The foundations of both Robert Mueller’s investigation and the sanctions placed on Russia appear to have crumbled into dust.

Doug Ross@Journal reprints an article in American Greatness by Michael Thau.

…hostile actors had gotten ahold of all the emails in campaign chairman John Podesta’s main Gmail account. You may have heard that Podesta’s emails were “hacked,” but they weren’t. There were no faraway cyber-nerds searching for some vulnerability in the DNC network. He fell for a common “spear phishing” scam. A fake email from Google arrived, saying he needed to change his password and providing a link. The link was also fake. Instead of changing his password, Podesta gave it away—along with all of his campaign emails.

…The Immensity of Podesta’s Blunder
Podesta’s blunder had the potential to damage Hillary Clinton’s already precarious reputation with voters regardless of their feelings about Bernie Sanders. In some of his pilfered emails, top Clinton advisors, including Podesta himself, insulted her abilities and her ethics, commented on her poor health, made disparaging remarks about Catholics, Muslims, blacks, and Latinos, and complained that Clinton wanted “unaware and compliant” voters.

…But perhaps the most troubling of Podesta’s emails would have been those containing passages from speeches Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs and other big money outfits at $225,000 a pop. In these speeches, Clinton downplayed Wall Street’s role in the 2008 recession and said big money bankers themselves are best equipped to write any necessary legislation.

Clinton in those speeches also conceded that her “economic fortunes” put her “obviously” out of touch with the struggles middle-class voters face. She further admitted that she has distinct public and private positions on political issues, and revealed that she secretly favors open borders.

Like the controversy over her private server, Clinton weathered this storm so well that it’s hard to remember how much her unreleased speeches alarmed Sanders’ supporters, to whom she was little more than a corporate shill. Sanders had been using Clinton’s speeches as a laugh line in his own stump speeches for months:

If you’re going to give a speech for $225,000 it’s gotta be really, don’t you think an extraordinarily brilliant speech, I mean why else would they pay that kind of money? . . . Must be a speech written in Shakespearean prose. So I think, if it is such a fantastic speech, the secretary should make it available to all of us.

To make matters worse, three weeks before Assange’s announcement, Clinton released a mandatory financial statement that brought her Wall Street speeches to the forefront of campaign news, yielding headlines like, “How corporate America bought Hillary Clinton for $21M” and “The massive scale of the Clintons’ speech-making industry.”

…The foundations of both Robert Mueller’s investigation and the sanctions placed on Russia appear to have crumbled into dust.

Let’s hope our political class notices.