From
left, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper sit together in the front row before
President Barack Obama spoke about National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance,
Friday, Jan. 17, 2014, at the Justice Department in Washington. (AP
Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always
implausible.
One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort
and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump.
Two, the Trump administration's Russia policies were far
tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted
Russia in Syria, upped defense spending, increased sanctions and kept the price
of oil down through massive new U.S. energy production. He did not engineer a
Russian "reset" or get caught on a hot mic offering a self-interested
hiatus in tensions with Russia in order to help his own re-election bid.
Three, Russia has a long history of trying to warp U.S.
elections that both predated Trump and earned only prior lukewarm pushback from
the Obama administration.
It's also worth remembering that President Bill Clinton
and the Clinton Foundation had been recipients of Russian and Russian-related
largesse -- ostensibly because Hillary Clinton had used her influence as
Secretary of State under Obama to ease resistance to Russian acquisitions of
North American uranium holdings.
As far as alleged Russian collusion goes, Hillary Clinton
used three firewalls -- the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law
firm and the Fusion GPS strategic intelligence firm -- to hide her campaign's
payments to British national Christopher Steele to find dirt on Trump and his
campaign; in other words, to collude. Steele in turn collected his purchased
Russian sources to aggregate unverified allegations against Trump. He then
spread the gossip within government agencies to ensure that the smears were
leaked to the media -- and with a government seal of approval.
No wonder that special counsel Robert Mueller's partisan
team spent 22 months and $34 million only to conclude the obvious: that Trump
did not collude with Russia.
Mueller's failure to find collusion prompts an important
question. If the Steele dossier -- the basis for unfounded charges that Trump
colluded with Russia -- was fraudulent, then how and why did the Clinton
campaign, hand in glove with top Obama administration officials, use such silly
trash and smears to unleash the powers of government against Trump's campaign,
transition team and early presidency?
The question is not an idle one.
There may well have occurred a near coup attempt by
high-ranking officials to destroy a campaign and then to remove an elected
president. Likewise, top officials may have engaged in serial lying to federal
investigators, perjury, the misleading of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court, the illegal insertion of informants into a political campaign, the leaking
of classified documents and the obstruction of justice.
So, how can we tell that the former accusers are now
terrified of becoming the accused? Because suddenly the usual band of former
Obama officials and Trump accusers have largely given up on their allegations
that Trump was or is a Russian asset.
Instead, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew
McCabe and Rod Rosenstein are now beginning to accuse each other of wrongdoing.
Even their progressive media handlers are starting to
sense the desperation in their new yarns -- and the possibility that these
hired-gun analysts or guests were themselves guilty of crimes and were using
their media platforms to fashion their own defense.
The end of the Mueller melodrama has marked the beginning
of real fear in Washington.
Comey, the former FBI director, has hit the lecture and
television circuit with his now-tired moralistic shtick that he alone had a
"soul" while others allowed theirs to be eaten away by Trump.
Translated, that means Comey is terrified that former Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein, whom Comey attacked as a Trump enabler, knows that Comey
himself may have broken the law -- and may direct prosecutors on how to prove
it.
Comey is also in a tiff with his former deputy, Andrew
McCabe. Both know that the FBI under Comey illegally leaked classified
information to the media. But Comey says McCabe went rogue and did it. Of
course, McCabe's attorney shot back that Comey had authorized it. Comey also
claims the Steele dossier was not the chief evidence for a FISA warrant. McCabe
insists that it was. It's possible that one might work with prosecutors against
the other to finagle a lesser charge.
Former CIA Director John Brennan has on two occasions
lied under oath to Congress and gotten away with it. He may not get away with
lying again if it's determined that he distorted the truth about his efforts to
spread the Steele dossier smears. A former CIA official claims that Comey put
the unverified Steele dossier into an intelligence community report on alleged
Russian interference. Comey has contended that Brennan was the one who did.
It's possible that both did. Doing so would have been
unethical if not illegal, given that neither official told President Obama (if
he didn't already know) that the silly Steele dossier was a product of Hillary
Clinton's amateurish efforts to subvert the 2016 Trump campaign.
In sum, the old leaky vessel of collusion is sinking.
The rats are scampering from their once safe refuge --
biting and piling on each other in vain efforts to avoid drowning.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and
historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of the
soon-to-be released "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict
Was Fought and Won," to appear in October from Basic Books. You can reach
him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
