RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Page-Strzok text exchanges might offer a few answers. Or, as Lisa Page warned her paramour as early as February 2016, at the beginning of the campaign and well before the respective party nominees were even selected:

One more thing: she [Hillary Clinton] might be our next president. The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear. You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more doj than fbi?

The traditional way of looking at the developing scandals at the FBI and among holdover Obama appointees in the DOJ is that the bizarre atmospherics from candidate and President Trump have simply polarized everyone in Washington, and no one quite knows what is going on.

Another, more helpful, exegesis, however, is to understand that if we’d seen a Hillary Clinton victory in November 2016, which was supposed to be a sure thing, there would now be no scandals at all.

That is, the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity.

On the eve of the election, the New York Times tracked various pollsters’ models that had assured readers that Trump’s odds of winning were respectively 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent, and less than 1 percent. Liberals howled heresy at fellow progressive poll guru Nate Silver shortly before the vote for daring to suggest that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

Hillary Clinton herself was not worried about even the appearance of scandal caused by transmitting classified documents over a private home-brewed server, or enabling her husband to shake down foreign donations to their shared foundation, or destroying some 30,000 emails. Evidently, she instead reasoned that she was within months of becoming President Hillary Clinton and therefore, in her Clintonesque view of the presidency, exempt from all further criminal exposure. Would a President Clinton have allowed the FBI to reopen their strangely aborted Uranium One investigation; would the FBI have asked her whether she communicated over an unsecure server with the former president of the United States?

Former attorney general Loretta Lynch, in unethical fashion, met on an out-of-the-way Phoenix tarmac with Bill Clinton, in a likely effort to find the most efficacious ways to communicate that the ongoing email scandal and investigation would not harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. When caught, thanks to local-news reporters who happened to be at the airport, Lynch sort of, kind of recused herself. But, in fact, at some point she had ordered James Comey not to use the word “investigation” in his periodic press announcements about the FBI investigation.

If you’re joining late, Part 1 considers whether it really is likely that the anti-Trump conspirators would take the extraordinary risks they have taken simply to get Hillary Clinton elected president; or, perhaps, whether their collective panic has another explanation — a red thread? Part 2 minutely examines Nellie H. Ohr, the Russian-speaking-ham-radio-operator Fusion GPS boss Glenn Simpson tried in vain to hide from investigators, and finds a tangle of red threads; Part 3 notes that Edward Baumgartner, another Fusion GPS Russia expert, was a Russian history major at Vassar (Class of 1995) when Nellie H. Ohr was a Russian professor at Vassar. Part 4 examines ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s political background and finds that he and his “opposite number,” Nellie H. Ohr, may be birds of a red feather.

Ever since the “the Russian threat within” returned to American consciousness in the summer of 2016 as a media-elite projection onto Donald Trump, his America First MAGA agenda, and their supporters (which includes me, starting December 26, 2015), I have been perplexed, and even personally so. After all, in the course of writing a recent and sensational history of “the Russian threat within” called American Betrayal, I embarked on a course of continuing study of exactly how this “threat within” has been aided, abetted, camouflaged, protected and advanced by a conspiracy so immense, not to coin a phrase, for well over one hundred years.

However, right from the return of “the Russian threat within” in the summer of 2016, something didn’t smell right, wasn’t lining up. The general alarm over Candidate Trump sounded shrill and artificial next to the resolute quiet of the Obama years, especially when it came to “the Russian threat within” posed by a president whose mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a Communist Party operative on an FBI arrest list in case of war with the USSR; whose close political aides, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, both, were descended from and mentored by Communist and/or Soviet operatives, some of whom were also associated with Davis. Not only was there no general alarm over this and so much more, there was media-enforced silence on these and related issues.

There was no general alarm over the 2009 “Russian reset” either: not over the arrest and quick expulsion of the Russian Illegals in 2010 (which the media treated like a Mission Impossible sequel); not over the Obama administration’s approval that same year of the sale of 20 percent of US uranium stocks to the Russian government; not over the hot-mike of Obama and Medvedev in 2012, where Obama, discussing missile defense, tells Medvedev “it’s important for [Putin] to give me space … after my election I have more flexibility” (former DCIA/Gus-Hall-voter John Brennan refused to recognize a question from a member of Congress about this); not over the transfer of military-use, space, and nuclear technology to Russia via the Obama-Clinton “Russian-rest” project known as Skolkovo, which, according to an Army study released in 2013, had, by 2011, “begun its first weapons-related project — the development of a hypersonic cruise missile engine.” Skolkovo is the least well-known of the Obama-Clinton Russian scandals, and perhaps the most damaging to US national security.

No, it was the Trump-Russia frenzy that became the juggernaut, racing around and around White House, threatening not only the Trump presidency, but also any grasp, any conception (vestigial as it is) of what “the Russian threat within” was or is. Meanwhile, as evidence separately began to mount of an anti-Trump “coup” — with links to the Kremlin — the decibels and static of the media-elite projections onto Team Trump rose also. For example, even as evidence was finally forced into the open proving that the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign were the mystery-clients paying huge sums throughout much of 2016 to Fusion GPS to produce an intelligence “dossier” against Donald Trump and his associates in Moscow and from Russian government sources via American and British IC leftists, the media-elite-projectionists just kept turning up the Sensurround on that 20-minute meeting at Trump Tower that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya had sought with Don Trump Jr. in June 2016.

The Census Bureau recently has rejected changes to the census that Obama had proposed as a parting gift to the Democrats. As the party of identity politics, the progressives were going to be gifted a new bloc of clients––“MENAs,” people of “Middle Eastern and North African” descent. As the tribunes of “people of color,” the Dems were eager to add yet another member to their conga-line of identity grievance. But the Bureau’s decision to reject the classification should be just the first step to completely discarding identity categories predicated on superficial and reductive characteristics.

First, our census rubrics like “black,” “Asian,” “white,” and the incoherent “Hispanic” are crude to the point of being meaningless. “Black” cannot express the incredible cultural, religious, social, and linguistic variety and diversity of the African continent and its diaspora. Neither does “Asian,” a geographical term equally as simplistic. “Hispanic” is a linguistic category even more hopelessly crude. So too with “white,” which lumps together under the rubric of superficial color a variety of cultures, mores, and classes. In fact, this impulse to label people by appearance is a leftover of “scientific racism,” the pseudo-scientific ideology of progressives in the first half of the 20th century that aimed to help Darwin out by excluding, sterilizing, and in Germany eliminating those deemed “inferior” and “unfit” because they weren’t “Anglo-Nordic,” that is northern European.

Second, our political system is predicated on “inalienable rights” that belong to individuals, not groups. Of course, all people are part of a collective identity, but that collective does not possess rights that are exclusive of individuals or that trump their rights. Such an idea of exclusive group rights reflects a persistent tribalism that rejects a universal human identity. The genius of the Founding was its recognition that universal human rights did not make everybody identical, but established a barrier against the attempts of any faction or group to dominate other factions, or compromise their freedom, or seize for itself power and privileges that encroach on others. Our collective identity is political, not biological. Within that unifying civic identity––the unum–– space is left for the expression of diverse identities––the pluribus–– created by region, religion, occupation, or ideology, whose potentially tyrannical contests for power and privilege are constrained by federalism, divided government, and the balance of power.

Identity politics rejects this foundation of our liberal democracy, and returns to zero-sum tribalism and its inalienable differences. One clan is given privileges denied to the others, or stakes a claim to political power specific to that clan. Backed by the coercive power of state institutions and regulations, identity is thus weaponized as selected clans compromise the freedoms of excluded clans, and reserve the right to violate the rights of others. We see this today with progressive assaults on the First Amendment to marginalize public speech about race that doesn’t follow the grievance narrative. Identity politics, then, is a form of tyranny that the Founders wanted to avoid.

Like the old Jim Crow racism, moreover, the identities are predicated on reductive, superficial characteristics that ignore all other factors––such as socio-economic class and its social capital, or our unique personalities, characters, beliefs, and talents––that make us who we are. The result is a meaningless notion like “white privilege,” as though less melanin can override wealth and education and social capital. I grew up in rural Fresno County with poor and working-class people of all colors, and I can tell you the Dust Bowl Scotch-Irish migrants had no more “privilege” than blacks or Mexicans. Their prospects were all pretty much the same: Vietnam, the penitentiary, or death. The lucky ones became carpenters or plumbers, the real lucky ones became school teachers or realtors. Some were hardworking and law-abiding, some were no damn good, as everybody called them. But you couldn’t tell which was which just by looking at the color of their skin. The valuable lesson I learned is that you have to take people one at a time, and judge them by their actions and the content of their characters.

Donald Trump is his own worst enemy, and his Twitter attacks on the FBI are a good example. New FBI director Christopher Wray seems to be undertaking a much-needed house cleaning of officials from the James Comey era who have damaged the bureau’s reputation, but Mr. Trump’s bumbling catcalls make that task all the harder.

A case in point is the resignation Monday of deputy director Andrew McCabe, which every Never Trump conspiracy theorist is blaming on the President’s machinations. The same President they claim is an idiot is apparently pulling off a Nixonian cover-up. If you’ve lost your mind over Mr. Trump, you’ll believe anything about him, even if it’s contradictory.

Mr. Wray has no choice other than to install new FBI leadership after the Comey calamity if he wants to assert control. That means removing the Comey loyalists who botched the Hillary Clinton email probe and may have inserted the bureau into a presidential election campaign on the basis of Russian disinformation from the Christopher Steele dossier. Cleaning house isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a necessity to restore the reputation of America’s premier law enforcement agency.

We’ll learn more about what happened in the Clinton email case when the Justice Department Inspector General concludes his investigation. But Mr. McCabe had done more than enough to warrant removal when he supervised the Clinton probe after his wife, Jill McCabe, had run for the Virginia state Senate in 2016 with the financial help of Clinton loyalist and then-Governor Terry McAuliffe.

The FBI’s ethics office cleared Mr. McCabe to stay on the Clinton case, but anyone with any ethical sense would have understood the appearance of a conflict of interest. He didn’t recuse himself from the Clinton case until a week before the 2016 election. Mr. McCabe’s name has since also appeared in troubling references in the text messages between FBI paramours Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the main agent on the Clinton probe.