hat once proudly called itself the country’s “paper of record,” the New York Times, has sunk to a new low in tabloid journalism. A recent front page article relies on half-truths and innuendo to attack former Attorney General Bill Barr and Special Counsel John Durham. Their sin, according to the Times, was that they conducted an investigation into the origins of the Russia hoax that failed to convict anyone of a major federal crime. We should applaud the integrity of our system of justice when an investigation into the misdeeds of the opposing party does NOT result in partisan indictments, but no — according to the Times’ twisted logic, there must be something wrong if the Justice Department under Trump failed to find evidence to indict Hillary Clinton’s campaign for something!

There are so many distortions in the Times article that it is hard to know how to begin. Start with the headline: “How Barr’s Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia Inquiry Unraveled.” No, it wasn’t a “quest” to “find flaws” in the Russia inquiry; it was an investigation into whether federal crimes had been committed. Those are very different. The principal crime that might have been committed by the Hillary Clinton campaign was conspiracy. Conspiracy is defined by federal statute as an agreement among multiple parties “either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.” The sine qua non for a conspiracy is an agreement to commit a crime; if there is no such agreement, there is no conspiracy. Concluding that there is insufficient evidence to support indictments for an agreement to commit a crime is a far cry from concluding there were no “flaws” in the inception of the 2016 investigation as to whether Donald Trump was a Russian agent or “colluding” with the Russians. It is very hard to prove the existence of an agreement to commit a crime without either a witness who turns state’s evidence or a wiretap proving the existence of such an agreement.