RUTHFULLY YOURS

The FISA-gate, Clinton emails, and Uranium One scandals are sort of reaching a consensus. Many things quite wrong and illegal were done by both Hillary Clinton and her entourage and members of the Obama agencies and administration — both the acts themselves and the cover-ups and omissions that ensued.

Remember, in the FISA-gate scandal such likely widespread criminal behavior was predicated on two premises: 1) certainty of an easy Clinton victory, after which the miscreants would be not only excused but probably rewarded for their zeal; 2) progressive hubris in which our supposedly moral betters felt it their right, indeed their duty, to use unethical and even unlawful means for the “greater good” — to achieve their self-described moral ends of stopping the crude and reactionary Trump.

The wrongdoing probably includes attempting to warp a U.S. election, Russian collusion, repeatedly misleading and lying before the FISA courts, improperly surveilling American citizens, unmasking the names of citizens swept up in unlawful surveillance and then illegally leaking them to the press, disseminating and authenticating opposition smears during a political campaign, lying under oath to Congress, obstructing ongoing investigations, using federal funds to purchase ad hominem gossip against a presidential candidate, blatant conflicts of interests, weaponizing federal investigations, trafficking in and leaking classified information . . . The list goes on and on.

The State Department is now involved. Apparently anyone who was a former Clinton smear artist can pass fantasies to a sympathetic or known political appointee at State. And if the “dossier” fits the proper narrative and shared agenda, it gains credence enough to ensure that it is passed up to senior State officials and on to the FBI. Perhaps a private citizen with a grudge against a rival should try that as well.

These scandals will grow even greater before various congressional investigations expire.

But then what?

In March 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed a number of Capitol Hill lawmakers on the Trump-Russia investigation. One topic of intense interest was the case of Michael Flynn, the Trump White House national security adviser who resigned under pressure on Feb. 13 after just 24 days in the job.

There were widespread reports that Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about telephone conversations that he, Flynn, had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition in late December 2016. On Jan. 24, 2017, two of Comey’s FBI agents went to the White House to question Flynn, and there was a lot of speculation later that Flynn lied in that interview, which would be a serious crime.

“The Jan. 24 interview potentially puts Flynn in legal jeopardy,” the Washington Post reported in February. “Lying to the FBI is a felony offense.”

There was also a lot of concern in Congress, at least among Republicans, about the leak of the wiretapped Flynn-Kislyak conversation. Such intelligence is classified at the highest level of secrecy, yet someone — Republicans suspected Obama appointees in the Justice Department and intelligence community — revealed it to the press.

So in March, lawmakers wanted Comey to tell them what was up. And what they heard from the director did not match what they were hearing in the media.

Item 1: “People now marvel how it came to pass that he should have been selected as the representative man of any party. His . . . efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world.”

Item 2: “A tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.”

Item 3: “He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.”

Item 4: “Heartfelt keening of shame and revulsion was heard throughout the land.”

These nuggets refer, of course, to the president. But which president? Items 1 and 2 refer to . . . whom? If you said “Donald Trump,” you are only half right. Item 2 does refer to President Trump. It is from David Remnick’s hysterical threnody in The New Yorker, published in the early hours of November 9, 2016. But Item 1 refers not to Trump but to Abraham Lincoln. And it comes not from some rabid secessionist but from the Salem Advocate, a newspaper published in Lincoln’s home state of central Illinois.

Items 3 and 4 are easy. Any woke member of The Resistance will guess that the “inferior character” must be Donald Trump. But it isn’t. The great orator Edward Everett was also referring to Lincoln. Item 4 comes to us from “Annals of Resistance,” a series of skirling anti-Trump dispatches in the Huffington Post.

It is not news that Lincoln, who won the election of 1860 with only 39.8 percent of the popular vote, was deeply unpopular. His popularity was in freefall until September 3, 1864, when General Sherman telegrammed the news “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Military triumph earned Lincoln a narrow victory over George McClellan in the 1864 election. He remained deeply unpopular, however, until John Wilkes Booth inaugurated the process of his beatification in April 1865.

I think of Lincoln and his contemporary unpopularity because of the secessionist mood that is still, in some fetid redoubts, rippling through the country. Most colleges and universities are gigantic petri dishes for the production of this toxin, as are many elite organs of opinion. The New York Review of Books, for example, warned that with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, “We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half.” Which is to say, since the Civil War.

Thanks to the work of smart and hardworking (non-mainstream) journalists, we can peek just a bit over the horizon and see where the story of the weaponization of the FBI via a senior-level cabal is going from here. I use the word “story” deliberately, because that is the way public opinion forms itself on major political affairs. The progressives in the media and politics have long understood this. The cast of the story is now set, and some dramatic plot points have been identified. The ending hasn’t been written yet, of course, but the villains are identifying themselves or being exposed, and some of the heroes are emerging. We are on the cusp of a drama much bigger than Watergate breaking open, and its story elements are compelling.

In the calm before the storm breaks, the mainstream media and the Democrat attack squad from the House Intel committee [i] are in the midst of utterly discrediting themselves. Once the story breaks into the open, indictments will be handed down, and the witnesses, hostile and cooperating, will be heard in hearings and in court. They have worked together to cover up and distract from the story, but the truth will out, and now it is becoming clear how that will happen.

The fake controversy over the ten-page Schiff memo is keeping the morale of the #resistance crowd up, but Schiff himself will go down in history as the guy who kicked sand in the eyes of the investigators. All that media effort in pushing the phony narrative of Russia collusion will make them into dupes and laughingstocks, once the solid evidence is brought to light that a conspiracy to push that phony narrative was run with key members of the Clinton machine working hand in glove with the cabal.