The powerful coterie that accused Donald Trump, first as a candidate for the presidency and then as president, of “colluding” with Vladimir Putin to do something-or-other in the interest of Russia and against the interest of the United States, knew perfectly well that the accusation was a lie since they themselves had invented it. They would have him exposed and punished as a traitor to the country he led, knowing full well that he was nothing of the sort but in fact a passionate American patriot.

Now their chosen president, Joe Biden, and his powerful supporters – billionaires, owners of vast international corporations, film makers, newspaper and television moguls, federal bureaucrats, career diplomats, primates of academia – are colluding with the Chinese Communist Party to do what it pays them to do in the interest of China and against the interest of the United States.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness about the “collusion” and the collusion:

“Collusion” destroyed what was left of respect for the Washington FBI, the CIA, and the liberal news media. …

“Collusion” … allowed befuddled Russian appeasers and naïfs to … recalibrate themselves as our new version of Cold War hawks. It was as if a supposedly geriatric and anemic Russia suddenly had transmogrified back into the huge and global-menacing Soviet Union …

But the chief motive for the “collusion” accusation was the destruction of Donald Trump; the driving force behind the hoax, sheer hatred of him – and of the tens of millions of Americans who trusted him to make their lives more prosperous and fulfilling. (Which he did.)

“Collusion” was, as the debased FBI agent Peter Strzok had texted, the “insurance policy” of the administrative state to keep the “smelly”, the “ugly folk”, and “dregs” where they belonged—far, far from power. …

“Collusion” took off because so many of those directly involved in its illegality—Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Hillary Clinton—pushed the “collusion” lie in roles of respected senior “wise men and women” with “security clearances” who knew “what was really going on”. …

[The accusation of] “collusion” did hurt Donald Trump, the sum of all their hatreds. “Collusion” was behind the dishonest and embarrassing witch hunt of Robert Mueller’s 22-month $35 million investigation. It was the subtext of a fraudulent impeachment …

The “collusion” fraud tore the country apart. It destroyed the reputations of James Comey, Robert Mueller, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, network news, and what had been left of the little repute of Brennan, Clapper, McCabe, and Andrew Weissmann. …

The “collusion” effort, its proven dishonesty, and its complete failure to remove Donald Trump, did not lead to a hiatus. …  No, the abject failure of “collusion’s” outlandish premises, and the impunity given those who destroyed so many lives and hurt the country, only whetted the appetite of the “Resistance”. The slow-motion coup aficionados promised to do better in the next round.

Remember, those who lied under oath, abused government power, broke the law, and unmasked and leaked classified information, to this day, have never been held to account. Nor have the journalists who spread these untruths and demonized any who refuted them.

And so with that exemption, the Left pressed on to impeachment and, eventually, remaking the very system of how we voted in 2020. …

And while the lying was going on –

There was a real, far more dangerous collusion that was burrowed deep within the U.S. administrative state, the Democratic Party, corporate boardrooms, Big Tech, professional sports and entertainment, and the media.

If, save for its rusting nuclear arsenal, Russia was shrinking, poor, and spent, not so was China. It was rich, huge, and ruthlessly hellbent on global hegemony—if not by bribery and corruption, then by naked commercial and military force.

[There was] a NATO along a much weaker Russia’s borders, [but] until Trump there was nothing much to protect Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan from China. …

Beijing, far better than Russia, understands how to unravel a new America, unhinged and obsessed with race, victimization, and “privilege”. 

Hollywood has had a field day with casting big-screen, shaved-headed, Orthodox tattooed, Russian mafia killers and brutes as the evil enemies of all noble minority and feminist film heroes. Yet at the same time, progressive studio heads and producers were reassuring the 1.4 billion people in the Chinese market that they would cull darker-skinned minority American actors so as not to offend the innate racism of the Chinese movie-goer. No one said a word about the paradox.

[China can] put 1 million religious dissidents in a gulag archipelago, destroy the semi-independence of Hong Kong, threaten any of its dissident neighbors with commercial destruction, embark on the largest imperialist and colonialist project in two centuries throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, obliterate the culture of Tibet, militarize, with man-made atolls, the South China Sea, systematize internal surveillance, nonchalantly practice institutional racism, and infect the planet with a novel virus—and receive almost no official criticism from the United Nations and the governments of the European Union and the United States …

[What do] Michael Bloomberg, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), the elite universities of the United States, the family of Joe Biden, Lebron James, and Colin Kaepernick all have in common?

Easy. A presidential primary candidate [Bloomberg] assures us that China is not an authoritarian country as he pours billions into jump-starting Chinese companies.

