The Democrats Get a Taste of Their Own Medicine

The lies, deceptions, and cover-ups of Clinton’s and Obama’s operatives will soon come to light.

by Conrad Black

It is not now clear whether the Democrats’ pathological attachment to the fantasy that they have some chance of destroying the Trump presidency legally is based on continuing hysteria and frenzy, or addiction to continued harassment of the president even as the credibility of doing so plummets, or is an attempt to forestall the investigation and exposure of the malfeasance of the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign in producing the fraud of Trump–Russian collusion. All serious observers can (and do) agree that there is no chance of removing this president from office by impeachment. It requires considerable perseverance and selectivity in canvassing the American media to elicit this fact, but the special counsel, Robert Mueller, despite his glaring anti-Trump biases and obscenely partisan group of investigators, found the president (and all other Americans) to be blameless on the charge of illegal collusion with anyone in Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

In the circumstances, it need hardly be emphasized that the entire Trump–Russia collusion gambit, based on the infamous Steele dossier’s pastiche of lies and defamations, was the dirtiest political trick in American history and is in the process of transmogrification into one of the greatest fiascos in the history of American political skullduggery. (One of the most rabid Trump-hating Democratic congressmen, Eric Swalwell, still professes to believe all of the Steele dossier, as if it were a catechism.) Though there is an elaborate psychopolitical effort underway to pretend otherwise, investigations already taking place by the inspector general of the Justice Department, a special counsel, and the attorney general of the United States, about to be joined by the Senate Judiciary Committee, will call upon the chief intelligence and law officers of the Obama administration, along with Hillary Clinton and members of her campaign staff, to account for their conduct. These include lies under oath to congressional committees, lies to federal officials, and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. This is a series of dishonest statements and illegal acts that can only, at least provisionally, be seen as a coordinated campaign to influence the results of the presidential election and then to compromise the unwished-for outcome of that election. It will not be long before we hear the still familiar words, in reference to President Obama: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

What is occurring now is an unprecedented and almost unbelievable episode of political theatrics. The Democrats are pretending that their fraudulent attempt at what amounted to a coup d’état against the election of an administration of the other party still possesses the legitimacy to be continued and taken seriously after it has been largely unmasked by its own chosen investigators for what it was. At the same time, the machinery of dispassionate justice is already turning towards the identification and eventual punishment of the Democrats for subverting the justice and intelligence apparatus of the former administration in order to influence the results of the election of the succeeding president and vice president of the United States. It is an elemental rule of nature that the longer and the more febrile the efforts of the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and the Democratic party generally, abetted by their media echo chamber, to delay the exposure of their wrongdoing, the more complete and overwhelming the defeat and discreditation of the entire effort to destroy the Trump administration will be.

The surest barometer of the coming political weather is provided by Bob Woodward, the principal bloodless assassin of Richard Nixon, still celebrated and triumphant in the indispensable role that he personally played in destroying one of the most successful administrations in American history. He is now warning of the malign influence of the Steele dossier in the whole anti-Trump removal movement (for such it has become). Even as his Watergate sidekick of 45 years ago, Carl Bernstein, inflicts upon viewers his insane theory that President Trump is so mentally debilitated that he is incapable of functioning as president under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, Woodward has disembarked from the foundering cause of Trump impeachment and clambered aboard the accelerating bandwagon of probing and revealing the sources of this monstrous attempt to derail constitutional government with the Steele dossier.

It is particularly irritating that House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), while acknowledging that impeachment (which he has been demanding and predicting for over two years) will not be successful without Republican collaboration, declares Trump’s conduct to be more odious than Nixon’s. Trump has committed no offenses, and Mueller didn’t write that he had — he just invited the House Democrats to look at obstruction of justice, although he did not allege it, presumably to give a decent interval before this nonsense collapses completely.

In fact, there is little probative evidence that Richard Nixon participated in a conspiracy to obstruct justice, though some of his staff did. For complicated reasons connected to the psychological makeup of President Nixon at that time (1972–74), he lost his formerly acute sense of political self-preservation and effectively collaborated with his enemies in his own destruction. He subsequently made, and posthumously continues, the greatest of all his political comebacks, and he is steadily rising in the esteem of American presidential historians as the forces of cant and political emotionalism subside. Schiff obviously knows nothing about Nixon. If he were a more accomplished, nonpartisan, and esteemed legislator, he would be a primary confirmation of Victor Davis Hanson’s brilliant remark this week that these Trump–Russian collusion matters show that “America’s best and brightest are our worst and dumbest.”

It seems that the Democrats in the House of Representatives are now under the comparatively sobering influence of Speaker Pelosi. They seem unlikely to try to impeach, knowing there is no chance of conviction, and will try to continue their investigations and dominate the news with Mueller excerpts that their media lackeys will amplify as much as possible, to continue this gigantic fraud. This won’t fly. The country recognizes that the attempt to unseat the president has failed, and that it deserved to fail. If he is to be removed from his office, it will be by the electors, and not by a Democratic lynch mob cheered on by the now largely disgraced national political media.

Their day of reckoning is about to begin. They will gag and balk at the evidence as it emerges that the Clinton campaign and the Obama Justice Department, the FBI, and the intelligence services were up to their eyeballs in an unprecedented unconstitutional attempt to manipulate and then undo the result of a presidential election. They have shown almost superhuman self-discipline in ignoring and implicitly denying the existence of the evidence of this wrongdoing. The failure of elected officials, and of the journalists and commentators upon whom the nation has a right to rely for serious and fair reporting and analysis of important political events, will weigh very heavily upon them. The Democrats will pay for their dishonesty at the polls in 2020. And the national political media will require a very long time to recover the confidence of the American people that they have so energetically squandered.

First published in National Review Online.