While the Russia-obsessed media self-combust, the biggest takeaway isn’t “Russia collusion,” but the revelation, buried in footnotes, that the FBI has had in its possession “high-level” Trump campaign ­emails since last year — and yet all investigators could get out of them is a false-statement guilty charge against a young, unpaid campaign aide.

From email exchanges among “high-ranking campaign officials” examined by investigators — including Paul Manafort — there apparently has emerged no evidence of collusion or espionage by the campaign.

We can glean this from the just-unsealed indictment of George Papadopoulos, who volunteered to work on the Trump campaign’s foreign policy advisory council, which met just one time.

In the 14-page document, Robert Mueller’s prosecutors maintain that Papadopoulos, a 20-something think-tank nerd who jumped ship from the Ben Carson campaign, met with individuals posing as Russian officials who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.

There was nothing illegal about what Papadopoulos did. The only crime alleged in the indictment is that he lied to federal agents when they asked him about the contacts last January.

It is fairly plain from the indictment that the young campaign volunteer was trying to impress higher-ups in the campaign, perhaps with a White House assignment in mind, but was played for a sucker by con artists who approached him masquerading as Russian honchos tied to Vladimir Putin. (The contact portrayed as “Putin’s niece,” for example, turned out to be nothing of the kind.)

The initial Russia offer by Papadopoulos went nowhere, as other members of the foreign policy team rejected the suggestion, according to a Washington Post story published in August (yes, this is old news, new media huffing and puffing notwithstanding). But Papadopoulos persisted, emailing then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in April 2016 that “Putin wants to host the Trump team when the time is right.”

The Washington Post further reported that Papadopoulos also forwarded campaign officials an email from a senior official in the Russian International Affairs Council about coordinating a Trump visit to Moscow. But once again, senior campaign officials rejected the suggestion. Proposed trips to Moscow “did not take place,” the indictment confirms.

All this information was contained in internal emails the FBI obtained and started reviewing last year, indicating investigators have had possession of the private communications of top officials serving in the Trump campaign for several months. And yet the best case of criminal wrongdoing they can come up with is inconsistent statements by a no-doubt very nervous young campaign volunteer?

The media elite are nonetheless trying to make “Russian collusion” hay over the Papadopoulos guilty plea, because they got bupkis on that front from the Manafort indictment. That 31-page document, also just unsealed, focuses entirely on the former Trump campaign chairman’s business activities, not campaign activities or events.

To be sure, any illicit activities found in the process of looking for the fabled “Russia collusion” — including tax fraud, money laundering and perjury — are crimes worth prosecuting. And the president has even intimated his desire for such scrutiny in private conversations with the FBI leadership.

As former FBI Director James Comey testified, citing his contemporaneous notes taken from a March 30 phone call with Trump, the president encouraged him that “if there were some ‘satellite’ associates of his who did something wrong, it would be good to find that out, but that he hadn’t done anything wrong.”

And that’s where we still stand.

Paul Sperry is a former Hoover Institution media fellow.