The Donald Trump-Russia collusion scandal that first broke in December 2016 and roared on until April 2019 has no parallel in our history — it’s not even close.
As president-elect and later as sitting president, Trump was accused by the country’s intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus of conspiring with a hostile power to subvert the 2016 election and sneak a crooked path to the White House.
Along the way, a damning Intelligence Community Assessment was issued, a major FBI investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, targeted the president, and a special counsel, Robert Mueller, was granted a team of prosecutors and a budget of millions to bring the guilty to justice.
It was the most sensational news story in history.
By one estimate, more than half a million articles were written about the collusion issue, the vast majority asserting or assuming criminality on Trump’s part.
A manic media competed fiercely to deliver the latest “bombshell.”
For over two years, the first Trump administration was forced to conduct America’s business while in the fetal position.
How much truth, you ask, did the accusations of collusion with Russia contain?
None. Zilch. Nada.
The entire episode was concocted out of whole cloth by the Obama White House, with an assist from the Hilary Clinton campaign and the eager cooperation of the heads of the FBI (James Comey), the CIA (John Brennan), and NSA (James Clapper), plus various zealous underlings.
Bam on a mission
Before asking the obvious questions, let’s pause for a moment to absorb this astounding fact: There was zero evidence, classified or otherwise, to justify the fuss, distraction and cost of the whole clamorous affair.
Pro-Trump fake news, as independent studies have consistently shown, had no effect on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Mueller, in his final report, rather grumpily admitted that the two-year-plus investigation he led “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
In fact, as of Dec. 8, 2016, the intelligence agencies believed that “Russian or criminal actors did not impact recent US election results,” according to documents recently declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Yet on Dec. 9, President Obama, in essence, tasked the agencies to change their minds and come up with the opposite conclusion.
They complied with a hastily-drafted ICA stating that “Russian President Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” and “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
On Jan. 17, three days before Trump’s swearing-in ceremony, an unclassified version of the ICA was made available to the public.
The lack of evidence was obscured with a tactic familiar to those who have worked in intelligence: The proof, the authors claimed, was super-secret and hyper-classified.
Gabbard’s declassification campaign has exposed the naked falsehood of that claim.
The Obama administration, Gabbard now maintains, was guilty of a “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine Trump’s 2016 election victory.
Now, “treasonous” is a strong word — although, to be fair, former CIA chief Brennan applied the same word to Trump at the height of the collusion uproar.
One thing is certain: The corpse of the Trump-Russia scandal has risen like a zombie and is now shambling towards its originators in the hope of eating their brains.
I’m content to leave the legal and constitutional implications of this tawdry episode to the experts who can best explain them.
My interest is in finding the answer to a basic question: What, in the end, was the point of the exercise?
Out to sully ’16 win
Evidently, the Obama White House, in its waning days, aimed to “subvert President Trump’s 2016 victory,” as Gabbard has said. In that, it succeeded brilliantly.
Leaks to The New York Times and The Washington Post began as early as Dec. 9, before the intelligence people even had time to concoct their story.
The bombardment continued for the duration, leaving the Trump administration bruised and battered under the shadow of the scandal.
To this day, 60% of Democrats believe that Trump climbed to high office with a helpful push from his friend Vladimir.
But the case against Trump was based on nothing.
For all the bureaucratic grinding, leaking and noise-making, the investigation was bound sooner or later to arrive at that point: nothing.
Trump would be exonerated. The probability was much higher than zero that he, or some future Republican president, would demand an accounting for the fraud. The Obama and Clinton people would then trade places with the Trumpists.
The prosecutors would be prosecuted.
That, of course, is precisely what has happened. Again: What political advantage was worth taking that risk?
One grateful beneficiary of the collusion story was Clinton, who could now answer, to everyone’s satisfaction, the question that had been tormenting her since Election Day: “How on earth could you possibly lose to that guy?”
The election that ended with her defeat, Clinton happily proclaimed, “was not on the level.”
The scandal, however, was a wholly owned Obama operation.
His tasking of the intel community, a month after the election had passed, fixated the government on the collusion question.
The Dec. 9 meeting to which he abruptly invited the agency heads to reach a foregone conclusion included White House enforcers like Ben Rhodes.
The rushed schedule ensured the ICA was completed on his watch and under his watchful eyes.
Did Dems believe it?
Barack Obama was deeply invested in discrediting Donald Trump, even before the latter assumed the presidency.
No doubt there were partisan and personal reasons for the rancor. We may take it for granted that Obama loathed the sight of Trump.
But by that point, he was the lamest of lame ducks. Only weeks remained of his time in office. Obama was already ascending majestically to the Olympus reserved for retired two-term presidents.
The extraordinary activity of those last days requires an explanation.
One possibility is that Obama and his people believed their own lies. They really thought Trump was a Russian operative, inserted into the Oval Office so he could destroy the country following the script of the 1962 movie, “The Manchurian Candidate.”
That’s unlikely, for a couple of reasons. If President Obama truly imagined Trump to be a foreign agent, he had every incentive to raise the alarm — not in an obscure intelligence report, but in public, before a national audience.
More to the point, when it came to American politics, Obama was a cold and calculating realist. He knew perfectly well when he was shading the truth to obtain a political advantage.
As the bizarre drafting process of the ICA demonstrates, the same was true of top bureaucrats like Brennan and Comey.
Everyone in this affair knew exactly what they were doing.
My take is that the attempted smearing of Trump was literally a vanity project for Obama, a man with an exalted view of himself, his personal achievements and his place in history.
His followers — a set that included pretty much all institutional elites — worshipped him.
From the idealist perspective, he was seen as the embodiment of hope and change, humane policymaking and smart diplomacy.
From a political angle, he was thought to be, like Franklin Roosevelt, a “transformational” figure, as the coalition he assembled of college-educated, minority, and young voters would provide a permanent Democratic Party majority for decades, if not forever.
That was the realistic position as the 2016 elections approached. It would take a man with a prodigious capacity for self-criticism not to believe such a flattering appraisal — and Obama, to put it mildly, was not that man.
Trump’s victory in 2016 shattered all of these illusions.
Suddenly, Obama was no longer a political messiah ushering in a liberal golden age. He was a helpless failure and an object of repudiation.
New level of deranged
He understood, as a realist, that he had been the cause of which Trump was the effect.
His vanity and self-image, I’m guessing, must have suffered a tremendous shock.
Trump was a fluke, a hoax, an impossibility. He had to be exposed as both a monstrous aberration and a depraved departure from his predecessor’s enlightened ways.
President Obama wanted his mojo back.
With the collusion scandal, he got it. On the day he left office, he was more popular with the public than he ever had been, while Trump’s popularity plummeted.
Was the elaborate charade worth it? Maybe so — only the former president is privy to his own internal states.
But on July 23, Gabbard referred his case to the Department of Justice for potential criminal investigation. Call it tit for tat, with terrible repercussions all around — for himself, the country, even his antagonists.
A Trump administration prosecution of Obama, I believe, would be a moral and political horror show.
In these days of rage and riots, it would inaugurate a whole new level of derangement.
At a time when we need forward progress, it would swivel our heads backwards the better to inspect minutely the sins of the past.
There’s a saner way to proceed. Find Robert Mueller’s evil twin, appoint him special counsel, and let him loose for years to hound the paper trail of Barack Obama and the rest of the Trump-Russia crowd.
That, in my humble opinion, would really be tit for tat . . .
