The repeated media lie that President Trump in 2016 explicitly directed Russia to hack the Democrats’ emails got new life thanks to former CIA director and drama queen John Brennan.

Brennan microwaved the falsehood Thursday in an op-ed for the New York Times, calling Trump’s denials of Russian collusion “hogwash.”

His evidence: That Trump on national TV said Russia would be “rewarded” if they found Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails.

“By issuing such a statement,” wrote Brennan, “Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.”

That’s a clever sleight of hand the media have been using since before the election to suggest there’s some connection between the DNC and John Podesta email hacks, Russia, and Trump.

Here’s what actually happened: During a news conference in July 2016, days after the hacked DNC emails were published online, a reporter asked Trump if he would call on Russian President Vladimir Putin to “stay out” of the election.

Trump said he had “nothing to do with Putin” before adding, “I will tell you this: Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be next.”

As we know now, all of Clinton’s emails were immediately found by the Russians, spread everywhere online and that’s why she lost the election.

Just kidding!

Though Clinton was required by federal rules to keep her work emails on a government server, she instead kept them all on a private server, from which more than 30,000 “personal” ones were deleted. To date, none of them have been seen.

Trump never called on anyone to hack the DNC or Podesta, and yet those are the emails we got.

And even if Clinton’s deleted emails had been found and published with the help of Russians, the press has been trying to get their hands on them since at least 2014, when it became obvious Clinton was going to run a second time for president.

Then-Vice News reporter Jason Leopold wrote in late 2016 that on Nov. 4, 2014, he submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department asking for every single email Clinton composed during her four years there.

The Department, according to Leopold, declined the request, arguing it was “too broad” and told him to narrow it down, though it turned out State didn’t have possession yet of any of Clinton’s emails; those were turned over — at least the ones Clinton wanted turned over — the next month.

And yet Trump’s call, obviously made in jest, for Russia to “find the 30,000 emails” is still brandished by the media and Brennan as sure evidence that Trump was dealing with the Kremlin to throw the election his way.

An indictment issued last month by special counsel Robert Mueller does say that “on or about” the same day Trump made the remark at the press conference, Russian “conspirators” attempted to hack more emails associated with Clinton and her campaign.

The indictment doesn’t state that the there’s a link between Trump’s off-hand comment and the attempted hacks — probably because the Russians had already been hacking Democrats.

But David Graham in Atlantic magazine called it “new evidence” that Russia had been “acting on Trump’s request.”

Yes, the Russians were “acting on Trump’s request” to do something they had already been doing and to retrieve something the news media had been trying to get all along anyway (and which the public were arguably entitled to see anyway).

And because it’s worth repeating: Those emails Trump was talking about were never found.

Trump wasn't colluding with Russia. He was looking for the same thing the media were.