that Michael Flynn is cooperating with Mueller, is Trump the next to be charged? Not so fast says THIS expert.)

Lest we forget in all of this, however, that the swamp remains intact, that Mueller (and Comey; and Clinton; and Obama; and everyone else tied to them) are part of it; and that Trump the Outsider is the biggest threat to their existence any of them have seen in their political careers.

That’s the only reason to explain why nobody is talking about real Russian collusion and real criminal behavior by Hillary Clinton, whom the swamp creatures were certain was going to defeat Trump in November 2016.

As Newsbusters points out, the mainstream media intentionally whiffed on a major story last week involving revelations made by a former intelligence community inspector general whose career was threatened after he discovered 22 “beyond classified” emails had passed through Clinton’s unsecured email server that she used to hide her activities as Obama’s secretary of state (even Obama knew she had it).

According to Charles McCullough III, he found those emails on Clinton’s server years after she left Foggy Bottom in preparation for her second run at the Oval Office.

“Very few establishment press outlets have done anything with the story in the past [several] days, and the rare exceptions have used McCullough’s revelations as a platform to take shots at President Donald Trump,” Newsbusters reported.

In appearances on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight program, McCullough relayed that he was “absolutely” convinced that both Clinton and Obama purposely misled the public about the highly sensitive nature of these emails. At one point, he said if he or anyone else he knows would have done what Clinton did, he’d “be in Leavenworth” — the military prison in Kansas.

“It sounds like this man was simply doing what it was his job to do, which is bring this sort of information forward, and indeed take it to Congress,” Fox News senior political correspondent Brit Hume told Carlson on one program.

So while the establishment press is making a mountain out of the molehill that was Michael Flynn’s admission last week that he lied to the FBI — a mere process crime — the much more serious breach of national security regulations committed by Clinton goes unnoticed and forgotten.

One more thing: Let’s also never forget that FBI sources believe there is a 99-percent chance that Clinton’s server was hacked by at least five foreign intelligence services, meaning whatever “beyond classified” material that passed through it has been compromised.

But by all means, let’s continue to generate fake news about a fake collusion scandal that has never existed so we can impeach a billionaire outsider whose only “crime” is that he wants to help “make America great again.”

J.D. Heyes is editor of The National Sentinel and a senior writer for Natural News and News Target.

Sources include:

TheNationalSentinel.com

NationalReview.com

Newsbusters.org