"Once, the FBI fought organized crime. Then the FBI became organized crime."

That is the comment made by Glenn Reynolds as he provided a link to an article by Roger Kimball in American Greatness. Roger writes,

Think about it: without Nunes we wouldn’t know that “Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Adviser, spied on members of the Trump campaign before the election and then unmasked their names with the likely knowledge that they would be leaked—which they were.” Pause for a moment to think about that. The national security advisor for one administration spied on members of her political opponents in a presidential election and then unmasked their identities and made sure their names were leaked to the press.

If you don’t find that breathtaking you have become too inured to living in a banana republic.

...without Nunes, “We would not have details about the plot in the FBI and DOJ to use the phony dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign, created by Democratic party-aligned opposition research firm Fusion GPS, and circulated by an associate of Republican senator John McCain.”

Savor that tidbit as well: a dossier of unverifiable gossip secretly commissioned and paid for by one campaign covertly injected into the intelligence apparatus of the United States to justify a counterintelligence investigation against an opposing campaign. And note the role of the late “maverick” John McCain, surely one of the most disgusting political actors in recent American history: it was at his request that Christopher Steele wrote the final installment of his vampire fantasy, a.k.a., “the dossier,” and it was through McCain’s intervention that the dossier was given to the FBI and emunctory media outlets like BuzzFeed.

...As I have been saying for a couple of years now, this is the biggest scandal in American history. It dwarfs Watergate. Indeed, it challenges the fundamental integrity of our democratic—i.e., accountable—institutions. It challenges, too, the sacrosanct ideal of the separation of powers. Finally, it challenges the presumption of basic fairness and open competition without which our republic could endure in name only.

Anyone who cares about future of our political system, be he Democrat or Republican, owes Devin Nunes thanks for his efforts. And that debt has just been compounded with Nunes’s announcement that, “now that we have an attorney general,” i.e., William Barr, not Jeff Sessions, he is sending eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.

...A Lengthy List of Suspects
But who do you think makes the list? Were I a modern-day Koko, my little list would include former CIA Director John Brennan, an implacable enemy of the president and a good candidate for the title of fons et origo of the Trump-Russia investigation.

It would include the FBI’s Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former acting attorney general Sally Yates, Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie who (unbelievably) actually worked for Fusion GPS.

That other James, the oleaginous James Comey, former Director of the FBI, would certainly be on the list, as would several people in the Obama Administration: the aforementioned Susan Rice, for example, and former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, who, like Rice, did a lot of unmasking in her final months in office.

...But the scary bottom line is this: over the last couple of years, one political party, aided and abetted by a compliant media and a deep-state bureaucracy, conspired to void the results of a free, open, and democratic election because they disapproved of the people’s choice.

What just happened in the United States represented an existential threat to the integrity of our institutions. It happened because highly placed individuals had cultivated a sense of entitlement and presumption of higher virtue—what James Comey called a “higher loyalty”—which they believed exempted them from the constraints and procedures that the rest of us must observe. They broke the law because they believed that they answered to a “higher” law. Out of such convictions are revolutions born and countries destroyed. The best safeguard against it happening again—indeed, against it continuing on now—is to hold those responsible to account. It is too early to say whether that will happen.

As I say, some of my friends think it would be a bad thing for the country to pursue high-profile indictments. I, on the contrary, thinking about what the country has just been put through, believe that our best hope of preventing this from happening again is to make an example of those who, smitten with the delicious sensation of their own virtue, did their best to reverse the results of an election because a candidate they did not like had the temerity to win.

Read more here.