So it was all fake news…

The entire two-year Russia collusion frenzy was based on an absolute falsehood that Donald Trump and his team had colluded with Russians to fix the 2016 election.

It’s hard to imagine a worse thing to say about someone than that they betrayed their country, that they were traitors to their own people.

Yet that was the charge levelled at Trump in an obsessively unrelenting campaign to bring him down as President.

Today, he stands completely vindicated.

The long-awaited report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller sensationally cleared Trump of any collusion.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller leaves church on Sunday, just hours before a summary of his report - two years in the making - was released to the public

After an intensive investigation, Mueller concluded that neither the President nor any of his campaign team conspired with any Russians to interfere with the election.

Trump is jubilant, understandably.

But whilst I am pleased for him that he was finally exonerated of a high crime I never thought he could possibly have committed, my overwhelming feeling today is one of fury that he had to endure such a disgraceful, deceitful and concerted attack on his presidency based on nothing but a fervent desire to destroy him and his family.

Make no mistake, this was a ‘Get Trump’ mission driven by a collection of people who just couldn’t stomach the thought that he won the White House.

The Democrats, led by the demented Adam Schiff, screamed ‘COLLUSION!’ so often I’m amazed their larynxes didn’t explode.

But at least they had an obvious political motive for wanting Trump gone.

Trump faced the cameras on Sunday as he took a victory lap on hearing the news he had been exonerated of any collusion charges

What is far worse is the way so many mainstream US media networks, newspapers and individual journalists fuelled the fake frenzy.

They let all the normal rules of balanced reporting fly out the window as they competed with each other over who could land the biggest Pulitzer prize-winning Trump/Russia sucker punch that would KO the President they loathe.

Only it turned out they were all punching thin air.

There was no collusion.

None.

Nada.

And today, all the people who’ve spent the past two years telling the world ‘Trump’s going down for Russia collusion’ look very stupid and have their reputations for impartiality irrevocably ruined.

Once revered newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post are effectively finished as credible purveyors of fair and balanced news.

Their sustained, often viciously partisan Russiagate coverage has been dictated not by any ‘higher purpose’ journalistic rigour but by commercial greed: the more they hammer the President, the more copies they sell and website clicks they attract, and the more money they make.

And the ‘Trump’s a traitor’ narrative has been their biggest money-spinner.

The Times has seen subscriptions and profits skyrocket since it erupted and has boasted about its success ad nauseam - but at what cost to its integrity?

Meanwhile, on the internet, websites have behaved like they were back in the unregulated, unlicensed wild west.

Buzzfeed, keen to show the world it’s a serious news organisation and not a trivia-led click-baiting gossip sheet, recklessly published the infamous dossier from ex-British spy Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson that claimed among other outlandish things that Trump paid prostitutes to urinate on him in a Moscow hotel room.

This revelation was designed to humiliate Trump personally, and also to infer that Vladimir Putin’s intelligence operatives had tapes of the incident, which is why Trump was so badly compromised by Russia.

It was also untrue.

I wrote at the time that most of the dossier – commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democrats - sounded like nonsense, and sure enough all the more lurid revelations have never been proven.

Yet that terrible journalistic decision to run a completely unverified document full of obvious bullsh*t poured a million tons of fuel onto the small Russia collusion fire burning slowly away in Washington and turned it into a furnace that threatened to engulf and destroy the Trump presidency.

The first page of the letter released on Sunday that summarized Mueller's findings - that Trump was not guilty of collusion

Cable TV news has arguably been even worse than the press, feeding off every tiny scrap of unsubstantiated Russia-related gossip to drive headlines and ratings.

CNN anchors like Anderson Cooper can’t hide their sneering disdain for Trump, which is entirely their prerogative.

But when, like Cooper, that disdain compels you to spend night after night, month after month, devoting almost your entire ‘news’ show to what has turned out to be a fake news story, your reputation as an unbiased, fair-minded journalist is finished.

Why should any CNN viewer ever trust the likes of Cooper again given how badly he’s burned himself on this bogus Russia collusion story?

At MSNBC, hugely popular anchors like Rachel Maddow pumped out the Russia line with increasingly intense, emotional nightly detail, convincing themselves and their viewers in the process that they were exposing the new Watergate.

But they weren’t.

They were just exposing their own bias and news-judgement-twisting hatred of Trump.

Late night hosts, too, all eagerly embraced the Russia collusion line, led by Stephen Colbert who turned round his ailing Late Late Show’s ratings fortunes by making it a Trump-whacking forum featuring the constant subliminal message, ‘Don’t worry folks, Mueller’s coming for him!’

Ironically, Fox News, which is routinely attacked by the left in America for its often undeniably slavish support for Trump, emerges with by far the most credit on this story.

Their much-vilified prime time anchors Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson have repeatedly picked apart and rubbished the Russia collusion claims - and they were right.