The erstwhile head of the U.S. Senate’s intelligence committee [Dianne Feinstein] has had a Chinese spy as her chauffeur for 20 years and a spouse who has millions in joint-Chinese ventures.

A congressman on the House Intelligence Committee [Eric Swalwell] was deeply compromised by an attractive young Chinese spy—a fact kept silent for years.

The Department of Education complains that our best universities have failed, again for years, to report tens of millions of dollars in “gifts” from Chinese government-affiliated companies.

Hunter Biden and his familial clique received millions of dollars in Chinese investment monies for no reason other than the “big guy” Joe Biden was vice president.

Our sports icons simultaneously trashed American democracy while keeping mum about Chinese racist dictatorship, the source of their millions in endorsements and franchising.

Remember just those few examples and one realizes that something is gone haywire with those at the very heart of America’s power and cultural influence.

And the most depressing fact of all? Even if we had investigative reporters and crusading congressional representatives, or past administrations before 2016 interested in real collusion, then what could they really have done? …

How many Wall Street grandees, how many media moguls, how many ex-politicians and bureaucrats (now “consultants” and “analysts”), and how many retired esteemed generals would journalists have had to reexamine to adjudicate whether their public views and corporate policies were warped by Chinese profiteering?

One can lie about “collusion” with impunity. But to speak the truth about collusion is to be smeared as “xenophobic”, “racist”, and “nativist”. 

China has piggybacked on the entire diversity/identity politics domestic cancel culture. …

Our elite simplistically conflates the Russian nationalist dictator and kleptocrat Vladimir Putin with the criminal past of the now-defunct Stalinist Soviet Union that killed 20 million of its own. Yet in creepy fashion, it still remains indifferent that Chinese President Xi Jinping, current General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the Chinese Central Military Commission, heads a government apparatus that is the direct and unbroken successor to Mao Zedong’s Communist killing machine that wiped out over 50 million of its own people. …

Given the present U.S. “collusion” hysteria of the anti-Trump Left, had a Russian city been the source of the origin and transmission of the virus, had SARS-CoV-2 been connected to research and experimentation within a Level-4 Russian virology lab, and had the Russians lied about these facts, and, either through laxity or deliberation, allowed the virus to infect the world, kill over 1.5 million, and destroy the global economy, then we would have been on the brink of war.

Once China has finished “unravelling” this “new America, unhinged and obsessed with race, victimization, and “privilege”, will it “build [it] back better” (as the slogan of the globalists runs) and make an entirely new America in its own image?

The quickest, smartest, simplest, most efficient way the Democrats, pressed as they are by their rising communist generation (represented in government by “the Squad”), could turn the United States of America into the United Socialist States of America (USSA), is to invite the Chinese to take over the running of the country. The ruling Chinese Communist Party wouldn’t need to send many of its agents here, as there are tens of thousands of them already in place.

A few top men would need to be flown over. (They would be men, not women, not transgenders. Their pronouns would be only he, him, his.)

It would be an unremarkable event when a smiling Chinese Communist fresh from Beijing enters the Oval Office, waits while a befuddled Joe Biden is gently removed from the chair at the president’s desk and escorted out into limbo, and quietly takes his place.

We hadn’t heard of him either. But now we know –

Daniel Jones is doing much evil. He and a huge crowd to which he belongs are all doing much evil. The people of the United States need to be told all their names.

The best critical observer of the passing parade of our age, Mark Steyn, writes:

There have been exciting developments in the “Russia investigation”. There always are, because that is the nature of open-ended money-no-object investigations. But, to me, the most interesting development was the testimony of Michael Caputo, who appeared just before me on Tucker Carlson’s show last night. Mr Caputo was, briefly, a very minor Trump campaign aide – and so his life has been destroyed. As he told the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday:

In 2009, my wife and I moved to my hometown of East Aurora, New York to have a family. Making far less money back home, we had a far better quality of life. That is, until the Trump-Russia narrative took off. Today, I can’t possibly pay the attendant legal costs and live near my aging father, raising my kids where I grew up.

Your investigation and others into the allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia are costing my family a great deal of money – more than $125,000 – and making a visceral impact on my children.

That’s chump change for most senators and their vast entourages – and barely a rounding error in most of the budgets they approve. It’s also considerably less than, say, my own legal bills after the scofflaws at CRTV broke my contract and put me through a year of “binding arbitration” that Cary Katz and his sleazy business partners (“Governor” Pete Wilson of California, etc) are now refusing to be bound by (having lost the case). But, for most Americans, 125 grand in legal bills for a case you’re not even a party to is a big chunk of change.

