Thirteen Russians and three Russian companies have been indicted for trying to mess with the 2016 presidential election, but the media were the main culprits, according to one author.

George Neumayr said in a special report for The American Spectator, the media tried to keep Americans from voting for then-candidate Donald Trump.

“The media’s torrentially biased coverage of the campaign amounted to a giant disinformation operation designed to dissuade people from voting for Trump,” the contributing editor wrote.

Although Robert Mueller’s office indicted Russian nationalists for meddling with the election, the U.S. government has also proved to be guilty and the media helped them.

“Journalists served as conduits for criminal leaks from Obama administration officials eager to defame Trump,” Neumayr said.

Like the Russians, the DNC and Clinton campaign paid a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, to influence the election by drafting an anti-Trump dossier.

“Imagine Trump paying a foreigner $168,000 to frame Hillary, who then holds press briefings on his ‘dossier’ before the election,” Neumayr wrote. “The press would have reported that immediately as a dirty trick of epic proportions.”

According to the contributing editor, the media who portray themselves as objective journalists do the most damage to the public opinion.

“The public went to the polls suspecting that Russians had meddled in the election,” he said. “What the people didn’t know — thanks to a press in Hillary’s pocket — is that the U.S. government had interfered too, and far more audaciously.”

The true 2016 scandal, according to Neumayr, was that government officials colluded with the Clinton campaign.

“The nabbed Russian trolls had Facebook ads; Hillary’s embeds had the front page of the New York Times.”

The indictment released Friday says that the defendants allegedly conducted “information warfare” against the U.S. in order to spread “distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general,” according to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

“The Mueller indictments don’t reveal anything that Americans didn’t already know, unless they find it mind-blowing to learn that countries spy on and harass each other,” Neumayr said.

He concluded, “The media had run plenty of stories accusing Russians of ‘information warfare.’ But it didn’t run a single story telling Americans that the U.S. government was trafficking in it, spying on one campaign by using smears from the other.”

Although the Russians were indicted for “information warfare,” Rosenstein said, “there is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.”

According to Neumayr, if any candidate lost votes from disinformation, it was Trump. (For more from the author of “Author Bombshell: Media Meddled in Election More Than Russia” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.