"And we the people will learn yet again that our best and brightest just may be among our worst and dumbest."

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes,

A Higher Ego
Fired FBI Director James Comey wrote a book called A Higher Loyalty, with the theme that Comey had always put allegiance to “the Truth” over all careerist and partisan concerns.

Yet Comey signed off on a FISA warrant request without apprising the court that the chief evidence for such a writ was paid for by losing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Comey’s own sworn testimony about the dossier to a Senate Judiciary Committee was not consistent with the actual evidence in the dossier presented to the court. Comey also claimed he needed to brief Trump on the dossier because the media was going to publish its contents, when, in fact, it was only Comey’s staged meeting with Trump about the dossier that offered enough official sanction for the dossier to convince Buzzfeed finally to release it.

Yet Comey on FBI time and machines wrote memos memorializing his confidential meetings with President Trump, and then leaked seven of them to the media in order to create enough fury to lead to the appointment of a special counsel.

Despite Comey’s denials, four of the seven memos may well have contained some classified information and thus were probably illegally leaked by Comey, who succeeded in prompting the appointment of a special counsel—his longtime friend Robert Mueller. Yet Comey in his December 2018 congressional testimony, admitted under oath over 200 times that he did not know the answer to the questions asked or did not remember.

Yet Comey’s testimony cannot be reconciled with sworn statements of his own deputy Andrew McCabe. Comey’s real message is not about a higher loyalty, but rather that when one does not tell the truth, one must apparently continue not to tell the truth—at least until the edifice of the aggregate untruth collapses by its own weight.

Collusion Delusion
Robert Mueller investigated a supposed crime of Trump-Russian collusion that early on in his investigation was discovered to hinge on the Christopher Steele dossier, which to this day has had none of its contents verified but lots of its assertions proved impossible or inaccurate.

...The No Stars
Robert Mueller had to assemble an independent and unbiased special counsel’s legal team, ostensibly to avoid the partisanship of an all-Republican Department of Justice hierarchy investigating the Republican Trump. But Mueller, a Republican, appointed almost all non-Republican lawyers; among them many donors to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign; among them lawyers of the former Obama Justice Department who had been briefed by Bruce Ohr on the contents of the Steele dossier at a time when Fusion GPS and members of Obama Administration were doing their best to seed the gossip mill among the media; and among them a few lawyers who variously had either represented the Clinton Foundation or former Clinton aides or former Obama Administration officials; and among them Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, who earlier had sent each other hundreds of text messages, many of them expressing not just loathing of the object of their investigation, but also vows to ensure that Trump would not become president.

In the end, the “dream team” and “all stars” spent $34 million and 22 months, and wrote over 400 pages to confirm what was self-evident from the outset of this ill-starred inquest: Donald Trump did not “collude” with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton; Trump did not impede the nonsensical investigation of absurd charges; and the horde of lawyers who found no crimes were frustrated to the point of including anything in their report they could to embarrass Trump—except the proof of collusion for which they were tasked to find.

Legacies
The Mueller fiasco likely will end any talk of any special counsel investigation for a generation. Eventually, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe, along with others, will feel what it is like to have a federal prosecutor leveraging them, but this time about real, not made-up, crimes.

The liberal television media and their administrative state partisan “experts” likely will not gain back their former audiences, who were duped with two years of fabrications dressed up as “the walls are closing in” psychodramatic news. The hard Left, “Impeach Trump!” Democratic presidential field will no longer have an excuse to avoid explaining to the American people their weird agenda: a fundamental transformation of the country antithetical to the visions of the American Founders and likely on every issue opposed by a majority of Americans. And we the people will learn yet again that our best and brightest just may be among our worst and dumbest.

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