UPDATE: The revelation Wednesday that surveillance data on Trump and his team have been uncovered does not of course mean Trump was "wiretapped" - in that obsolete term Trump and the media persist in using.

What it does mean is that a whole lot of people - including the executives at Fox News - should go back and reread Andrew Napolitano's comments in light of what he said about digital surveillance, a for more worrisome issue than mere wiretapping.

Now back to the show:

Did you see that story about how Fox News suspended the talking head who said this about the wiretapping of the White House?

"There was a report in June 2016 -- a FISA request by the Obama administration -- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several other campaign officials. Then they got turned down. Then in October, then they renewed it and did a startup wiretap at Trump Tower with some computer and Russian banks."

No, you didn't see that story.

That's because the Fox News personality who said that was Brett Baier.

I have nothing against Baier, who's a Jersey guy.

But I find it extremely curious that the above comment alleging that Donald Trump was wiretapped did not attract any attention from the executives of Fox News.

Meanwhile those executives suspended legal analyst - and also a Jersey guy - Andrew Napolitano for a much more reasoned remark in which he went out of his way to discredit the notion that Trump was wiretapped.

Both statements were cited by Trump press secretary Sean Spicer the other day, as were a lot of other similar statements. Yet for some reason the Fox execs went after Napolitano.

So did the newspapers, with fake news headlines like "Fox pulls Napolitano after wiretap claims" in the Los Angeles Times and "Napolitano reportedly pulled from Fox News after debunked wiretapping claims" in the Washington Post.

Napolitano did indeed debunk claims of wiretapping. But from the opposite direction from that portrayed in that piece of fake news in the Post.

Napolitano never claimed Trump was wiretapped.

In fact he was among the few commentators who bothered to make the distinction between "wiretapping" - a practice that has long been obsolete - and the modern practice of digital surveillance, which is thriving and a menace to the privacy of all of us.

It was the New York Times, not Napolitano, that claimed in a front-page headline on Jan. 20 that wiretapping was employed against the Trump campaign.

In one of the articles that started the stir, Napolitano stated that wiretapping has long since been abandoned in favor of the sweeping up of digital data, which can then be accessed by warrants granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, "FISA" for short:

"When FISA was written, telephone surveillance was a matter of wiretapping - installing a wire onto the target's telephone line, either inside or outside the home or business, and listening to or recording in real time the conversations that were audible on the tapped line."

That no longer happens and President Trump was inaccurate when he used that term in that infamous tweet.

The real problem for all of us, Napolitano went on to note, is that the feds are in effect "wiretapping" all of us - without wires of course:

"Today the National Security Agency has 24/7 access to the mainframe computers of all telecom providers and all computer service providers and to all digital traffic carried by fiber optics in the U.S. The NSA has had this access pursuant to FISA court orders issued in 2005 and renewed every 90 days. The FISA court has based its rulings on its own essentially secret convoluted logic, never subjected to public scrutiny. That has resulted in the universal surveillance state in which we in America now live. The NSA has never denied this."

Napolitano went on to state that there would be a record kept if an American official were to look up the records of an American citizen.

But the British have access to that database as well. They were capable of getting information and leaking it back to the Obama administration officials eager to pin a relationship with Russia on the Donald's campaign.

In that regard, consider this passage:

"American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials -- and others close to Russia's president, Vladimir I. Putin -- and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence."

Three anonymous sources saying the Brits had handed over data to the U.S.?

How could that crazy Andy Napolitano say that?

He didn't.

That's a direct quote from a March 1 article in the New York Times.

The article was headlined, "Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking."

It tells of close cooperation between the Obama administration and the Europeans in the closing days of Obama's term to get the goods on the Trump team's contacts with the Russians.

Read that article and you start to wonder if those three sources were the same three sources Napolitano cited in the March 14 appearance on Fox News that landed him in hot water:

"Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. He didn't use the NSA, he didn't use the CIA, he didn't use the FBI, and he didn't use the Department of Justice. He used GCHQ, what is that? It's the initials for the British Intelligence Spying Agency."

In that briefing the other day that led to Napolitano's suspension, Sean Spicer gave a long list of news organization on both sides of the partisan divide saying similar things.

So why did Napolitano get singled out?

I ran this by Phil Giraldi, also a Jersey guy, one who is a former CIA agent.

There are basically two ways spy organization get information, he said: "humint"and "sigint."

"Humint" stands for "Human intelligence." It's highly unlikely the Brits had a spy in a trench coat hiding in a closet when someone with the Trump campaign met with one of those dread Russkies.

It's more likely they used "sigint," he said.

"If they're looking into it, they're going to be using sigint," Giraldi said. "That's the only way you can do it. You're not going to go tap on the ambassador's door and say, 'Tell us what you did.'"

A nice note I got from Pat Buchanan thanking me for supporting the traditional conservative position. I don't know of another American newspaper columnist who did.

