by WorldTribune Staff, February 10, 2020

With impeachment over, at least for now, and the investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia hoax continuing, Americans may soon learn that no one is above the law — “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,” historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson wrote.

But for now, Hanson noted in a Feb. 9 op-ed for American Greatness, “the following statements are irrefutable:”

• President 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 Obama, Hanson noted, “Trump did not dismantle U.S.-joint European missile defense in order to coax Putin into behaving during his re-election 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 all originated in 2015-16, Hanson noted, “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,” Hanson wrote.

• Hanson continued: “When Adam Schiff’s pernicious role in jump-starting the impeachment is finally fully known, he will likely be revealed as the prime schemer, along with minor Obama officials buried within the Trump National Security Council, dreaming up the entire Ukraine caper of the ‘whistleblower.’ ”

As the Russian and Ukrainian farces unfolded, Schiff “variously lied to the public about impending ‘bombshell’ revelations of Trump ‘collusion,’ ” Hanson noted. “His minority House Intelligence Committee memo outrageously alleged that the Steele dossier was accurate and truthful and yet was not the prime evidence for the granting of FISA warrants — two more lies exposed by Horowitz.”

Hanson noted that Schiff would the proceed to rig “the initial House impeachment hearings to exclude transparency and bipartisan access to witnesses. He read a false version of the Trump conversation with the Ukrainian president into the congressional record. He secretly data mined his own colleagues’ communications. And to the very last moments of the entire fraud, even in his dotage, he was still babbling in the Senate about the long-ago discredited ‘Russian collusion’ and again stringing together absurd fantasies of Trump wishing to sell Alaska to the Russians.”

Trump’s acquittal in the Senate was a “great gift” to Schiff, Hanson wrote. “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, which included 500 subpoenas, took 22 months to complete, and cost American taxpayers $35 million, “was one of the great travesties in American investigatory history,” Hanson wrote. “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.’ ”

Hanson continued: “Comey is not yet in jail, in part, because his cronies at the FBI, including the disgraced Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, post facto, announced that the leaked Comey versions of his one-on-one talks with the president of the United States were merely confidential rather than top secret and thus their dissemination to the media was not quite felonious.

“The rest is history. Comey’s leaking gambit paid off. It led to the appointment of his long-time friend and predecessor, former FBI Director Robert Mueller. Mueller then delighted the media by appointing mostly progressive activist lawyers, some with ties to Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, in what then giddy journalists called a ‘dream team,’ of ‘all-stars’ who in the fashion of a ‘hunter-killer’ team would abort the Trump presidency. They would prove Trump was what former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on television called a ‘Putin asset.’ ”

• Then, “in surreal fashion, the main players, under suspicion for seeding and peddling the fraudulent Steele dossier among the high echelons of the U.S. government and using such smears to cripple Trump — John Brennan, James Clapper, and Andrew McCabe — were hired by liberal CNN and MSNBC as paid analysts to fob off on others the very scandals that they themselves had created,” Hanson wrote.

Mueller and his dream team “finally had to concede that it was born out a conspiratorial hoax by finding after 88 weeks — punctuated by almost daily leaks to sympathetic progressive media — that there was no Trump-Russian collusion to warp the 2016 election,” Hanson wrote. “Nor did it find actionable obstruction of justice on the part of Trump to thwart the investigation of what was admittedly a non-crime.”

• The net effects of the investigations by Mueller and Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz “were variously to exonerate Trump, to expose a corrupt Justice Department, CIA, and FBI, to illustrate how the government hounded and ruined the lives of minor 2016 Trump campaign officials with largely process convictions and plea-bargained confessions, and to explain the peremptory resignations of more than a dozen top Washington officials of James Comey’s FBI — as well as the railroading of General Michael Flynn,” Hanson wrote.

“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.”

• In sum, Hanson wrote, “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 pre-emptive fashion, shielding a virtual coup to destroy an elected president.”

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  Adam Schiff, collusion hoax, Hanson: As the smoke clears, here’s what we now know, James Comey, John Brennan, Mueller report, Trump-Russia, WorldTribune.com