The biggest political scandal in the history of the United States.  Three years of constant lies told by government agents, political operatives, and deceitful news personalities.  Thousands of hours of criminal investigative interviews; thousands of written stories and television segments; thousands of leaks and insinuations and threats.  All to take down the legitimately elected American president, Donald J. Trump.

Now that some light is finally revealing just how rotten this whole nonsense has been from the very beginning, the most maddening aspect of all is the one thing not said nearly enough: every bit of this frame-up job to hang the American president for being a Russian agent and traitor to his nation began as a way to inoculate Hillary Clinton from her largest political vulnerabilities going into the 2016 campaign.

Aside from her questionable health and a lifetime of scandal, Hillary had two sizable liabilities (of her own creation) that threatened her ability to win the general election: (1) her use of the Clinton Foundation as a vehicle for laundering bribes from foreign governments and moneyed interests and (2) her decision to conduct the business of the State Department (as well as to discuss our nation's most guarded secrets) on an unsecured private email server that had been hacked by known and unknown foreign governments and adverse entities.  Peter Schweizer's Clinton Cash did a remarkable job exposing the Clinton Foundation as a spectacular pay-to-play operation that had allowed Hillary to trade the powers of her office for personal aggrandizement (including the sale of 20% of America's uranium to Russia for, among other things, $145 million transferred to her foundation).  And even though the Obama Justice Department was doing its best to minimize the revelation of Hillary's gross breach of national security and slow-walk any repercussions, the American people were discovering that life-and-death secrets had been entrusted to a person with such disregard for our well-being that she stored them on a personal server in a downstairs bathroom.

For a normal person with a modicum of ethical concern, sense of shame, or patriotic duty, these crimes would have been more than sufficient to prompt withdrawal from an election for the country's highest office.  This type of honest self-reflection and private admission of guilt is alien to the Clintons, though, so what would have represented immovable obstacles to anyone else became just another set of political variables that had to be neutralized in her favor.  

I can just imagine the conversation Hillary had with her most trusted advisers — not the ones with the official titles like Robby Mook and Brian Fallon, whose chief value lay in their expendable nature and the ease with which Hillary could roll them up into any unexpected scandal to be disposed with the trash at a future time of her convenience.  I mean the real group of confidants, the ones who have "the ends justify the means" tattooed on their souls and have gotten away with more crimes than we'll ever know.  If you're Sid Blumenthal or John Podesta or Cheryl Mills or Marc Elias or Lanny Davis and you know where some of the bodies are buried along the spectacular trail of Clinton corruption through the years, then the prospect of a massive pay-to-play scandal or criminal indictment for mishandling top-secret intelligence or engaging wittingly or unwittingly in espionage is just another bump on the long road of progressive relativism and Clinton nihilism.  If Clinton Cash and FBI investigators come knocking, you simply accuse all your political opponents of being the real grifters and foreign agents.

That's exactly what Team Hillary did.  They leveled allegations of criminal bribery at Jeb Bush; they questioned Marco Rubio's loyalty to the United States; but Donald Trump was the prize.  A man who had spent a lifetime in the exotic world of luxury real estate around the globe while mixing it up with all kinds of powerful figures in that often shady world was the ideal mark, and he also happened to be a political novice who the Democrats universally believed would lose in a landslide of historical dimensions for political lore long to come.  When Paul Manafort joined his team just before the kickoff to the general election and brought with him a lifetime of political baggage that included skullduggery around Russia's zone of interest, it must have seemed as if Christmas had come early for the Clinton team.  (Kind of makes you wonder how coincidental this unforced error really was.) 

And so, after a lifetime in the public eye, starring in a popular television show, and rubbing elbows with celebrities and politicians of all stripes, Donald Trump woke up one day to find himself being generally slandered (and libeled) as a Russian spy by the information merchants who control America's airwaves and print media.  That had to have made him laugh, considering that the press had spent most of his foray into politics demeaning him as a greedy capitalist playboy nationalist who selfishly placed America's interests before those of our common world.  

Yes, before John Brennan devised a global espionage ring to frame President Trump as a national security risk and enable the FBI to open up counterintelligence investigations into his political associates; before Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe attested to false information with the FISA Court; before Robert Mueller put the screws to General Flynn in order to sink a lifetime defender of America for political purposes; before President Obama initiated changes to security classification that opened up scurrilous investigative records on President-Elect Trump to an exponentially greater number of bureaucrats with partisan motivations; before Susan Rice left an electronic CYA memorandum at 12:15 P.M. on Inauguration Day of 2017 noting that Sally Yates and James Clapper and John Brennan and Joe Biden and Jim Comey had all agreed in the Oval Office with President Obama to continue any investigations "by the book"; before Samantha Power unmasked hundreds of names picked up during the course of electronic surveillance that were deemed to somehow implicate the new president in wrongdoing; even before the Clinton operatives and Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele first started composing the fan fiction now known as "the Dossier" — before all of this and everything else we have been forced to endure for three long years, there was Hillary Clinton, doing what she and her people know best: accusing her political opponent of the very crimes she had committed herself.  

As awful as this orchestrated campaign against President Trump has been, it is absolutely maddening to realize that none of it would have happened had Hillary Clinton not engaged in one of the greatest pay-for-play operations in American history while placing our most guarded secrets (as well as the very lives of our soldiers and civilians) on a silver platter for those governments and adversaries who wish us the most harm in this world.  Three years of Russian hysteria happened only because of the deep corruption of Hillary Clinton.

This scheme of political projection and wicked treachery should go down as a final reminder that America survives today only because President Trump managed to prevail against the nearly insurmountable wave of our government's intelligence agencies, the justice system, media propagandists, and the combined wills of the Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans intending to swamp him.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.