J. Peder Zane’s RealClearPolitics column makes the case “Why the Russiagate Scandal Outranks the Rest.” This I believe:
Russiagate is the biggest scandal in American history.
Nothing comes close in size, scope or harm to the republic than the years-long effort to cripple Donald Trump’s presidency by claiming he conspired with an enemy state to steal the 2016 election and then do its bidding as commander-in-chief.
Its notorious predecessors – L’Affaire Lewinsky, Iran-Contra, Watergate, Teapot Dome, Crédit Mobilier, the XYZ Affair – involved relatively small numbers of malefactors engaged in specific acts of illegality and corruption (we still don’t know who, if anyone, planned the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol)
Russiagate, by contrast, is a vast conspiracy involving innumerable powerful forces, including the Democratic Party, NeverTrump Republicans, the Obama administration, the FBI, Department of Justice and the nation’s most prestigious news outlets.
Where previous scandals often ended with public accountability for the perpetrators – Watergate saw the imprisonment of top White House aides and President Nixon’s resignation – and public reforms, Russiagate has produced no such reckoning.
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Clinton staffers – including Jake Sullivan, who now serves as Biden’s national security adviser – tried to interest the mainstream press in its scurrilous accusations, but got little traction because they could not be verified. Instead of laughing it all off as transparent campaign mud-slinging, however, the FBI joined the conspiracy. The bureau took the extreme step of opening a counter-intelligence probe into an ongoing presidential campaign – and its agents perjured themselves to obtain wire-tapping warrants.
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Leading peddlers of the hoax – including Brennan, Clapper, Pelosi, Schiff and Sullivan – have paid no price for their actions. To date, no one has conducted probing interviews with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama about their roles in the scandal.
Engineered by broad swaths of the government and media, the effort to paint a sitting president as a foreign agent alone makes Russiagate the worst scandal in American history. But it is this second, still ongoing phase – this willful effort to deny what happened, this refusal to hold the perpetrators accountable – that presents the most serious danger to our nation.
One should think this cannot stand, yet it stands like a castle keep. Whole thing here.
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