The only 2016 campaign that colluded with Russia was Hillary Clinton's, and the only 2020 candidate who bragged about threatening Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating corruption is Joe Biden.

If the latest media-manufactured hysteria over President Donald Trump’s interactions with the Ukrainian government looks familiar, it’s because it is. The same tired playbook is being run by the same discredited people with the same goal: get rid of Trump, by any means necessary.

Just as the Clinton campaign, Obama administration holdovers, and complicit media allies peddled lies about Russian collusion while engaging in literal Russian collusion during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, so too did Joseph Biden literally threaten to withhold money from Ukraine if it failed to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company.

To hear the media tell it, Trump committed treason. The walls are closing in. The end is nigh. Why? Well, the details there are a little fuzzy, as they always seem to be. Somebody heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another that Trump had threatened Ukraine that it must investigate Hunter Biden, the troubled son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden…or else.

The media initially hyped their latest faux scandal by claiming a deeply connected “whistleblower” listened to a phone call between Trump and the head of Ukraine’s government, in which Trump allegedly threatened to withhold money if the Eastern European nation failed to investigate allegations of corruption by Hunter Biden. Then it morphed into the source reading a transcript or readout of the phone call. And eventually it was buried in the 22nd paragraph of a breathless CNN story that the alleged “whistleblower” hadn’t in fact directly read or seen or heard anything he or she was allegedly blowing the whistle on:

The whistleblower didn’t have direct knowledge of the communications, an official briefed on the matter told CNN. Instead, the whistleblower’s concerns came in part from learning information that was not obtained during the course of their work, and those details have played a role in the administration’s determination that the complaint didn’t fit the reporting requirements under the intelligence whistleblower law, the official said.

There’s burying the lede, and then there’s fitting the lede for cement boots, pushing it down an elevator shaft into a pool of bullets, and then tossing the remains overboard somewhere over the Marianas Trench. CNN opted for the latter. One man’s “whistleblower” is apparently another man’s rumor-monger or anonymous gossip columnist. The Wall Street Journal later disclosed that there was no quid pro quo and no discussion of U.S. financial aid during the call the whistleblower cum axe-grinder never even heard.

On Sunday, Trump did admit that he raised the topic of Biden and his son Hunter with the Ukrainian president within the context of needing to root out corruption in Ukraine, which raises all sorts of questions Democrats and their media allies would desperately like to avoid, such as: did Hunter Biden have sketchy business dealings in Ukraine? Did he benefit financially from those arrangements? Were any Ukrainian companies he worked for being investigated? Did his father, as the vice president of the United States, personally intervene to shut down Ukrainian officials who were investigating Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian business arrangements?

The answer to all those questions is a resounding YES. Despite being kicked out of the Navy for cocaine abuse and having no demonstrable business acumen, Hunter Biden nonetheless in 2014 landed a $50,000 per month gig on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian oil and gas concern.

Coincidentally, the law firm that helped arrange the sinecure, Boies Schiller, previously hired Fusion GPS, the shady opposition research firm retained by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to concoct the Russian collusion hoax, to run interference for Theranos, the infamous fake blood testing company whose founder was charged with wire fraud.

When Burisma later attracted the attention of Ukrainian law enforcement, Joe Biden personally intervened to make sure Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor looking into the company’s finances, was fired. You don’t have to take my word for this, because Joe Biden bragged about his efforts to fire the prosecutor investigating the company that paid Hunter Biden a $50,000 per month sinecure. On camera. In detail. Last year (the specific statement from Biden begins at 52:20 in the video):

And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t. So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.

Well, then.

The similarities between the anti-Trump Russian collusion operation and the fledgling anti-Trump Ukraine operation are eerie. If not for the utter implosion of the Russian collusion nonsense, culminating in a two-year special counsel investigation run by anti-Trump partisans that nonetheless found zero collusion, the Ukraine operation might almost be believable.

The thinly sourced rumors, the bombshell evidence that was always just around the next corner, the hyperventilating media coverage, the demands for ever more invasive investigative enemas from left-wing lawmakers like Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the fact that the alleged crimes were all committed not by Trump, but by his political opponents. If we hadn’t already been shown this same movie over and over and over again for three years, it might actually be interesting.

Instead, it’s just another manufactured narrative peddled by partisans desperate to prevent anyone from shining a spotlight on their own shenanigans. Just as the Russian collusion conspiracy begins and ends with Hillary Clinton, the Ukraine corruption scandal begins and ends with Joe and Hunter Biden. And just as they did with the investigation of the Russia hoax, their media allies will do everything in their power to make sure that evidence never sees the light of day.