When Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., supported President Trump’s outreach efforts with Russia last summer, including a diplomatic trip to the country himself, Vanity Fair’s Tina Nguyen wrote that “ Rand Paul is Trump’s Perfect Russia Stooge .”

New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait said Paul was a “ Loyal Trump Stooge ” for not supporting the investigation into the president’s "opaque ties to Russia."

Not to be outdone, neoconservative Stephen Hayes, the former Weekly Standard editor who once concocted the outlandish conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Osama Bin Laden, penned a column titled, “ Rand Paul, Russian Stooge .”

As a libertarian-conservative writer who often chronicles the career of America’s most high profile libertarian Republican, almost every Rand Paul story I have shared since the summer of 2016 on virtually any subject has been met with social media commenters parroting the notion that the Kentucky senator is a Russian “ stooge ” or even Vladimir Putin’s “ puppet .”

On Friday, and confirmed on Sunday we learned these people are a bunch of conspiracy nuts.

Now that the Mueller report has recommended no indictments and the Justice Department has officially declared there was no collusion between Trump and Russia during the presidential election, Democrats and leftists in the media are doing their best to scramble the egg that has landed flatly on all their faces: "You haven’t seen the report!" "We don’t know the full story yet!" No doubt as you read these words, most are still scrambling.

I can’t blame them. If I put my credibility on the line for such an elaborate fabrication for as long as they have, I would be trying to prove it somehow wasn’t a lie too.

“For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in,” writes Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi. “We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.”

Taibbi laments how many in the press became willing foot soldiers for the Democrats’ efforts to undermine the president. “Worse, it’s led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission,” Taibbi says. “We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction ...”

Perhaps even worse than the left-leaning media’s Democrat shilling, what was it Rand Paul did specifically that earned him the Russian “stooge” insult? He thought trying to establish better diplomatic ties with nuclear-armed Russia was preferable to a new Cold War .

Who was the last president to advise against starting another Cold War? Barack Obama.

"Gov. Romney … few months ago when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al Qaeda,” Obama said to Republican Mitt Romney during a 2012 presidential debate. “You said Russia … the 1980s, they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War's been over for 20 years.”

And yet, most of Obama’s former supporters have been more interested in restarting it for purely partisan reasons.

These are the people who believe Rand Paul is somehow an unprincipled “stooge.”

While Paul was busy pursuing the same realist foreign policy he advocated for long before Trump even emerged on the political scene, Trump-deranged zealots gleefully chose instead to portray the senator as engaging in something sinister. Friday, that narrative blew up in their face. “I hope the biased media learns their lesson, and Democrats are able to accept the undisputed facts and move on,” Paul said Sunday.

From today’s more illuminated vantage point, what was worse than the supposed unpardonable sin of Paul trying to help Trump neuter the hawks within his own party and dethaw relations with Russia ? Answer: Liberals and neoconservatives trying to restart the Cold War based on a wild-eyed conspiracy theory that has now been disproven.

Rand Paul’s Russia critics have all been outright stooges for the Democratic Party and its agenda for two long years, wittingly or not. If they were honest, they would admit it.

Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.