By Michael Goodwin

Published Oct. 7, 2025, 10:24 p.m. ET

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.

Only GOP targets

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 Party.

So far, the current controversy is hardly the equal of that sordid affair, but it’s a very big deal anytime the FBI surveils elected officials and private citizens for political reasons.

Yet there was not a single word of the huge news in the Times.

The facts are inconvenient for the paper’s narrative, which is that Trump is in a class by himself when it comes to weaponizing the Department of Justice for political purposes.

Moreover, to report the facts about Smith would require the Times to admit its role in protecting the Biden administration during Smith’s tenure.

So it continued to follow its playbook of “Biden good, Trump bad,” with this turkey of a distracting headline:

“As Trump’s Justice Dept. Pursues His Enemies, an Ally Goes on Trial.”

Huh?

The story was about a small-time donor to Trump’s 2020 campaign charged with gathering illegal donations from Chinese citizens.

Highlighting the inconsequential case gave the Gray Lady a chance to jump on its hobby-horse that Trump, unlike all of his predecessors, routinely uses the Justice Department to go after his “enemies.”

That’s where the Times’ own coverup comes into play.

When you’ve been riding shotgun for the corrupt Deep State for a decade, as the paper has, the last thing you want to report is that your sources are guilty of the very things you accuse Trump of doing.

Relentless leaks

The FBI, then under James Comey, relentlessly leaked to the Times, especially on the Russia Russia Russia hoax.

The paper proved itself a loyal errand boy for whatever lies Comey and his band of dirty cops wanted to spread to hobble the new president.

More to the point, the paper’s editors know their claim that Trump alone politicizes law enforcement is false.

They know that because they knew Biden did it first, and they reported it, albeit in a very round-about way.

The Times disclosed that Biden took office wanting his Justice Department to prosecute Trump.

Its reporters had the goods but, trying to avoid making a Democrat it endorsed look bad, they backed into the story.

In an article on April 2, 2022, that focused on Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general, the paper carefully buried the most important facts.

It said Biden was frustrated by Garland’s “deliberative approach” and had “confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, according to two people familiar with his comments.”

So anonymous sources told the Times Biden had all along aimed to indict Trump.

If that’s not weaponizing the Justice Department for political purposes, what is it?

Imagine how that story would have been written if Trump had wanted to indict Barack Obama in 2017.

Recall that no former president had ever been indicted.

Yet here was Biden, determined to lock up the man he defeated and succeeded.

But the Times was already in full protective mode, so the story continued this way: “And while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6.”

So we are expected to believe that Garland didn’t know about Biden’s desire to prosecute Trump because, anonymous sources told reporters, the president never told Garland directly.

You can bet Garland knew exactly what his boss wanted.

If he didn’t know it before, he knew it then, thanks to the Times story.

And the AG gave the president what he wanted. Within months of the article, Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel, and painted a target on Trump’s back.

Smith would soon indict Trump on two separate cases — one related to Jan. 6 and another over the alleged retention of classified documents.

That case, of course, involved the unprecedented FBI raid on a former president’s home.

Armed agents descended on Mar-a-Lago and reportedly also searched through Melania Trump’s closets.

Double standard

In keeping with its partisan bias, the Times has never connected the dots between Biden’s desire to see Trump prosecuted and Jack Smith’s cases.

Nor has it ever illustrated the coordination between the Biden administration and two state criminal prosecutions against Trump.

The Fani Willis case in Georgia featured her lover, and chief prosecutor, meeting for hours with Garland’s Justice Department.

And Matthew Colangelo, the lead prosecutor in Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s novel case against Trump’s business records, improbably left a top job in Main Justice to take over the bizarre case.

That’s a lot of weaponization of law enforcement for political purposes, but you’ll never read about it in the Times or like-minded outlets.

For them, the party line must be obeyed: Donald Trump is distinctively dangerous, so ignore the facts that don’t fit the narrative.

https://nypost.com/2025/10/07/opinion/ny-times-should-be-ashamed-of-covering-up-jack-smith-spying-on-republican-senators/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5784263&forum_id=2/en-en/#49333535)