And somewhere or other is a guy for whom blowing, say, 75 grand on lawyers is catastrophic, and they’re trying to turn him to sell-out Caputo so they can turn Caputo to sell-out whoever’s next up the chain. And they’ve got all the time in the world to bleed you dry.

Mr Caputo did something very unusual yesterday. He named names – or at least one name, from the Gulf Emir-sized retinue that attends each senator:

How many of you know Daniel Jones, former Senate Intelligence staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein? Great guy, right? Most of you worked with him. One of you probably just talked to him this morning.

Of course, very few of us in flyover country knew Daniel until recently. Now we know that he quit his job with your Senate committee not long ago to raise $50 million from ten rich Democrats to finance more work on the FusionGPS Russian dossier. The one the FBI used to get a FISA warrant and intimidate President Donald Trump, without anyone admitting — until months after it was deployed — that it was paid for by Hillary Clinton.

In fact, good old Dan has been raising and spending millions to confirm the unconfirmable – and, of course, to keep all his old intel colleagues up-to-speed on what FusionGPS and British and Russian spies have found…

We know from the news that he’s been briefing Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of this committee. Which one of you works for Senator Warner? Please give Danny my best.

Great. So a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer is – what’s the word? – colluding with Russian spooks to keep the story alive. And he leaks more than those Moscow hookers:

I saw some of his handiwork just last month. Remember this lede paragraph, from McClatchy on April 13?

‘The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.’

That’s your pal Dan, isn’t it?

It’s unclear from the transcript whether any pals of Dan confirmed this. But Mr Caputo certainly has their number:

I mean, you’re all in this together. You’re the swamp.

What America needs is an investigation of the investigators. I want to know who is paying for the spies’ work and coordinating this attack on President Donald Trump? I want to know who Dan Jones is talking to across the investigations – from the FBI, to the Southern District of New York, to the OSC, to the Department of Justice, to Congress.

Forget about all the death threats against my family. I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election.

I want to know because God damn you to Hell.

(If you would like to read Mr Caputo’s full statement, well, oddly enough I can only find it in a non-American publication – The Daily Mail.)

…  The process is the punishment. That’s particularly true at the federal level, where as a matter of policy they first wipe you out – drain your savings, empty your retirement account, nuke the kids’ college fund …and then dangle a deal in front of you in exchange for you pleading guilty “only” to a process crime, like lying to the lyin’ liars who run the FBI. It is an awesome thing to behold – particularly by comparison with, say, military justice, where the US has been holding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for almost four times as long as the First World War and still can’t manage to bring him to trial.

In a sane system, he’d have been convicted and hanged in a fortnight. Instead, his lawyers are now arguing he’s been brain damaged by the United States. Who knows? But, given that the US has been nursemaiding him for over fifteen years, it’s not unreasonable to argue that, whatever medical ailments afflict him, they developed during Uncle Sam’s leisurely custody of him.

Thus American justice in the 21st century: It can ruin a no-name Trump campaign volunteer in nothing flat. But it can’t try a guy who murdered three thousand innocents in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, another two hundred in the Bali nightclub bombing, plus Daniel Pearl in Pakistan … and has confessed to all this and more. …

Despite this being the most litigious society on earth huge numbers of Americans remain oblivious to the vast amount of human wreckage piled up: Every day on cable news, I hear some Democrat telling the host that, if these former minor Trump aides have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear from investigation-without-end: We need to let the law do its job, and let the process play itself out. …

When the process plays itself out as lethargically and ruinously as this, the process itself is the problem – as Michael Caputo has discovered.

I wish him well, and I wish those toying with him as they’ve toyed with Carter Page and others are indeed damned to Hell.

We like the idea of their “damnation”. Unfortunately there is no Hell for them to suffer in eternally. It is here on earth, in this one and only life, that justice needs to be done. Will the Mueller conspirators be punished by the law? We hope they will, but see little to encourage the hope.

*

Ah, a sign that the wheels of justice might be beginning to turn against the villains:

A federal judge on Friday [May 4, 2018] harshly rebuked Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team during a hearing for ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort – suggesting they lied about the scope of the investigation, are seeking “unfettered power” and are more interested in bringing down the president.

“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III told Mueller’s team. “You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you to lead you to Mr. Trump and an impeachment, or whatever.”

Further, Ellis demanded to see the unredacted “scope memo”, a document outlining the scope of the special counsel’s Russia probe that congressional Republicans have also sought.

May the good judge decree that the unredacted memo be published so we can all read it.