Barack Obama's administration has now been exposed for doing something once-unthinkable in American politics – using classified information gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

By comparison, it makes the bungled 1972 Watergate break-in look like a 1.5 on the Richter scale of political scandals.

They say the cover-up is worse than the crime. That may not be quite true in this case. This crime is a high crime – a wholesale betrayal of the Constitution, not to forget two centuries of American political tradition.

Yet there was a cover-up – a big one. It's still going on. It began simultaneously with the criminal conspiracy orchestrated in the White House to use all the power of the federal government to spy on the political opposition campaign of Donald Trump.

It included leaking select information to create a "Trumped-up" political diversion – the notion that it was the Russians who were actually conducting dirty tricks in the 2016 election campaign – again using their own political appointees at U.S. intelligence agencies to make the case.

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There was just one problem with that diversion. No evidence was found. Zip. Zero, Zilch. Nada.

And, unlike Watergate, where the media had a rapturous feeding frenzy in uncovering the details of the scandal, in 2016 and 2017, the press mostly took a dive. Worse, the media cartel, which betrayed its watchdog role on the power elite in Washington for eight years, continues its shamefully transparent Obama-protection racket by simply pretending Susan Rice doesn't exist.

As a lifelong journalist who before founding the first independent, online news company ran daily newspapers in the so-called "mainstream media," I have to tell you I believe my old colleagues have become so ideologically blinded that they are creating for their out-of-touch cartel an existential threat. I never thought I would see the day that it would be this bad. Collectively, and almost without exception, they are humiliating the vital institution of the free press and all it means to a free society.

Twenty years ago, when I launched the first independent, online news service, I boastfully predicted that efforts like mine would eventually topple the Big Media, revolutionize the way people got their news and open up the press with the only kind of diversity that really matters – worldview diversity.

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Today, the media cartel is in chaos, exposed, as it were, to a majority of the country as little more than political propagandists.

Their audience is dwindling. Many watching are doing so for laughs or to test their blood pressure prescriptions.

Like a pitiful, helpless giant the Big Media seem to be in the suicidal death throes that inevitably follow the betrayal of sacred missions. Their pride and arrogance cannot save them. Their day of judgment is no longer near; it's here.

Meanwhile, as the media cartel take the cover-up to desperate, unimaginable extremes, there must be accountability for the high crimes and felonies that have taken place in Washington and continue to take place in Washington, even after a new administration has taken power.

It's going to take some courage to prosecute former high officials who abused their authority and betrayed the Constitution. It's going to take some courage to prosecute current high officials who have been complicit in their crimes. It's going to take some courage to dismantle the corrupt Deep State that defies both the will of the people and the rule of law.

Do we as a nation have the stomach for this vital yet divisive task?

I don't know. But, if the guilty don't pay for their sedition, subversion and treachery, America will be forever diminished as a nation.

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