RUTHFULLY YOURS

Expect the anti-Trump mob to be drinking heavily this weekend. The week has been filled with lots of bad news for them.

Sadly for Trump foes, the U.S. economy is thriving: Market indicators this week continued to rise, pointing to a “robust” 2018. Jobless claims are near a 45 year-low, and “job openings are near a record high, and scattered but growing shortages of skilled labor are forcing companies to increase pay or improve benefits to attract or retain employees,” according to an assessment by MarketWatch.

Several polls this week show the double-digit lead that Democrats had in the generic congressional ballot at the end of last year is nearly gone. Issues such as immigration and gun control are backfiring, while most voters credit Trump—not Obama—with the strong economy: The Democratic Party is bitter, listless, and devoid of any winning message or policy agenda.

Which brings us to the week’s worst news for the Left and NeverTrump Republicans, who have devoted 100 percent of their energy to taking down the president via Robert Mueller’s probe into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government before the 2016 election: The credibility of the investigation and the key players involved in the scam is disintegrating.

Let’s revisit the week’s lowest moments for the anti-Trump mob:

He changed his story about the FBI and the Clinton Foundation, lying about his lies.

The Justice Department’s inspector general has referred Andrew McCabe to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., for a possible false-statements prosecution. It was big news this week. But the story of how the FBI’s former deputy director lied to investigators, repeatedly, is mainly of interest to him. It is the story of what he lied about that should be of interest to everyone else.

He lied about leaking a conversation in which the Obama Justice Department pressured the FBI to stand down on an investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

That’s not getting much attention. The referral by Inspector General Michael Horowitz focuses us, instead, on the prospect of McCabe’s prosecution. That’s understandable. McCabe has it coming, as the IG’s 35-page report powerfully illustrates.

The report concludes that the former deputy director “lacked candor,” the standard for internal discipline at the FBI, from which McCabe was fired. It is a charge similar to those spelled out in the federal penal code’s false-statements and perjury laws. Specifically, the report cites four instances of lack of candor; more comprehensively, McCabe is depicted as an insidious operator.

About two weeks before Election Day 2016, the then–deputy director was stung by a Wall Street Journal story that questioned his fitness to lead an investigation of Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ nominee. McCabe’s wife had received $675,000 in donations from a political action committee controlled by the Clintons’ notorious confidant, Virginia’s then–governor Terry McAuliffe — an eye-popping amount for a state senate campaign (which Mrs. McCabe lost). It was perfectly reasonable to question McCabe’s objectivity: The justice system’s integrity hinges on the perception, as well as the reality, of impartiality.

The utility of the Mueller investigation has not been the uncovering of collusion, or even in the badgering of an Administration perceived as loathsome. Rather, it has allowed American elites to avoid facing uncomfortable questions about the factors that put Trump in the White House.

I cannot contemplate the havoc of Russiagate without a shudder of horror not only for my country, but also for myself. How very different my life would have been over the past year or more if I had been one of those Trump volunteers assembled in early 2016 to give the campaign the pretense of having a foreign-policy team. For that matter, it would probably have been enough for me to have volunteered as a neighborhood canvasser to get out the Trump vote (what precious little of it there was) in my community in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Once the charge of collusion with the Kremlin had been leveled against Team Trump, my 40-year association with Russia, much of it as a diplomat, would have made me a prime suspect. A swarm of reporters would have descended on my quiet suburban street, observing my comings and goings and pumping the neighbors for information and pithy sound bites (“He seemed like a quiet, unassuming guy; I would never have thought him capable of such a thing.”).

The fact that I am a nonentity would not have spared me, any more than it has spared Carter Page or George Papadopoulos. Certainly, all my personal and business contacts had been with ordinary, working-level Russians, not the ruling elites. Nevertheless, a few of the Russian diplomats I knew 20 years ago have by now risen through the ranks, and no doubt some of them have presumed intelligence links that could have been used to cast aspersions on my patriotism. And although I knew no one at, say, Rosneft or Gazprom, I’m sure I must have known someone who knows someone in those organizations. A veritable cottage industry could therefore have arisen to contrive a daisy chain of connections, however tenuous and improbable, linking me with the inner sanctum of the Kremlin—the conduit along which cash and information presumably flowed in the supposed collusion that many people deem the only plausible explanation for Trump’s electoral victory.

Perhaps some creative journalist would even have fingered me as the American who explained to the Russians what a purple state is.

My sudden notoriety would have come as a most unwelcome embarrassment to my employer, who might well have felt obliged, however reluctantly, to let me go. Combining unemployment with the imperative to “lawyer up,” I would have been staring bankruptcy in the face and contemplating the disheartening prospect of having to crowdfund my children’s college education, and perhaps even my own retirement.