Last night I noted that the DOJ’s investigation of the Russian-collusion hit-job had become a criminal investigation. The story was originally reported by the New York Times, which still pretends to be a “news” outlet.

It is, of course, nothing of the sort. Were the Times in the business of impartial reporting, it would have given us such facts as it had managed to discover, and left the political spin to the reader. Instead we get this headline:

Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry Into Its Own Russia Investigation

“Its own”? No, the investigation is into the machinations of the previous administration’s DOJ, under a completely different team of people, and a different president. By choosing this headline the editors are trying — desperately — to cast the investigation as an obvious absurdity, and to make it seem to be nothing more than distraction, a “wag the dog” PR scam by a president under withering attack.

There’s a sub-headline, too, that takes us already from news-reporting to partisan editorializing:

The move is likely to open the attorney general to accusations that he is trying to deliver a political victory for President Trump.

(To be as charitable as possible, I suppose one might say that this is actual reporting, because those “accusations” are going to come from … the New York Times.)

The story begins:

WASHINGTON — For more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it.

“Repeatedly attacked…”? To quote a well-known Russian: “Who? Whom?”

“Even months after the special counsel closed it.” Well — if the Russia “investigation” was a hoax, and illegal (which the newly opened criminal investigation suggests that it may well have been), and it was aggressively pursued throughout the first two years of the current administration, with enormously destructive effect, then was Mr. Trump, who has known all along that the charges he was persecuted with were false, supposed to just forget about the whole thing once the special counsel closed it? Would you?

The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies… Mr. Trump has made clear that he sees the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies. That view factors into the impeachment investigation against him, as does his long obsession with the origins of the Russia inquiry.

How can anyone, let alone a “news” reporter, write something like this with a straight face? The investigation is about the use of the “typically independent” Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against the Obama administration’s political enemies.

The answer, of course, is fear. Even the sainted Obama himself may be within the blast radius of this investigation, and the Times is willing to throw what’s left of its own reputation on the grenade.

This, then, is America’s “newspaper of record” in 2019: Pravda on the Hudson. (We all knew this already, of course, but I couldn’t let this latest example pass by in silence.)