There are several Robert Mueller-related issues in my profession that still need to be dealt with.

One is: Are the New York Times and the Washington Post going to return the ill-gotten Pulitzer Prizes the two papers received for their coverage of the nonexistent collusion between President Trump’s administration and the Russians?

And, an even more important issue: Is the NYT ever going to follow through on the inconvenient — but Pulitzer-worthy — story about our government spying on Trump? That’s a story that the paper broke exclusively but then abandoned, probably because it went contrary to the NYT’s political mission.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten. And I’m sure the Pulitzer committee up at Columbia University would love you to forget.

But those of us who were doing real research during the months leading up to Hillary Clinton’s failed run for president — and not relying on planted information from those involved in the intentionally botched investigation into Clinton’s emails — haven’t.

The committee said the New York Times’ and Washington Post’s Pulitzers were awarded “for deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

It sure was relentless.

And it also was extremely wrong, as special counsel Mueller showed last week when he reported that there was no collusion with the Russians by the Trump campaign, the transition team and the president’s administration.

Ouch! How embarrassing!

To be fair, Mueller did indict some Russians who were screwing around on social media trying to affect the election. But that was not much different from what American dirty tricksters did during recent Russian and Ukrainian elections.

And Trump and his people had nothing to do with any of that either.

The two papers and all others in the media that went down the collusion rabbit hole will say that they want to see the full Mueller report and not just the summary provided by Attorney General William Barr.

Then, those who were duped into horrendously bad reporting are hoping they will be vindicated.

That’s called stalling until the embarrassment wears off.

The NYT and the Washington Post should have had their guard up. One of the few utterances made by Mueller during his two-year investigation was a warning to the two papers when they were going off half-cocked about the probe of Trump aide Paul Manafort.

Mueller told the paper to check its sources. Some of their information was inaccurate, he publicly chastised.

But the NYT and the Washington Post continued their relentlessness — as the Puliltzer people were so proud of noting — toward their goal of spreading the falsehoods that Vladimir Putin had helped get Trump elected and that Trump approved.

The Times sees its award differently.

“The New York Times won a Pulitzer for coverage of Russian meddling in the US election that benefited the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump,” says a spokesperson.

“What we know of the Mueller report from the Attorney General’s summary confirms our coverage. Russia actively worked to upend the American elections in 2016 and there were multiple instances of Trump Transition and Administration officials having contact with Russia.”

The Washington Post didn’t return a call for comment.

In journalism, we know that anything could be made to look suspicious. That’s what all these stories did. And it worked.

People probably don’t realize that papers lobby for Pulitzer Prizes the same way Hollywood players put a full-court press on when they want to win Oscars. In this case, the Washington Post and New York Times succeeded in winning.

And now their efforts seem premature and embarrassing.

But the NYT did do one story that was very much worthy of a prize. I’ve brought this up a number of times before. That story was published on Jan. 20, 2017, and the headline was: “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.”

The NYT never corrected that story or withdrew it, so I guess the paper knew it was true. So why wasn’t that blockbuster included in the package of stories submitted for the Pulitzer it won, or a separate one?

Well, one of the reasons was that the NYT was suggesting that the US was doing something very illegal.

It was spying on Americans, which is against the law unless there is a special warrant from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. And you won’t get that warrant until you persuade the court that the person being spied upon is a threat to the US.

And spying on the people working on a presidential campaign is beyond illegal.

More than that, the NYT — I suspect — didn’t want to focus on the story about wiretapping Trump’s campaign because it went contrary to the paper’s agenda, which was to undermine Trump.

Even when Trump started to allege that he was wiretapped, the NYT never stepped forward to say, “Yeah, we had that story.”

Instead, it implied that Trump was crazy, paranoid and — most important — unfit to be president.

However, the wiretaps and how they came about will soon become integral to the rest of the investigation of the 2016 election.