Who will be thrown under the bus?

In the Epoch Times, Roger Kimball writes in part,

...What started with a suite of covert FBI investigations into Donald Trump and various members of his team even before Trump took office flowered into the fireworks of the Mueller investigation and then came to a pathetic, ignominious end when a confused and doddering Robert Mueller testified before Congress and, inter alia, claimed not to know what was Fusion GPS—the firm that hired the ex-spy Christopher Steele to produce the dossier that provided the impetus for Mueller’s probe in the first place.

The whole thing was as pathetic as it was repellent, amply earning its title as the greatest political scandal in our nation’s history. But just when we thought the sordid story was yesterday’s news, a series of revelations about Gen. Michael Flynn, the man who was Donald Trump’s National Security advisor for a few minutes in 2017, catapulted the story back into the center of everyone’s consciousness.

I, like every other scribe in Alpha Centuri, have written about the Case of Flynn ad nauseam. Flynn was an early casualty of Obama’s Deep State attack on Trump. Fair-minded people have suspected he was set up since the indictment first came down. Now we know.

...If you sense a sudden chill in the air, an uncomfortable silence. it is because the usually insouciant Deep State actors from Barack Obama and James Comey on down have clearly got the message. Their lot are never called to account for their wrongdoing by the establishment for the very good reason that they are the establishment. They make the rules that we have to obey but that they may ignore with impunity.

...Also nervous was the Queen Bee, the spider at the center of this web of extralegal intrigue, Barack Obama. In a gesture that was almost comical in its clumsiness, a “private conversation” with aides was leaked.

Lo and behold, it was leaked to Michael Isikoff, the same Michael Isikoff who was the happy recipient of the leaked Steele Dossier way back before Robert Mueller began his Don Quixote-like quest to get Trump. Isikoff links to an audio of Obama’s stage-management remarks. Here is what the ex-President said:

“The news over the last 24 hours I think has been somewhat downplayed — about the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn. And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”

This carefully rehearsed effort at Narrative Correction was brutally anatomized by the commentator and law professor Jonathan Turley. First, Turley points out, Flynn was not charged with perjury.

Second, we now know that Obama discussed charging Flynn under the Logan Act, an act that dates from 1799 that “has never been used successfully to convict anyone and is flagrantly unconstitutional.”

Moving on to understatement, Turley notes that Obama’s strategically leaked statement shows that he is “personally invested in this effort.” Finally, pace the ex-President’s claim, there is plenty of precedent for such dismissals. Turley cites a few.

He also points out this delicious bit of irony: “The Justice Department has dismissed cases in the past including the [Ted] Stevens case. That was requested by President Obama’s own Attorney General Eric Holder for the same reason: misconduct by prosecutors. It was done before the same judge [who heard Flynn’s case], Judge [Emmet] Sullivan. How is that for precedent?”

As I say, it never seems to happen that the important people who develop and nourish The Narrative are called to account for the sort of misconduct that is being exposed in the case of Obama v. Trump.

Will it be any different this time around? What if it were proved that Barack Obama knowingly had a hand in illegally framing Michael Flynn and the attempt to frame Donald Trump? What then? Do you expect he would be indicted?

Would Hillary Clinton, no matter what evidence were brought forward of felonious mishandling of classified material to say nothing of her fabricating a case against Donald Trump by feeding Russian-sourced disinformation to an eager press?

Would James Comey ever be held to account?

To ask these questions is to answer them. You would have to go far down the Democratic food chain—to a Peter Strzok or a Lisa Page—before you get to someone dispensable enough to be thrown under the bus.

Which is why retribution is a fond hope. The best we can hope for is a general disillusionment and erosion of authority in the public’s acquiescence to rule by the Deep State. That would undoubtedly be a victory, the more thoroughgoing the disillusionment, the better. Doubtless, retribution, in the form of indictments, would be more satisfying. But politics, as Bismarck observed, is the art of the possible.

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