Jake Sullivan is the White House National Security Advisor partly because he smeared Michael Flynn, the man who used to hold that job.

In 2017, Sullivan testified at the House Intelligence Committee that Flynn violated the Logan Act by speaking by phone with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. as the Trump administration prepared to take office. Sullivan speculated Flynn’s conversations may have been part of a “collusion” scheme.

Sullivan’s claims were a continuation of his effort to promote the “Russia collusion” hoax.

In October 2016, Sullivan — then Senior Policy Advisor for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — issued a press statement citing a Slate.com article claiming that Trump had a computer server linking him with Russia-based Alfa Bank. Sullivan further urged “federal authorities” to “explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia.”

The Alfa Bank claims were false. But the “federal authorities” did investigate.

Special Counsel John H. Durham later indicted former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who fed the Alfa Bank story to the FBI. A D.C. jury acquitted Sussmann of lying to the FBI about the fact that he was working for the Clinton campaign. But the trial revealed that Clinton personally approved the decision to leak the Alfa Bank claims to the media.

Sullivan’s role was confirmed in the final report of Special Council Durham, released on Monday. The Special Counsel concluded that Sullivan’s role in the Alfa Bank story “tends to support the notion that the Alfa Bank allegations were part of a Clinton campaign plan to tie Trump to Russia.” Sullivan “could not conclusively rule out the possibility,” Durham said, that the campaign had created such a plan to distract from her email scandal.

What Sullivan did know, according to another witness interviewed by Durham, was that there was “a project involving ties between Trump and Russia being conducted by [the law firm] Perkins Coie.”

That “project” was the Steele dossier, which the Clinton campaign successfully shopped to the FBI to encourage it to investigate the Trump campaign. The campaign and the party later paid an FEC fine for hiding Perkins Coie’s “project.”

Sullivan told the House that Flynn’s talk with the Russian ambassador about avoiding sanctions was, by itself, evidence of collusion. Flynn lost his job thanks to such innuendo.

But the calls with the Russian ambassador were legal; the Logan Act had been a pretext for holdovers at the Department of Justice to investigate Trump. (Ironically, Sullivan’s new boss, Joe Biden, dropped Trump’s sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline.)

Durham never charged Sullivan with a crime. But his investigation made clear that Sullivan was at the core of the “Russia collusion” hoax.

That is relevant today, because Sullivan is making key national security decisions and statements about Russia. With the U.S. arming Ukraine to resist invasion against a nuclear-armed power, the stakes are extremely high.

But Sullivan has no credibility — certainly not on anything relating to Russia.

And yet the White House press corps, presented with frequent opportunities to ask Sullivan about his role in the “Russia collusion” hoax, never does. This Wednesday, less than 48 hours after the Durham report’s release, reporters whiffed again as Sullivan gaggled with them at a briefing on Air Force One.

He has never been held accountable, because the press collaborated in his lies. In covering for Sullivan, they are raising the risk of war.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.