When Donald Trump told George Stephanopoulos he (Donald) might listen to “oppo” research coming from a foreign source and that he might not tell the FBI about it, the mainstream media, as is so often the case, deliberately missed or misstated what he meant, went into one of their usual hissy fits, and attacked the president, even calling him treasonous.

Besides the obvious hypocrisy, pointed out with characteristic aplomb by Andrew McCarthy, something else, likely more important, was at play.

The media (and the Democrats, of course) deliberately missed the point because you would have to be seriously intellectually challenged not to get why Trump might have been hesitant or ambivalent about going to the FBI. These days only a total dimwit would unquestioningly trust the supposed “world’s greatest law enforcement agency.” The FBI is under a dark cloud.

The litany of personages who have recently left or been expelled from that organization is long and getting longer. As is well known, it’s under investigation for its practices during and before the Mueller probe, via the inspector general and recently-appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is famed for prosecuting FBI agents with ties to the Boston mob. All this is being supervised by AG William Barr.

Significantly, Durham is also investigating the CIA and, it appears, the State Department. President Trump has given Barr (and therefore presumably Durham) the ability to compel the agencies to reveal their secret documents and to make their personnel cooperate with investigators.

FBI director Christopher Wray doesn’t like this much and is doing a bit of stonewalling, not to mention phony parsing in failing to acknowledge that “surveillance” and “spying” are basically the same thing. Apparently Wray, also relatively new to his job, thinks he is being loyal to his organization and, one supposes, protecting the esprit de corps of the rank-and-file and the reputation of the FBI.

He’s doing the opposite. Only via a thorough and complete airing will the organization ever get its reputation back (or get a good one in the first place — the recent MLK revelations are not flattering to King or the FBI). Too much water is already under the proverbial bridge. This is, after all, an organization that claims to have “lost” — as in “the dog ate the homework” — Peter Strzok’s notes regarding the Chinese having hacked into Hillary Clinton’s email server.

Given their behavior, Wray and the others trying to damp down the investigation of the predicate of the Mueller probe are terrified the results will not be good for the FBI or for Mueller, not to mention Clapper, Brennan, etc., etc., and on upwards. We will hear and are hearing a great deal about “sources and methods” and “lives at risk.” They will do anything to hide the truth.

Although investigators should be careful, much of this is self-serving nonsense. And a great deal of what they are trying to hide will come out in the end anyway. As we used to say in the sixties, “the whole world is watching,” only this time the world has the Internet. Someone is going to leak the truth eventually and then everyone, at least everyone willing to look, is going to see it. And everyone will know what really happened. America, already hopelessly split, could well rupture. It may be that the New York Times and the Washington Post will do their best to obfuscate and spin, but they can only hold the fort for so long. Already the Times seems engaged in CYA.

But the fact that “the whole world is watching” means also that they/we are watching the new investigators too, Mssrs. Howoritz, Durham, and Barr and their staffs. We know these men have the difficult task of investigating old friends and acquaintances. Showing clean hands is and will be complicated. Already IG Horowitz pulled his punches on the Clinton email investigation. If he does that again, he will be a historical goat. This time no backsliding, please, by any of them.

Democrats, the media and Never Trumpers should realize that just because Donald Trump says the Mueller/Russia probe was a “set-up,” doesn’t mean it wasn’t. And if it was, it was treason and should be treated accordingly for the good of our country. Aaron Burr is small change indeed compared to suborning our intelligence agencies, State Department, and FBI in the service of undermining first a candidate and then a presidency, no matter what party or ideological bias he or she is from. As many have written and said, it can happen to either side.

We live in a world where, due to the pervasiveness of Big Tech, many, if not most, of us feel that our privacy is dead. Our children are growing up with that grim knowledge, unlike any generation in human history. It’s not an exaggeration to imagine that this will have a profound effect on the human species itself. Big Brother is already the fabric of our existence. We need an FBI that is a defender of the people, not of itself, that is totally clean and as transparent as possible, to fight for us against this behemoth and to preserve even a semblance of what the Founders wanted for the citizens of this country.

Think about that one, Christopher Wray, when you’re worried about your “secrets.”

Roger L. Simon — co-founder and CEO emeritus of PJ Media — is an award-winning author and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. His new novel will be published shortly.