No, you're not - especially if you have access to that huge National Security Agency archive of electronic communications at your fingertips, as the Brits apparently do.

Giraldi noted that Napolitano had said that the Brits could have been doing so to help the Americans get around the requirement of getting FISA warrants for all of their inquiries.

Did they?

Neither the Times reporters nor Napolitano know firsthand just who did what when, where and how.

Both relied on anonymous sources.

So why did Fox News fold?

They seem to have panicked in the face of liberal pressure.

Why?

Glad you asked.

I like to think of myself as the sole old-time conservative newspaper columnist in America.

I was certainly the only one to wise up to the so-called "neo" conservatives who in the Bush years passed off their liberal internationalism as right-wing conservatism.

The Fox crowd, with the sole exception of Napolitano, were up to their ears in this fraudulent attempt to hijack American conservatism.

That's why Fox fought Trump until the bitter end -when they realized they couldn't stop him from getting the nomination.

Their politics regarding the Mideast are indistinguishable from the Beltway liberalism of the Washington Post opinion pages - which now seem to include the news pages.

They even employ Charles Krauthammer, the left-wing former Walter Mondale speechwriter who got everything wrong about Iraq, the Arab Spring and so on.

So it's hardly surprising they chose this opportunity to excommunicate the sole dissident from the neocon view that Fox has always embraced.

Giraldi can also be counted among the apostates.

Like me, he argues this entire affair has been an exercise in silliness from Trump on down to the Times.

Of Trump's original tweet, he said, "Trump's comment was goofy but might not be that far off what happened."

What's happening was communicated to me by another ex-CIA insider who didn't want his name used.

So just pretend I made up this quote about the mental state of the Beltway insiders ever since they woke up Wednesday Nov. 9 and realized Donald Trump would be president till 2021:

"It was a collective meltdown. They're going through the seven stages of grief and they're still locked in denial."

They certainly are. I can't watch CNN or MSNBC without hearing some talking head offer some scenario that ends up with the Donald being hounded out of office because he stole this election in a secret deal with the Russians.

See Giraldi's comments on that "soft coup" here.

That ain't gonna happen, no matter how much Rachel Maddow might desire it, and for a simple reason.

There was no "secret" reason the Russians wanted Hillary Clinton to lose.

She had stated out loud - over and over - that she wanted to set up a no-fly zone in Syria, one that would have the U.S. shooting down any Russian plane that entered the protected airspace.

That's an open invitation to World War III.

No one had to explain that to the Russians.

Similarly one of the conspiracy theories going around is that the Trumpies secretly communicated to the Russians that if the Donald won he would end American support for the Ukrainian government in that dust-up over Ukraine.

The Russians didn't need any clandestine meetings with the Trump campaign to figure out that the Donald wanted to stop U.S. interference in Ukraine.

Again, all they had to do was read the New York Times.

In March of last year he had a meeting with the Times editors at which he said, "If you look at the Ukraine, we are the ones always fighting on the Ukraine. I never hear any other countries even mentioned. NATO is obsolete and it's extremely expensive to the United States, disproportionately so."

No wiretaps needed to get that message. The Donald made it plain he intended to get along with the Russians. Hillary made it plain she wanted to fight them.

Guess who they supported?

Did they do so by hacking into Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's emails and sending them to Wikileaks?

That's tough to prove, said Giraldi.

But even if they did, the country that hacked German leader Angela Merkel's cellphone would have a hard time making the case that this is anything but some nice intelligence work, said Giraldi.

"First of all they haven't yet made the case that Russia did anything," he said. "And even if they do make the case that they tapped into Podesta's emails, that's pretty much fair game."

Apparently Podesta fell for a phishing scheme that could have originated with the Russians - or some hacker sitting in his Mom's house in his underwear tapping on his computer.

Perhaps the inquiry will find this guy.

"That would be the only gain from all this," he said. "The downside is this is going to go on for months and make everyone look bad."

No one has to make Fox News look bad.

They've already done that themselves.

ADD - MORE CHEAP SHOTS AT TRUMP FROM THE POST: When I first read the headline on this Washington Post article: "Trump: Most People Don't Know Lincoln Was a Republican," I expected the text would cite some poll or another stating that most Americans do in fact know Lincoln was a Republican.

No such poll was cited. A quick web search revealed that none falls readily to hand, as the English like to say.

I did find this recent poll in which participants named Lincoln the best president ever. But there was no indication of party affiliation.

So where's the joke?

I'm sure that virtually all political insiders are aware of the party lineup in the 1860 election. But are most Americans?

Unless the Post has some proof they are, this looks like just another failed attack in their jihad against the president.

Also, just for the fun of it, can anyone name the candidate who finished second to Lincoln and his political party?

I certainly couldn't until I looked up the results of that race.

PLUS: I wonder if Shepard Smith will reveal his sources on this killer storm that failed to kill: