RUTHFULLY YOURS

However this era of angry polarization, crime and violence ends, it will be left to historians to decipher how America got so far off track. Instead of building on our unprecedented prosperity and role as the world’s ultimate superpower, we declared war — cultural, political and social — on each other. Even our nation’s Founders are not spared.

The reasons will be better understood in hindsight, but it’s hard to believe the 2016 presidential campaign won’t be seen as an inflection point. Our move toward disunion didn’t begin then, but it certainly gained steam and vitriol during and after the election of Donald Trump.

Two recent developments illustrate how that campaign remains a radioactive hot spot. With both developments centering on Hillary Clinton, they underscore her role and the depths of her venality.

Just when you think you’ve seen the worst of her, proof emerges that she was even more duplicitous than we knew.

The first evidence came in a little-noticed decision from the Federal Election Commission. It ruled on a complaint from the Coolidge Reagan Foundation that Clinton and the Democratic National Committee violated federal law by hiding how they funded the odious Christopher Steele dossier, perhaps the most destructive disinformation document in United States history.

The FEC agreed with the complaint and ruled that Clinton and the DNC, which she effectively controlled, hid their payments to Steele as merely “legal fees,” without mentioning him or his work. In fact, the money was funneled through a law firm, Perkins Coie, which then hired the smear merchants at FusionGPS, who hired Steele, a former British spook.

The layers and false claim about legal fees were intended to put distance between Clinton and Steele because knowledge of the truth would have destroyed her campaign. Although her lawyers and the DNC argued they did nothing wrong, they agreed not to contest the findings and quietly paid fines totaling $113,000.

Press looks the other way

If this effective admission on funding the dirtiest dirty trick in presidential politics is news to you, don’t blame yourself. Much of the media ignored or downplayed the finding and Clinton’s fine, saying the issue was just one of “misreporting” or “mislabeling” the Steele payments.

That’s because the truth would make them look guilty, too. To report on the election commission’s significance would force the Dems’ propaganda arm to acknowledge its own culpability.

By treating the Steele dossier as if it were holy writ, or at least credible, the media furthered Clinton’s campaign to paint Trump as a Russian stooge.

Of course, the FBI was also complicit, using the dossier as a crutch to justify its unjustifiable spying on a presidential campaign. A remaining question is, under Jim Comey’s leadership, was the FBI the dumbest ever or the most venal?

 Special Counsel John Durham is investigating Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI.Perkins Coie

Probably both but whatever the answer, J. Edgar Hoover finally can rest in peace.

The second recent development involves a new court filing by special counsel John Durham in the case of Michael Sussmann, a Clinton lawyer and campaign operative who is charged with lying to the FBI in 2016. His alleged role expands the deception annals by showing Clinton’s team wasn’t relying only on Steele’s farrago of lies, lies and more lies.

Perhaps doubtful that Steele, even with his FBI friends and media contacts, could make up for her unpopularity, Clinton financed a bookend to his dossier with another fabrication.

This second scam had Sussmann, a tech executive and the same smear merchants try to sell the FBI on a concocted story about a Trump computer secretly communicating with a Russian bank.

Durham calls the effort a “joint venture” of the conspirators, a phrase that gives a sense of the plot and the players. There wasn’t a scintilla of truth to back up the computer nonsense, and even though the FBI saw through the tissue-thin claim, many in the media naturally fell for it.

They managed to find in this particular lie a confirming detail of the larger lie Steele was spinning — that Trump was a toady of Vladimir Putin and was colluding with him to steal the election.

Crime against democracy

The case is a criminal one because Durham accuses Sussmann of lying by saying he was not representing any clients as he tried to spin a top agency official on the computer connection. In fact, Sussmann was representing the Clinton campaign, which he billed for the meeting, and the tech executive, identified as Rodney Joffe.

Although Sussmann pleaded not guilty, Durham released a text message in which Sussmann explicitly tells the FBI he is not representing any clients.

His trial, scheduled for next month, has the potential to be a breakthrough in Durham’s long-running effort to reveal voluminous wrongdoing by Clinton and the federal government against the Trump campaign.

Based on his court filings, the prosecutor appears to be planning to link Sussmann’s efforts to the dossier, in part because of the role his firm, Perkins Coie, played in both scams. Also, Durham said Sussmann met with Steele and FusionGPS in Perkins Coie offices and raised the possibility that Steele could testify.

Even before a verdict, the case moves the responsibility closer to where it ultimately belongs–in Clinton’s lap. Whether Durham will ever be able to show her fingerprints on any criminal conduct is the great unknown, but in one sense, it’s also beside the point.

We already know with 100 percent certainty that she is guilty of igniting the false accusations of Russian collusion that continue to shape our culture and politics. Although Trump was hardly a model president, the widespread claim by her party and the media that he was an illegitimate president wasn’t just dirty politics. It was a nuclear attack on the spirit that has always held our nation together, however tenuously.

 The lies about Trump and Russian collusion have made the US more polarized.Photo by Scott Olson/Getty ImagesClinton lost the election and Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe came up empty, yet the collusion narrative lives on among major elements of the political left. To judge from the tumultuous years since, many of those who subscribe to her lie are using it as a license to try to destroy America.

Tragically, they are having a good deal of success.