Nearly a year after co-authoring a suspect account damning Brett Kavanaugh as a serial sexual harasser — in the august pages of The New Yorker, no less — journalist Jane Mayer has taken up a curious cause: defending Al Franken.

Recall that when Franken resigned from the United States Senate on Jan. 2, 2018, he was facing down eight accusers in a scandal that unfolded over just three weeks.

The conservative Kavanaugh, approaching his confirmation hearing for the United States Supreme Court, had faced one accuser. The second, whom Mayer and co-author Ronan Farrow profiled favorably, told The New Yorker she had serious gaps in her memory about the night in question — a party, 35 years prior, during which she said a young Kavanaugh had put his penis in her face. She had been drinking heavily that night and couldn’t be sure.

But after six days in consultation with her lawyer, this accuser came back to Mayer and Farrow. She felt she had recovered all of her memories with certainty.

Mayer and Farrow depicted this account as credible, worthy of an FBI investigation, even as they wrote that “The New Yorker has not confirmed with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present at the party,” opting instead to rely on hearsay from those who claim to have been “told at the time [by another student] that Kavanaugh was the student who exposed himself.”

Forget about morality or ethics — that is a shockingly loose journalistic standard, one that does not help the perception of the elite liberal media.

Mayer, as made clear in her latest profile, would never have done the same to Al Franken.

Poor, poor Al. Here Mayer finds him just last month, alone in a row house in Minneapolis, “Minnesota’s disgraced former senator, wandering around in jeans and stocking feet.”

The sun is out but the shades are down, hardly a subtle metaphor. Franken says he’s been clinically depressed, on medication, feeling anti-social. Without his wife at home to do her wifely duties — she is “stuck in D.C. with a cold” — Franken offers only carrots and hummus, takeout at that.

“He had evidently done the best he could to be hospitable,” Mayer writes. It does not occur to her that Franken, a showman long before he was ever in politics, has set the scene.

Nor does Mayer address any attempt to seek comment from Franken’s wife. Considering the long, sad tradition of wronged political spouses standing by their men — from Jackie Kennedy to Hillary Clinton to Silda Spitzer to Huma Abedin — this significant absence, one would think, merits a mention.

But no. “Now Franken was just one more face in a gallery of previously powerful men who had been brought down by the #MeToo movement,” Mayer writes. “America had ghosted him.”

Bad America!

Franken himself had written about his long-standing and troubling views toward women in his would-be 2020 presidential campaign book “Al Franken: Giant of the Senate,” but these passages went largely ignored by the media.

As do they in Mayer’s piece.

Franken, Mayer implies, is the victim of a conservative conspiracy. (Sound familiar, Bill Clinton apologists?)

Leeann Tweeden, Franken’s most prominent accuser and the one with photographic evidence, is a conservative, Mayer notes. Tweeden worked at a conservative media outlet as a conservative radio talk show host, Mayer also notes, continuously. You know what that means, liberal elite: She must be dumb and crazy.

Also, Mayer writes, Tweeden participated in a USO skit, written by Franken, calling for Franken to make a pass at her, and “Tweeden participated in other ribald USO skits.” Another part of the script — written by Franken, the details important later — had Franken, as “Dr. Franken,” attempting to perform a “breast exam” on Tweeden.

So what, Mayer basically asks, did Leeann Tweeden expect?

A prominent female journalist, a staff writer for decades at one of the most esteemed publications in America, in sum and substance has made this accusation in print: She asked for it.

Democrat or Republican, this is an argument no thinking woman ever has or ever will countenance. How did not one editor pull Mayer back? Could you imagine if this were a similarly disgraced Republican senator she was profiling?

To recap: Tweeden alleges that in 2006, while on a two-week USO tour, Franken subjected her to constant sexual harassment. This culminated, she said, in his repeated insistence that they rehearse a scene in which his character kisses hers.

When she finally relented, Tweeden said that Franken “just put his hand on the back of my head, and he mashed his face against it. He stuck his tongue in my mouth so fast — and all that I could remember is that his lips were really wet, and it was slimy.”

Mayer also points out, condescendingly, that Tweeden “wasn’t an actress” — no, just once a lowly Frederick’s of Hollywood model, no slut-shaming here — and so “may have been unfamiliar” with the concept of a rehearsal.

Tweeden said she pushed Franken away and felt “violated.” Franken’s revenge: taking a photograph of Tweeden, in helmet and flak jacket, asleep, with Franken bent down and appearing to grope her breasts, smiling wide.