The collective impact of all this hysteria was that 95% of America’s media was actively colluding - oh the irony! - to turn the false Russia collusion story into a presidency-ending scandal.

As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote in an excoriating attack, it has been this media generation’s equivalent of the WMD fiasco that led to the Iraq War being fought on an entirely bogus pretext, aided and abetted by a woefully supine and deluded media.

Taibbi said: ‘As a purely journalistic exercise, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it’s led to most journalists adopting a radical change in mission. We’ve become side-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.’

Exactly.

As for other big losers in all this, the list is long and illustrious:

Hillary Clinton, who never got over being beaten by a candidate with zero political experience, has been shrieking away ever since about Trump colluding with Russians in the desperate hope it would be proven true and she should rise again in glory as the true winner in 2016.

Today, she just looks an even bigger loser.

And what about the FBI, supposedly the very byword of discretion and unimpeachable integrity?

The bureau’s former boss turned self-aggrandising secret-revealing lawman celebrity James Comey posted a moody photo of himself in woodland on Sunday and the caption: ‘So many questions..’

James Comey posted a cryptic tweet in the hours after Mueller report summary release - a photograph of himself in woodland with the caption 'so many questions'

Yes, there are – like: ‘What the hell was the FBI doing on Comey’s watch while Russia was aggressively hacking away to try to fix the last election?

The shocking answer is that they were more fixated with trying to stop Trump becoming President and wrecking his presidency if he did.

There should now be a proper investigation into Comey’s role in forcing the Mueller investigation into life in the first place, by leaking misinformation to the media when there was no hard evidence to support any collusion.

Such a new probe should also examine how Comey’s FBI colleagues like Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr and Peter Strzok all conspired to compromise the democratically elected president of the United States.

They are all heavily implicated in numerous acts of alleged crimes involving the misuse of the dodgy Steele dossier, which they used as an excuse to get FISA warrants to spy on an associate of Trump’s campaign, without any mention of Hillary and the Democrats financing it.

Their treachery, and Trump-hating motivation for it, is all there in their own words.

Strzok texted Page, his secret lover, before the 2016 election, and after he had just helped get Hillary off the email scandal rap, to say a newly-opened FBI investigation against Trump was an ‘insurance policy’ against him in case he won.

McCabe, who succeeded Comey as FBI Director, confirmed to CBS after his own departure that he not only launched a counter-intelligence operation against President Trump, but also discussed with FBI colleagues whether it was possible to remove him from office using the 25th Amendment.

What the hell were all these FBI agents, who took an oath to serve the President, doing by plotting against him in such a disgraceful way?

The full scale of their behaviour must be properly investigated and those involved, if proven to have acted illegally, should be jailed.

And then, of course, we’ve got the Trump-bashing liberal celebrities who’ve been hollering ‘COLLUSION’ for two years and more recently been salivating on social media about the President’s impending day of reckoning at the hands of their hero, Mueller.

Today, this preening, posturing collection of ridiculous Hollywood creatures from Bette Midler, Sarah Silverman and Chelsea Handler to Alyssa Milano, Rob Reiner and George Takei have all been left in a state of shock, distress and denial – unable to believe that their knight in shining armour didn’t just spare their target but exonerated him.

Of all the many terrible things about this Russia collusion farce, the worst is the open, excited craving by so many Americans to WANT to believe their President was a corrupt agent of a foreign enemy, and their undisguised disappointment now it turns out he wasn’t.

Celebrities including actress Alyssa milano, left, and late night host Stephen Colbert, right, have been partuclarly vocal about wanting to see Trump proven to be corrupt

This scandal has exposed many of America’s politicians, journalists and celebrities for the hysterical Trump-deranged fools that they have become.

By obsessing about the fake saga of Russia collusion, they have done immeasurable harm to their country and their own reputations.

Trump is no angel, and faces other investigations that may or may not uncover bad stuff. That remains to be seen.

But on Russia, he has been absolutely consistent in repeatedly crying ‘NO COLLUSION”, and he’s called the probe a ‘witch hunt’ more than 170 times.

He was right: there was NO collusion, and it WAS a witch-hunt.

The result of this appalling episode in modern American history is that Trump emerges vindicated, emboldened and with a massive stick to beat his many critics in the 2020 election campaign.

And his opponents have once again shown their horrible tendency to believe their supposed moral superiority justifies anything they do, however venal.

I can see him now on the stump, declaring: ‘I delivered on defeating ISIS, I delivered on the economy - and I crushed the fake news attempt to destroy me on Russia collusion.’

It’s a powerful vote-winning cocktail.

I tweeted last year that my bet was Mueller would find no collusion.

Today, I bet that Trump, if nothing serious emerges in any other investigation, will now be re-elected President – and his enemies will have only themselves to blame.