By Douglas Andrews

The Federal Election Commission fine is both minuscule and misdirected, but it’s a start.
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This isn’t about the amount of the fine. It’s about what the fine represents. And what it represents is guilt — and hopefully just the start of it.

As the Washington Examiner reports: “The Federal Election Commission has fined the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for lying about the funding of the infamous, and discredited, Russian ‘dossier’ used in a smear attempt against Donald Trump weeks before he shocked the world with his 2016 presidential victory.”

We know what you’re thinking: Better late than never. And you’re right. We’ve known about this and reported on it for years, and we watched as the false, phony, fraudulent allegations of Russian collusion plagued the Trump presidency from its onset. And as we look at the amount of the fines meted out by Joe Biden’s FEC — $8,000 for the Clinton campaign and $105,000 for the DNC — we can’t help but think this is the Democrats’ way of trying to forthrightly admit to some minor degree of wrongfulness while at the same time laughing at their knuckle-dragging accusers: There’s your measly fine, you filthy Trumpers. Now go away.

Indeed, they’d love it if we’d go away. They’d love nothing more than to get beyond an issue that once helped them but has since clearly boomeranged. But we’re not going anywhere, and neither is Spygate. And the longer the sordid affair sticks around, the more damage it’ll do to the Democrats. Why? Because they made their case in the mainstream media long ago, and it’s been exposed as fraudulent. Everything from here out will vindicate Donald Trump and those stalwarts on the Right who smelled a rat all along. (Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan: Take a bow.)

“This was done to create — as I have stated many times and is now confirmed — a hoax funded by the DNC and the Clinton Campaign,” said Donald Trump in an email statement. “This corruption is only beginning to be revealed, is un-American, and must never be allowed to happen again. Where do I go to get my reputation back?”

That rhetorical question at the end is a reference to Ronald Reagan’s former labor secretary, Ray Donovan, who in 1987 uttered those same words as he left a Bronx courthouse a free man, having been found not guilty by a jury that deliberated just 10 hours over two days after an eight-month-long corruption trial.

Donald Trump never appeared in a courtroom as a defendant in this Russia collusion hoax, but he might one day do so as a plaintiff. That’s because he recently filed suit against those same two malefactors, Hillary Clinton and the DNC, and a host of others for their collective treachery. As our Nate Jackson wrote recently: “Yes, Trump won in spite of Clinton’s efforts, but her lies and conspiracy with the American intelligence community undermined his entire presidency and created national security problems for the United States. Now, Trump has filed a lawsuit against Clinton, the DNC, and several others who ‘orchestrated an unthinkable plot,’ and he seeks some semblance of justice.”

Of course, those who get their news from The New York Times and other leftist rags are still ignorant of all this. That’s because, as is always the case with news that redounds to the benefit of Donald Trump, the mainstream media bends over backward to minimize the story. Take the aforementioned Gray Lady, for example, which ran this intentionally misleading headline: “Democrats Agree to Pay $113,000 to Settle Campaign Spending Inquiry.” And this equally deceitful subhead: “Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party described payments to a law firm that commissioned scrutiny of Trump-Russia ties — leading to the Steele dossier — as legal services, not opposition research.”

To listen to the Times tell it, one would think Hillary and her DNC merely made some sort of clerical error over in bookkeeping. Indeed, how many Americans still think Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 election? Because that’s what this is all about — not some silly little FEC campaign finance violation.

Again, a puny campaign finance fine is small potatoes. But what it represents is big. And there are plenty more shoes still to drop.