By any means necessary

Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review,

…So far, we know that the U.S. government decided to intervene in a political campaign to help one candidate and to smear the other — under the pretext of Russian “collusion.” And so it hired or made use of spies and informants including Hank Greenberg, Stefan Halper, Felix Sater, and others to contact Trump campaign officials to catch them in supposed collusion traps. It enlisted the help of foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the British and Australians. It misled FISA courts into granting warrants to spy on Americans and, post factum, threatened long prisons sentences with those surveilled and interviewed. And as a result, it has so far found no collusion but may well find some misleading statements in hundreds of hours of testimonies from the likes of Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and perhaps Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone.

Christopher Steele, a British subject and de facto unregistered foreign agent, is imminently indictable and extraditable. He was paid through two firewalls (Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie) by Hillary Clinton to tap Russian sources to compile a smear dossier on her opponent, with the intent of warping the U.S. election — a classic example of foreign-agent interference in an American campaign. If we were to take away that one purchased document, then the FISA court warrants, the informants, and all the CIA, FBI, and DOJ machinations would likely have disappeared or never arisen.

…Brennan has never faced consequences for admittedly lying under oath to Congress about collateral drone damage and surveillance of Senate staff computers; James Clapper likewise admittedly lied to Congress about NSA surveillance and faced no consequences. Has any administration ever had its two top intelligence officials admit to lying under oath on matters of national policy and security, and with impunity to a congressional committee?

…Both Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills likely lied to FBI investigators about the extent of their knowledge of Clinton’s private email server. In Orwellian fashion, FBI investigator Peter Strzok claimed that Abedin and Mills were not truthful to the federal investigators, while he concluded that General Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser, had been.

Yet Flynn was targeted for giving false information to federal officials, while Abedin and Mills never were. Of course, Clinton herself lied when she insisted that she had transmitted no classified information over the server, and she destroyed over 30,000 emails Congress had subpoenaed — all without any criminal liability.

No one has ever seriously investigated the activities of Daniel Jones, who worked for Fusion GPS and was apparently a former FBI agent and staff investigator for Senator Dianne Feinstein, and who as a freelancer received millions of dollars from anti-Trump donors (reportedly Silicon Valley activists and George Soros) and, after Trump was president, in March 2017, met with FBI officials to share information gathered by his Penn Quarter Group designed to harm the Trump presidency.

…Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel, signed a dubious FISA warrant request. Such surveillance was apparently useful to his appointee Robert Mueller’s ability to issue indictments against some minor Trump officials. Was Mueller ever going to examine whether Rosenstein improperly helped produce a FISA court warrant that was central to Mueller’s own investigation?

…Such skullduggery poses the question of whether Mueller’s investigation has been simply derailed by partisanship. Or has it effectively served as a deliberate distraction from the felonious behavior of dozens of Obama-administration and Clinton-campaign officials — all determined to ensure, by any means necessary, that Trump would never be president?

Read more here.