Andrew McCarthy – former federal prosecutor and long-time legal commentator – has a depressing article on National Review’s website about the endgame of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the Trump-Russia collusion case, which is actually about the corruption of Hillary Clinton and her campaign.  For those of us who think that both Bill and Hillary Clinton deserve to be in jail for a number of good reasons, it’s a disappointment.  McCarthy thinks she will walk, along with just about everyone else responsible for this sordid affair.

What it boils down to is that everything that’s transpired so far convinces McCarthy that Durham can’t make the case for conspiracy.  Incompetence, yes. Unconscionable bias against Trump among supposed public servants, in spades.  A political dirty trick for the ages, certainly.  But conspiracy, no. The legal requirements for that are too high a bar to clear.  Furthermore, it doesn’t take a conspiracy to explain what happened, and Ockham’s Razor suggests that the simpler answer is the more likely.

More and more, it’s looking like this started out as nothing more than a political dirty trick, and then got insanely out of control.  It went something like this (and there’s a bit of speculation in my account of events – so shoot me): Some bright, amoral, utterly corrupt operative in the Clinton campaign says, you know, Trump has always played fast and loose with the rules (and other men’s wives, mistresses and girlfriends, and women in general), and does business in places where systemic corruption is the norm.  Can’t be too hard to dig up some dirt   A call is placed to an attorney at Perkins, Coie, the Democrats’ go-to law shop for sleazy dealing, and they farm the work out to “opposition research” firm Fusion GPS.  No one has to be told to keep things quiet, no one has to be told that they don’t want to know who wants it done, or why, or who’s paying for it.  It’s just a day’s pay for a day’s work.

Fusion GPS calls on British ex-spy Christopher Steele, and he gets to work by looking up old contacts and asking what they know – or at least what they’ve heard – about Trump’s dealings in Russia.  In the world of intelligence, rumor is important, because it can lead to fact.  No one needed to be told that, in this case, the more salacious the rumors, the better, and, boy, did Steele’s sources come up with some doozies.  But, the rumors not leading to any verifiable facts, Steele did the next best thing and printed the rumors.

So far, nothing more than standard dirty trick, perhaps enhanced with a little help from Russian intelligence, which saw an opportunity for mischief that would be good for a laugh or 2 around the Kremlin.  But then the excrement hit the rotating air-movement system.

By this time Trump Derangement Syndrome had lots of “public servants” and “journalists” and “public-spirited citizens” barking at the moon.  “Public-spirited citizen” Steele, maybe on his own, maybe at the direction of Fusion GPS (which in turn may or may not have had instructions from on high, but didn’t need them in any case), shopped his work of fiction to various “journalists” at news outlets whose management still had enough sanity left to recognize garbage when they saw it.  They pass.  Not so the FBI, because they ran with it and talked the FISA court into letting them open an investigation.  All it took was a little lie on the application.  So were the FBI and court duped, or were “public servants” serving the higher calling of truth, justice and the American Way rather than, you know, adhering to their oaths and following the law?  My opinion – they’re not stupid enough to be duped, but are smart enough to play dumb and pretend to be offended that anyone would question their integrity.  The Russians, sniffing an opportunity for industrial-grade damage, played along and provided even more titillating disinformation.  And finally, seeing that the mainstream media wasn’t going to use the story, garbage website Buzzfeed, in a fit of “public-spiritedness” for the ages, published it.  All hell broke loose.

Even at this point a return to sanity was possible.  All it would have taken is for the Clinton campaign to disavow the dossier, the FBI to tell the truth and say, yes, we looked into it, it’s garbage, and for the press to do the same, then proceed to ignore it.  Instead, the “public servants”, the “journalists”, and the woman they were working for doubled down and insisted that Trump was a blackmailed tool of the Russians.  All to no avail, of course.  The “deplorables” saw Clinton for what she was, Trump ran a brilliant campaign (albeit one that sowed the seeds of his downfall 4 years later), and he was elected.

At which point the perpetrators of what started as a standard dirty trick and descended into criminal conduct began to worry about the legal and reputational consequences.  So they doubled down again, insisting that Trump had stolen the election with Russian help, not to mention that the Steele dossier wasn’t garbage, it exposed the awful truth that would be proven if investigated long and hard enough.  Cue Adam Schiff, Robert Mueller and the rest of the TDS Clown Caucus, and a farcical investigation and impeachment that made the House Democrats look like fools and idiots (with an Honorable Mention to the Senate Democrats), and exposed the mainstream press as nothing more than willing and eager tools of the Democratic Party, which could find no better use for their time and our money than to destroy the sitting President.

And now the truth is coming out, slowly and surely.  If anything, it was Clinton who was helped by the Russians.  Her aides made sure that she was shielded by plausible deniability, so she won’t see the inside of a jail, and those aides and the others involved will receive nothing more than slaps on the wrist.  The arrogance and self-righteousness of James Comey and many other people in the FBI and Justice Department are becoming clearer by the day, and can no longer be denied even by their most ardent supporters. The only clear winners are our adversaries around the world, who are exulting at the exposure of the corruption and sleaze at the very top of our national leadership.

So let’s hope that Special Prosecutor Durham’s report lays this out in all its sordid detail.  Let’s hope that Clinton, Schiff, and all involved are exposed as corrupt, power-mad liars and cheats who would stop at nothing short of murder to gain the presidency, and having failed at that, did their damnedest to undermine and destroy the legitimately-elected president to protect their own skins, or out of insane hatred.  Let’s hope these people are driven out of government and any position of political influence forever.  And then let the historians have at them, if they will tell the truth, to destroy their reputations forever.  They deserve nothing less, and the nation needs nothing less.

– Kenneth D. Gough © 2021