***UPDATE: Napolitano is doubling down on his misleading, one-sided analysis. On Monday, he told Shepard Smith, “There’s ample evidence — this doesn’t require too much analysis — to indict the president.”

Napolitano also speculated that Trump may already be an “unindicted co-conspirator.” Again, Napolitano did not bother to point out just how absurd and desperate (as explained below) this all is. ***End Update

Appearing with Shepard Smith on Wednesday, Fox News’s Judge Andrew Napolitano continued his winning streak of being the worst and most dishonest legal analyst on television not named Jeffrey Toobin.

Spewing all kinds of mindless gloom and doom (you can watch the full segment here), while ignoring the all-important mitigating context that proves just how stupid his gloom and doom is, Napolitano painted a dire picture of President Trump as a felon.

After Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, Smith teed up Napolitano with this: “Prosecutors have told us through these filings that they have evidence that the President committed a felony.”

Naturally, Napolitano heartily agreed:

The felony is paying Michael Cohen to commit a felony. It’s pretty basic. Somebody hires you — A hires B to shoot someone. A is as liable as if he had pulled the trigger. You pay someone to commit a crime, they commit the crime, you are liable, criminally liable for their commission of that crime, as well as they being liable. That’s what the prosecutors told the federal judge.

Keep in mind that this is coming from the same Judge FakeNews who called proven liar Christine Blasey Ford “exceptionally credible” after hearing only a few minutes of her testimony.

But here is the important information the Judge FakeNews is deliberately hiding from Fox viewers…

At worst, at the very worst, this is a campaign finance violation, and even that is a stretch when you are talking about paying off a couple of scheming blackmailers who threatened to ruin your reputation and cause trouble in your family and marriage.

There is nothing illegal about committing adultery, about paying hush money, about caving to blackmail, about hiding all of this from the public and voters. Nothing.

The only way this is illegal is if an overbearing government decides this particular expenditure was a campaign expenditure — in other words, something you would not have paid for were you not running for office — which is absurd in the case of Trump, who has a decades-long history of aggressively working to kill stories that might damage his reputation — not all of them sex related.

And let me again point out that Trump used his own money — his own money — to pay off his blackmailers. He did not use campaign funds.

But rather than explain the important context of the government’s ludicrous attempt to “gotcha” Trump with a felony, rather than explain to viewers that these prosecutors are almost certainly politically motivated, Napolitano chooses to mislead viewers with inane analysis about Trump “directing a felony.”

How dumb is this campaign finance law that gotchas candidates over what they choose to spend their own money on? This is how dumb it is…

Should Mitt Romney be charged with a felony if he failed to report all of the expenses involved in his move to Utah, a move that was all about running for a senate seat there?

Should Hillary Clinton be charged with a felony if she failed to report the cost of her hairstylings, because before she ran for president, Hillary showed no interest in styling her hair.

If a candidate purchases a nicer wardrobe than he would have otherwise, has her teeth whitened, gets hair implants, bleaches her upper lip, or purchases a voter-friendly American made car in preparation for a run for office, and does it with his or her own money, should they be charged with a felony if it is not listed as a campaign expense?

There is nothing illegal about hiding your sex life, bad teeth, or bald head from voters, and to criminalize such things with vague campaign finance laws will not fly. Even the jury in a case involving former presidential candidate John Edwards, who funneled other people’s money through his campaign to hide payments to his mistress, came out deadlocked.

And what about the 264 active members of Congress who created a $17 million slush fund using taxpayer dollars to make sexual harassment and other employer-related conduct lawsuits go away?

These are active members of Congress using our money to make their sins go away, to pay off women to sign non-disclosure agreements, and that is perfectly a-okay with prosecutors (and a media that has lost total interest in the story), but Private Citizen Trump doing what he has done for decades — making a bad story go away — has committed a felony?

If you are holding off canceling your cable to hold onto Fox News, it is time to rethink that. If Fox News is going to mislead and spread anti-Trump propaganda that is no different from the fake news coming from CNN … It’s time to cut the cord, y’all, it is time to starve fake news.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.