A multitude of crimes have been committed by people who were entrusted with the high responsibility of leading and protecting the nation.

How will history judge them? Which is to say, how will historians judge them?

One excellent historian, Victor Davis Hanson, is already judging them.

Writing  at American Greatness, he lists the evils done. We compile our list from his, mostly in his words:

A systematic and terrible assault was made on our constitutional freedoms.

A group of smug and mediocre apparatchiks assumed they had the moral right to destroy a presidential candidate and later an elected president.

A series of progressive-government-media driven melodramas was aimed at both injuring the Trump presidency and shielding a virtual coup to destroy an elected president.

The FBI and the Justice Department deliberately misled Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges to spy on an American citizen as a way to monitor others in the Trump campaign.

Samantha Power and Susan Rice requested the unmasking of scores of Americans, and the names of some of them were were illegally leaked to the media with the intent of defaming them.

James Comey’s 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 – which is why Comey is not in jail.

Comey’s leaking gambit led to the appointment of his long-time friend, 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 by proving Trump was what former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on television called a “Putin asset”.

The Mueller investigation—500 subpoenas, 22 months, $35 million—was one of the great travesties in American investigatory history. 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”.

The libel of Russian collusion was absurd from the get-go.

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.

Eric Clinesmith, another FBI lawyer, altered an email presented as evidence before a FISA court to warp the request to surveil Carter Page. If there is any justice left in this sordid mess, he will end up in jail.

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” (during which caper he and Representative Gerald Nadler and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi behaved in a manner that was childish, peevish, and absurd).  

The hatching of the intricate plots, the systematic abuses against Candidate Trump and then President Trump, Hanson calls skullduggery. Which is what it was and what it continues to be. He says that for four years the skulduggery kept a series of melodramas going which shielded a virtual coup to destroy an elected president.

Hanson’s verdict on the whole long-drawn-out episode of crime, corruption, and treachery:

It is the greatest scandal in American history.

How will  the conspirators – the arrogant civil servants, the dirty cops, the media connivers, the politicians – be judged? Will they ever be made to answer for what they did?  Is there “any justice left in this sordid mess”? 

If they were brought to trial, what would their just punishment be?   

What would be the just punishment for the two people behind it all, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?