Now that impeachment and Ukraine are falling apart as arguments to remove President Trump, CBS's 60 Minutes is at it again, bringing up the old dead cat from the Mueller Report, that Russia hacked the 2016 presidential race to steal the election from Hillary Clinton and all the rest of the Democrats. Russkis, see, are on Trump's side.

They went over all the stuff that everyone who's been watching this stuff already knows as if it were something new, blaming Trump for the entire problem. Here's their intro:

There was a lot of testimony during this past week's impeachment inquiry about foreign interference in our 2016 election, including the president's assertion that Ukraine was involved. But the president's own intelligence agencies say it was the Russians who "hacked" the 2016 elections. Special counsel Robert Mueller spelled it out in his report. Now the Justice Department has at least two open cases against Russian citizens for interfering with our presidential and congressional races, we decided to take a closer look at one of them - the case against 12 Russian military officers accused of breaking into the Democratic Party's computers, stealing compromising information, and selectively releasing it to undermine Democratic candidates. There's no evidence of similar operations against Republicans in 2016. With the 2020 election approaching, the story of "The Russian Hack."

So if Russia hacked the election, somehow that means Ukraine couldn't? Like the pair of them are not rivals, each jockeying for position to get the candidate of their choice out front? And if one hacked, it means the other didn't? This is rubbish. File under Things 60 Minutes Didn't Think Of.

There were big long (and interesting) interviews with FBI agents who work the Russia side, as is appropriate, an interview with Politico's Marc Caputo who got got some Russia tipoffs and ran with them as news, Kelly Ward Burton, who was the executive director of the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and a Democratic politician in Florida who claims she lost the 2016 primary to another Democrat all because of Russian hacking, as if there was nothing wrong with her candidacy otherwise, which is far from a slam dunk. Maybe the voters weren't keen on having another socialist, but somehow CBS forgot to ask.

It was a report full of assumption. An intelligence official who said the Russian aim was to sow chaos was glossed over in order to get to the juicier topic of the Russians supposedly wanting to help Trump.

Anyone who's been watching the Russians, though, knows that most of the Kremlinites were rooting for Bernie Sanders, raising the far likelier motive that the purpose of the hack was to get Bernie Sanders on as the Democratic nominee over Hillary Clinton. Sanders of course, would never confront Russia the way President Trump has, and the Russians would have reason to believe that Sanders retains a soft spot for the old Stalinist empire based in part on his defense of the Chavistas, a Russian ally, in Venezuela, as well as his spending his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union. If the Russians wanted anyone to get elected, it was probably Bernie. But of course, 60 Minutes didn't ask.

The big whopper of omission, though was their failure to ask either the FBI or Democrats just why their party refused to fork over their supposedly hacked server so the FBI could inspect it. That was the weird thing, an FBI loaded with Democratic symps, letting Hillary Clinton off easy for her outrageous security violations, (which opened the door wide open to Russian hackers), and somehow they didn't want to let the FBI see it in order to get to the bottom of what as going on.

The Democrats significantly obstructed the FBI from getting any facts about the supposed hacking of their server and only a pretty skeevy "compromise" of letting some private company look at the matter was what was done. CBS pretty well had all the players in front of them in its report, and ooops, forgot to ask any of them about it.

And this isn't just rightwing conspiracy talk. The information that the Democrats shut out the FBI from what was probably a Russian hacker attack on their computer came from none other than lefty FBI Director James Comey himself in his 2017 testimony. Why CBS didn't think to ask that one, suggests maybe the target of the report wasn't the Russians, but President Trump.

Sounds about right from this bunch. But it sure did make for some Swiss cheese-holed journalism.

Image credit: YouTube screen shot