Mayer describes this as a boyish prank.

At the time, Franken would have been about 55 years old. Mayer also neglects to describe this photo in detail. If you haven’t seen it, look it up. Tweeden is not asleep so much as dead to the world, her head pitched back, mouth open.

That photograph was intended to humiliate her.

But Franken says when he first saw the photo, which ran with the concurrent breaking news story, his first thought was “Oh my God, my life! My life!”

Not: What was I thinking? Or: How could I have done that to a young woman, on a USO tour no less? Or: How will my wife and daughter react? Nope.

As we’ve heard in such cases, rich, famous and powerful men who face such credible accusations usually admit to this first thought: Oh no! What about me?

Even more damning, Franken’s defenders describe him here in hardly glowing terms. A sampling:

“He can be a jerk.”

“He can be very aggressive interpersonally. He can say mean things, or use other people as props.”

He also, these defenders say, gave no thought to the people around him: clapping one female staffer so hard on the back that sometimes she had “the wind knocked out of her” — think about that one, about what would have been done to Kavanaugh over that alone — kissing people on the mouth (same), chewing with his mouth open, cutting lines by announcing he was more important than anyone else who was waiting their turn, and generally behaving like a smug, boorish, entitled a–hole.

But with women — subordinate, attractive, younger women, or women who were fans — no. Al Franken was a model of comportment.

When I first wrote about Franken in 2017, I revisited his memoir, published earlier that year. The book is quite illuminating. Franken wrote that he wasn’t sorry for the “porn and rape joke week” that nearly cost him the nomination — and that got two whole chapters.

Nor was he apologetic for a graphic piece called “Porn-O-Rama” that he wrote for Playboy’s January 2000 issue, one that ends with Franken in a three-way and getting the kind of oral sex his actual wife, he wrote, refuses. (Lucky woman.)

And as for that joke he pitched at “Saturday Night Live” about drugging and raping “60 Minutes” journalist Lesley Stahl and stuffing her in a closet?

Not sorry, not at all. “I was just doing my job,” Franken wrote.

As I wrote then, women who defend Al Franken, beware. This is what he really thinks of you. And if the Dems want moral authority going into 2020, taking on a president who might best be wounded on this very issue, the party needs to be as strict and clear-eyed with their own.

Yet Mayer allows Franken these most cowardly of defenses: He remembers things differently. He’s never been popular with the ladies and so maybe he just doesn’t know how to relate (another version of “Women, it’s your fault.”). He’s just obtuse. He doesn’t get it.

The larger problem with Mayer’s articles, and The New Yorker’s decision to publish them, is the damage they do to the #MeToo movement. It’s no secret that The New Yorker’s politics lean very left.

So when the magazine runs a serious, possibly career-ending allegation against Kavanaugh made by one woman who has, by her own admission, a very impaired recall of the night in question, and not one eyewitness who put Kavanaugh at that party, yet defends a former Democratic senator who has eight very credible accusations against him, photographic evidence, and his own disturbing writings on his views of women, this is what the public hears: Believe all women — but only when they’re accusing the guy in the other political party. Universal standards do not apply.

Again, if the left wants to hurt Trump, it needs to admit when its own are at fault.

In conclusion, Mayer has the temerity to ask another accuser if Franken’s behavior toward her “was bad enough to end his Senate career.”

“I didn’t end his Senate career — he did,” the woman rightly shot back.

This, Mayer writes, deeply wounds Franken. He even starts crying. “This” — not anything he ever said or did, just “this” — “has really destroyed my family,” Franken whines. “For her to say that, it’s just so callous.”

If Franken were so innocent, you’d think he’d be outraged. You think he’d be issuing blanket denials. You think he’d be able to reflexively say that he has never acted inappropriately toward women in his life, nor would he ever.

It’s not a high bar to clear.

Women who make apologies or allowances for this behavior, who argue that women should accept a lesser level of sexual harassment or abuse because these poor men just don’t know any better, are traitors to the cause.

And Mayer has revealed herself as one. Franken, she writes sympathetically, “is still trying to understand and learn from what he did wrong.”

Here’s a simple, inarguable truth: Any decent man knows not to harass, make improper comments, grope, intimidate or predate. It would never occur to any decent man, sober or drunk, to make a woman feel uncomfortable.

There’s nothing here to “understand” or “learn” — but if that’s really Al Franken’s best defense, it’s all the more reason he has no place in the Senate, or in any form of public life.