"Absurd from the get-go!"

Victor Davis Hanson writes in part in American Greatness,

...Donald Trump, in concrete ways, has been far harder on Russia than was the “reset” Obama presidency, and far more helpful to Ukraine than Team Obama ever was. Trump armed the Ukrainians. He upped sanctions against Russia. He ordered lethal retaliation against Russian mercenaries in Syria. He vastly increased U.S. oil and gas production to Russia’s detriment. He jawboned Germany about its fuel dependence on Moscow. He coerced NATO to spend more on defense. He got out of an asymmetrical missile treaty with Russia. He is rebuilding the U.S. military.

Unlike his predecessor, Trump did not dismantle U.S.-joint European missile defense in order to coax Putin into behaving during his reelection bid. He did not push a big plastic red reset button in Geneva to mark outreach to Putin, in rejection of prior Bush sanctions on Russians. He did not forbid the shipment of anti-tank missiles to an endangered Ukraine. He did not invite the Russians into Syria after a 40-year hiatus from the Middle East.

So the libel of Russian collusion was absurd from the get-go.

It originated in 2015-16 when the deep state was terrified over the then unlikely possibility of a President Donald Trump. The “collusion” ruse involved the chief players of federal law enforcement and national intelligence agencies. All, of course, had assumed Hillary Clinton would be president and their extralegal efforts to “insure” her victory would soon be commensurately rewarded, regardless of the illegality and unethical behavior required. And both crimes and amorality were most certainly involved.

The litany of these systematic abuses constitutes the greatest scandal in American history.

...Schiff was given a great gift with a quick Senate acquittal. If he had been called as a fact witness, he either would have had to lie under oath to refute his earlier myths, or continue them and compound his falsities.

The Mueller investigation—500 subpoenas, 22 months, $35 million—was one of the great travesties in American investigatory history. It was cooked up by fired, disgraced—and furious—former FBI Director James Comey. By his own admission, Comey conceded that he leaked confidential memos of private conversations he had with the president to create a large enough media and political storm to force the naming of a special prosecutor to investigate “Russian collusion.”

...Yet Mueller’s team was marred with problems from the outset. The amorous and textually promiscuous pair of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were both fired for their rank partisanship, although Mueller and his team initially hid the reasons for their departures and staggered their firings to suggest a natural rotation. Mysteriously, hundreds of their incriminating texts have disappeared from FBI smart devices—a weirdness reminiscent of the FBI’s willingness not to examine Hillary Clinton’s computers that were hacked, as well as apparent unconcern that she destroyed thousands of subpoenaed emails.

Some of that skullduggery and more are currently the subjects of a criminal investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham. The American public has been assaulted for four years by an array of fake scandals, fake bombshells, and fake televised analyses that camouflaged a systematic and terrible assault on our constitutional freedoms.

But soon the worm may turn. The real scandal is back on the horizon, and at last, we may learn that no one is above the law, and most certainly not a group of smug and mediocre apparatchiks who assumed they had the moral right to destroy a presidential candidate and later an elected president.

In sum, this real scandal, dormant for over four years, had been overshadowed by a series of progressive-government-media driven melodramas, aimed at both injuring the Trump presidency—and, in preemptive fashion, shielding a virtual coup to destroy an elected president.

Read more here.