Michael Goodwin: NY Times should be ashamed of covering up Biden-appointed Jack Smith spying on Republican senators

Leftist media outlets never tire of preaching that the great lesson of Watergate is that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Fair enough, but the lesson would be more credible if those same outlets followed their own advice.Yet the leader of the leftist pack, The New York Times, proved again Tuesday it is engaged in a massive cover-up of its own. The evidence is that the paper failed to report what was arguably the biggest news Monday out of Washington: that Jack Smith, the head-hunting special counsel appointed by Joe Biden’s administration to prosecute Donald Trump, also teamed up with the FBI to spy on nearly a dozen Republican senators. Thankfully under new management, the FBI blew the whistle on itself, with Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino revealing that Smith and a team of agents investigating the Capitol riot of Jan.

6, 2021, were tracking the communications and phone calls of Sens.Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and others. Patel and Bongino said some of the agents involved in the improper snooping have been fired and the two are continuing to probe the affair. The misdeeds involved subpoenas to phone companies, with only senators from the opposing party targeted.

At least part of the effort overlapped with Nancy ­Pelosi’s House partisan “select” committee investigating the events of Jan.6, though it’s not clear if there was coordination. Regardless, the fact that the FBI was targeting elected Republican leaders is a bombshell story by any standard.

Especially in light of the decades-long history of the FBI’s habit of spying on domestic political dissidents, going back to the early days of the Cold War and lasting through the civil rights movement. The low point came under J.Edgar Hoover, who hated Martin Luther King Jr.

and aimed to destroy him by linking him to the Communist...